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Bessie Head: Botswana and South Africa’s Shared Literary Great

Bessie Amelia Emery Head (July 6, 1937 – April 17, 1986) was a novelist, journalist, and poet born in Pietermaritzburg, South Africa. She later left for Serowe, Botswana, and became an established literary figure across these two countries’ borders.

This overview of the  life and work of Bessie Head is an introduction to this notable literary figure who was instrumental in gaining a more international voice for African peoples.

 

A complicated early Life

Bessie was born in a psychiatric hospital where her mother, Bessie Amelia Emery, was institutionalized, and where she remained for the rest of her life. As reported by South Africa’s Sunday Times Heritage Project:

“According to the racial legislation of the time, Bessie was classified as white and was placed with a white adoptive family. However, her racial identity later became blurred as the white family’s lawyer noted: ‘The child is Coloured, in fact quite black and Native in appearance.” The state authorities hastily removed Bessie and placed her under the care of a ‘Coloured’ adoptive family, George and Nellie Heathcote.”

Bessie was removed from the Heathcote’s home by social services around the age of twelve. This started the process of feeling alienated from her heritage, stemming from the fact that she was considered mixed race or ‘coloured’ under the South African government’s racial classification.

Documented in a letter to her publisher for a never-completed autobiography, she wrote that she was “as anxious to avoid any knowledge of my mother’s white relatives as they were anxious to destroy my mother and disown me.”

 

Early journalism and writings

Bessie began teaching in Durban, KwaZulu-Natal, and held the position from 1956 to 1958. Her first newspaper job was working for the Golden City Post in Cape Town. Around 1959, she joined Home Post at their Johannesburg offices.

She was inspired by the writing of Mohandas Gandhi and Robert Sobukwe, (the founding member of the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC). Her letters would compare Gandhi and his writing to being Godlike, and she particularly admired his contributions to civil rights that might have well inspired her own.

In 1960, Bessie joined the Pan Africanist Congress. Because it was a banned organization under the South African apartheid government, she was arrested. Although charges were later dropped, this event is said to have been the driving force behind her first suicide attempt.

Returning to Cape Town, she founded and published The Citizen newspaper. Bessie established a close association with District Six and the coloured community. She mixed with prominent figures that would influence her life and writing, including jazz musician Abdullah Ibrahim (then known as Dollar Brand).

The apartheid government would later gain control of The Citizen and other newspapers in an operation dubbed Operation Muldergate. Attempting to purchase these magazines, the government believed they could have a stronger hold on public opinion – and directly counteract the anti-apartheid motions of authors like Bessie Head.

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Marriage, Cape Town to Pretoria, and early works

Bessie met Harold Head in 1961, and they married six weeks later. Their marriage was an unhappy one from the start, and she soon began to seek any escape from her troubled and depressed home life. Her son was later diagnosed with fetal alcohol syndrome — a consequence of her stressed, erratic lifestyle during her pregnancy.

Some of Bessie’s later poems, written around 1961–1962, were discovered in 1995. These were donated to the National English Literary Museum in Grahamstown, South Africa.

She finished writing her first novel, The Cardinals, in 1962. However, it was published only after her death. The Cardinals tells of a girl named Mouse, who is sold by her birth mother – and who later runs away from home after being abused by her stepfather. The book is one of her only novels set in South Africa, and takes place in Cape Town during the 1950s.

Bessie left Cape Town at the end of 1963 and moved into her mother-in-law’s house in Atteridgeville, Pretoria. She described the circumstances of her marriage while living in her mother-in-law’s house and attempting to gain a teaching job as being “at the edge of despair and terror.” She also tried to get a teaching job in Uganda; however, her passport was refused, possibly due to her earlier involvement with the PAC.

 

Bessie in Serowe, Botswana

Bessie’s marriage ended in 1964. She left for Serowe with her son to start a new life in Botswana on a one-way exit permit. She returned to her teaching background at Tshekedi Memorial School.

Starting a new life in Serowe wasn’t easy, and due to her political affiliations, it took fifteen years to gain legal citizenship in Botswana. Her teaching job only lasted a year and a half. In a letter, she stated that a lack of respect for women in the workplace was the reason for her dismissal.

Her letters also reveal that she often asked friends for money or extensions on loans that they had given her. As a thanks to some, she reportedly enclosed some of her original writing within these letters. She was a prolific letter writer, and some of her letter collections have received as much attention as her other writings. – including her writings to South African poet Patrick Cullinan and his wife, Wendy.

Her letters have been studied more in recent years. A study by Annie Gagiano (Writing a Life in Epistolic Form: Bessie Head’s Letters) points to her early childhood letters, where she “takes on the role of social commentator” that she would occupy for life.

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Bessie Head’s Major Literary Works

When Rain Clouds Gather (1968) tells the story of a political refugee named Makhaya, who flees to Botswana and settles in a rural town called Golema Mmidi. Makhaya comes to meet the English agricultural expert Gilbert Balfour, who joins forces to introduce new technology and farming techniques to the village.

Around 1969, Bessie began to experience symptoms of depression and schizophrenia, which led to her hospitalization in Lobatse Mental Hospital. After this episode, she wrote A Question of Power (1973). Bessie wrote in a letter to her agent that this book had drawn from her mental health and anxiety at the time.

A Question of Power is one of Bessie Head’s best-known works and is considered semi-autobiographical. The main character, named Elizabeth, leaves South Africa to live in Botswana. Many of her experiences seem to draw directly from Bessie’s life.

Maru (1971) tells the story of historical racial discrimination between the Setswana and San peoples. Head speaks from the perspective of Margaret Cadmore, a member of the San/Basarwa people, and shares her experiences as teacher in the village of Dilepe – where her people face brutal discrimination.

In 1977, she published the short story collection The Collector of Treasures. Serowe: Village of the Rain Wind (1981) was a personal perspective on Botswana – the place she set most of her stories, and where she felt most at home. Bessie Head’s last novel, A Bewitched Crossroad (1984) was set in Botswana, spanning from 1800 to 1895, and explored the Sebina clan.

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Later Life and Final Novel

Bessie lived with her son until her death from hepatitis in April 1986. She passed away at Sekgoma Memorial Hospital in Serowe.

Much of her acclaim arrived later in life, and today she is considered a literary legend in both Botswana and Southern Africa. Bessie was awarded the national Order of Ikhamanga posthumously in 2003 for her contribution to literature. In 2007, the Bessie Head Heritage Trust and Bessie Head Literature Awards were established to further her legacy.

In 2013, the Bessie Head Heritage Trust recommended that the Serowe library be named after her, as she had been an active member of the library during her lifetime. Her papers are archived at the Khama III Memorial Museum in Serowe.

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Further reading and sources SA History Online: Bessie Amelia Head Britannica: Bessie Emery Head The South African Presidency: Bessie Head The South African Literary Awards: Bessie Head Botswana Tourism: Explore Serowe

 

Contributed by Alex Coyne, journalist, author, and proofreader. He has written for a variety of publications and websites, with a radar calibrated for gothic, gonzo and the weird. His features, posts, articles and interviews have been published in People Magazine, ATKV Taalgenoot, LitNet, The Citizen, Funds for Writers, and The South African, among other publications.

More by Alex Coyne on this site

Nadine Gordimer, South African Author and Activist 8 Essential Novels by South African Author Nadine Gordimer Jeanne Goosen, Author of We’re Not All Like That 6 Notable South African Women Poets The Banning of Nadine Gordimer’s Anti-Apartheid Novels Olive Schreiner, Author of The Story of a South African Farm 10 Unforgettable Books by South African Women Writers Ingrid Jonker, South African Poet and Anti-Apartheid Activist

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20th-Century Women Novelists Worth Rediscovering

So many books, so little time … especially since so many new and noteworthy books by women are published each year. But let’s not forget those who came before. There are a plethora of 20th-century women novelists whose works deserve to be rediscovered and read; here are a dozen.

Women writers’ books that have endured as classics in and out of the classroom include To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee and The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck; the ever-respected Virginia Woolf; and the beloved Jane Austen, the Brontë sisters, and Louisa May Alcott. 

On the flip side is a treasure trove of women authors who were widely read in their lifetimes, yet have been somewhat (or nearly completely) forgotten — and shouldn’t be! Here is a baker’s dozen of authors worthy of rediscovery. You may also enjoy Bustle’s list of overlooked classic novels by women.

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Vera Caspary

Vera Caspary (1899– 1987) was a remarkably prolific American novelist, screenwriter, and playwright. Over the course of her long career, she became known as a writer of crime fiction and thrillers, though she created works in other genres. 

Many of Caspary’s works featured young, forward-thinking women (then called “career girls”) who fought for female autonomy and equality, and refused male protection. 

With nearly two dozen novels published, the best known remains Laura (1943), she also wrote long short stories and novellas, not to mention numerous screenplays for Hollywood films, some based on her own works. The Blue Gardenia, Fritz Lang’s 1953 classic noir film, is based on her novella, The Gardenia (1952). Yet Vera Caspary’s books are exceedingly hard to come by, other than these listed below:

Laura  (1943) Bedelia (1945) The Man Who Loved His Wife (1966)

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Jessie Redmon Fauset

Jessie Redmon Fauset (1882 – 1961) was an American editor, poet, essayist, and novelist who was deeply involved with the Harlem Renaissance literary movement. 

Jessie Fauset was known as one of the “midwives” of the movement, as someone who encouraged and supported other talents. She was especially noted for her work as the literary editor of The Crisis, NAACP’s journal, in the Harlem Renaissance era. In that capacity, she discovered and nurtured several major Black literary figures.

She also wrote four well-regarded novels and numerous short stories and essays; she was an accomplished poet as well. She wrote four novels about race and class, all of which are a century old, give or take a few years, are still wonderful reads today:

There Is Confusion  (1924) Plum Bun: A Novel Without a Moral   (1928)The Chinaberry Tree   (1931)Comedy, American Style (1933)

 

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Edna Ferber

Edna Ferber (1885 – 1968), American novelist and playwright, was one of the most successful mid-20th-century authors — —primarily the 1920s through the early 1950s, with earning power to prove it. Some of her sprawling novels captured a slice of Americana, and several became famous films and/or stage plays, notably Saratoga Trunk, Cimarron, Giant, and Show Boat.

Ferber’s reputation was cemented with So Big (1924), a surprise (to her) bestselling novel that was awarded the 1924 Pulitzer Prize for fiction (even more of a surprise). Popular writers rarely enjoy critical acclaim, but in her case, the critics were generally kind, even as her subsequent work became less literary and more mainstream. 

This is but a small portion of Ferber’s prolific output, and a good place to start with her novel:

So Big  (1924) Show Boat  (1926) Cimarron  (1929) Giant  (1952)

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Rumer Godden

Rumer Godden (1907 – 1998), the British-born novelist and memoirist. was raised mainly in India at the height of colonial rule. A mid-20th-century favorite whose novels melded the commercial and literary; nine of them became films. One of several memoirs of her dramatic life, and arguably the best known, is A House With Four Rooms.

In 1939, her first novel, Black Narcissus, was published to immediate acclaim and became a bestseller. The story is set in a cloister high in the Himalayas. A group of nuns in a convent in northern India is the backdrop for a story of cultural conflict and obsessive love.

Black Narcissus set the stage for a succession of novels that are defined by vivid settings and realistic characters in masterful storytelling that was sometimes described by contemporary reviewers as “deceptively simple” and “subtle magic.” Here’s where to start with Rumer Godden:

Black Narcissus  (1939) The River  (1946) In This House of Brede  (1969) The Peacock Spring  (1975)

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Laura Z. Hobson

Laura Z. Hobson (1900 – 1986) is an author whose name has been eclipsed by that of her best-known novel, Gentleman’s Agreement. The film version went on to win multiple Academy Awards. Laura wrote a number of other fascinating and readable novels that have fallen into obscurity.

Before she became a full-time novelist with the 1947 publication of Gentleman’s Agreement, she had been a successful writer of advertising and promotional copy on the staff of Luce publications, where she wrote for Time, Life, and Fortune.

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Ann Petry

Ann Petry (1908 – 1997) was the first Black American woman to produce a book (The Street, 1946) whose sales topped one million. At its peak, this novel had sold 1.5 million copies. 

Ann trained as a pharmacist so that she could follow in her father’s footsteps. But her heart was with reading and writing.She was particularly taken with Louisa May Alcott’s fictional heroine Jo March as a role model for her writerly aspirations.

When The Street was published in 1946 it became an overnight sensation. The New York Times called it “a skillfully written and forceful first novel.’’ Its significance was as a frank explored Black women’s experience through the intersection of race, gender, and class. It was reissued in a new edition in 1992 along with her other novels and a collection of short stories, all of which depict slices of Black life in 20th-century America:

The Street (1946)Country Place (1947)The Narrows (1953)Miss Muriel and Other Stories (1971)

 

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Dawn Powell

Dawn Powell (1896 – 1965) wrote prolifically throughout her life, producing novels, short stories, poetry, and plays. She is sometimes considered a “writer’s writer,” though sadly, nearly all of her work was out of print by the time she died. She didn’t gain much notoriety — for better or worse — during her lifetime, but many of her works have been rediscovered and rereleased, much to the joy of devoted fans and new readers alike.

Born in Mount Gilead, Ohio, Powell started her life in a small American town, a setting that she would often use in her early writings. Her novels were replete with social satire and laced with wit. Here are four of her fifteen novels:

Angels on Toast (1940); reissued in 1956 as A Man’s AffairA Time to Be Born (1942)My Home Is Far Away (1944)The Locusts Have No King (1948)

 

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Barbara Pym

Barbara Pym (1913 – 1980) was a British author whose novels explored manners and morals in village life. The following selection of quotes from Excellent Women and other novels by Barbara Pym demonstrate her sense of irony and subtle, understated wit.

Though most her books’ action, such as it is, is set in small town England locales, her stories convey universal truths about human foibles. Pym published thirteen novels in her lifetime, and four posthumously. Pym was often compared to Jane Austen for her comedies of manner.She has been called Britain’s “other Jane Austen” or “new Jane Austen.”

Her baker’s dozen of novels, most published in her lifetime and a few posthumously make up the Barbara Pym canon, with many devotees citing Excellent Women as their entry-point or overall favorite. Here the first four of a baker’s dozen of her novels:

Some Tame Gazelle  (1950) Excellent Women   (1952)Jane and Prudence  (1953)Less than Angels (1955)

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Jean Rhys

Jean Rhys (1890 – 1979) is best remembered for Wide Sargasso Sea, (1966), a prequel and post-colonial response to Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. This imagining of how “the madwoman in the attic” came to be is her most remarkable and enduring work of fiction.

Wide Sargasso Sea was published when Rhys was 76, and revived her flagging literary career. Central to its plot is its imaginative presentation of Rochester’s Creole wife Antoinette’s descent into madness. She becomes Bertha, Rochester’s mad wife. You’ll never look at that character in the same way if you re-read Jane Eyre! That said, it works well as a standalone novel.

Rhys’s Caribbean roots figured into her 1934 novelVoyage in the Darkand shorter fiction such as The Day They Burned the Books. In this sampling of four of her novels, you’ll see that there was a very long gap beforeWide Sargasso Sea, her last novel, was published.

After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie, 1931 Voyage in the Dark , 1934Good Morning, Midnight, 1939 Wide Sargasso Sea , 1966

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May Sarton

May Sarton (1912 – 1995), might be better remembered for her memoir series that began with Plant Dreaming Deep, but she was also a pioneer of modern queer fiction. Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing was pretty radical for 1965 and the lesbian novel, The Education of Harriet Hatfield , was still considered  ahead of its time in 1989.

Despite coming out as a lesbian during a time when very few others did, the popularity of her work wasn’t affected. In fact, it brought high recognition and respect, later to become staples in women’s studies classes. She preferred, however, for her work to be appreciated for its exploration of what is universal in love, rather than as lesbian literature.

May Sarton was also an accomplished and widely published poet. Here’s a  sampling of her best-known novels:

Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing (1965) Anger  (1982) The Magnificent Spinster  (1985) The Education of Harriet Hatfield  (1989)

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Margery Sharp

Margery Sharp (1905 – 1991), a popular British author in her lifetime, wrote in the comic novel genre, the best known of which is Cluny Brown.She was also known for The Rescuers series for children, two of which were adapted into animated Disney films.

Though most of her works were on the lighthearted side, the devastating bombing of London featured in Britannia Mews. She continued to produce works that are generally considered comic novels, but she was a keen observer of human nature and foibles and captured the details of daily life of the World War II years.

Cluny Brown (1944)Britannia Mews (1946) The Eye of Love   (1957)Something Light  (1960)

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Elizabeth von Arnim

Elizabeth von Arnim (1866 – 1941), an Australian-born novelist, launched her writing career with Elizabeth and her German Garden (1898). Little is known about this mysterious author, but her tales of unhappy marriages told with a dry wit are still a treat to read.

Vera (1922) isn’t Elizabeth’s best known work, but is considered her finest novel from a literary standpoint. Like some of her other works, it is semi-autobiographical and draws upon her ill-fated marriage with Earl Russell. 

Following closely upon its heels was The Enchanted April (1922). One of von Arnim’s most commercially successful works, it was charming and lighthearted, almost the opposite of Vera from the perspective of mood. The former was adapted to film in 1991, titled Enchanted April. 

The Pastor’s Wife   (1914) Vera   (1922) The Enchanted April   (1922) Mr. Skeffington  (1940)

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Goodnight Moon: On Falling Asleep in Order to Wake Up

This essay is excerpted from “An Unreasonably Deep Analysis of Goodnight Moon: On Finding (or Creating) Meaning in Dreams” by Eponynonymous.

My daughter used to fight sleep like grim death. Every night as she was dozing off, she would suddenly recoil, bouncing back from that hypnagogic state with flailing arms and banshee screams. It was as if she saw what lay on the other side of sleep and what she saw was death. Oblivion. I don’t think the analogy is too dramatic.

To a baby, bedtime really is a little death. Her sense of self is tenuous, her dreams not so easily distinguished from reality, and her mind freighted with new experiences that some psychologists say have the effect of slowing time. As it was, my daughter came to recognize those grim portents of sleep, and one of them was Goodnight Moon.

It’s a wonder Margaret Wise Brown’s masterpiece isn’t celebrated as a work of existentialist horror, one which plays on the belief that things exist regardless of our awareness of them. Combs, chairs, bowls full of mush—these things are lifeless, objective, impervious to introspection, and wholly beyond the mind which observes them.

We believe the world is made of “things,” and those who experience them are merely privileged with the senses to do so. Even the act of experience is understood to be an object of complex neurosensory activity in the brain, and subjectivity is only a particularly convincing illusion of emergent neural phenomena. Our consensus model of reality, as it were, speaks in the passive voice: object begets subject.

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Margaret Wise Brown, photo by Consuelo Kanaga
courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
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Not so the voice in Goodnight Moon, whose steady itemization of stars and balloons and little toy houses serve like rosary beads for the flighty spirit-voice, whose accruing mantra of “goodnight” foretells the end of all experience, even as it clings to the objects that define it.

Do these things persist when we close the book? What about when we close our eyes? To crib a famous thought experiment, if a quiet old lady is whispering hush and there’s nobody around to hear it, does she even make a sound? I think about this while rocking my daughter to sleep.

First published in 1947, Goodnight Moon was nothing if not a break from convention. Without any characters or coherent narrative, it was more like a lyrical stage set than a children’s story. Brown herself got the idea from a dream, having jotted down the words as soon as she woke up.

The lack of plot could not have troubled her less. As an educator, she championed the philosophy of author Lucy Sprague Mitchell, whose “here and now” approach to children’s literature sought to harmonize storytelling with the raw, sensory-laden experience of being a kid. Plot, character, morality—these were only incidental to a good story. More important is to reflect the child’s reality by heightening her experience of it. Such is the mandate, Brown believed, of all “sincere art.”

Today, Goodnight Moon is a classic, but in 1947 its charms were hardly assured. Early sales were slow. Anne Carroll Moore, the esteemed children’s librarian at the New York Public Library, famously called it an “unbearably sentimental piece of work,” going so far as to help blacklist the book for nearly 25 years—a draconian measure that might have stunted its popularity. (In one revealing incident in 1951, Brown was blocked from a book ceremony at the very library that had so excoriated her work.)

What exactly was Moore’s beef with Goodnight Moon? In a word, it was too realist, which is a shame because most kids who grew up with the book will attest to its profound strangeness. Rather than tantalizing children with a daytime odyssey to Oz or Neverland, Goodnight Moon lulls them to sleep with a gloomy portrait of a “great green room.”

Here, everything fantastical—three bears sitting in chairs, a cow jumping over the moon—is confined to picture frames hung on the wall. The only exception is in illustrator Clement Hurd’s decision to depict the story’s only characters—the bedridden child and the quiet old lady—as fluffy-tailed rabbits. The effect is soporific, and a little uncanny.

The Great Green Room’s true purpose, it seems, is not to lull juvenile rabbits to sleep but to simulate an underworld for them, an underworld where subjectivity obtains. Here, in this dreamy, second-person purgatory, all meaning that belongs to the world of the day has been cut loose. Here, in the night world, objects are only their appearances—a parody of the reader’s waking life, dependent as it is on dichotomies and boundaries and the unexamined assumption that the universe is devoid of meaning.

For just such an outlook, Goodnight Moon tells a story about falling asleep in order to wake up.

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See also: In the Great Green Room: The Bold and Brilliant Life
of Margaret Wise Brown by Amy Gary

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When my daughter was two months old, I had a dream of a creature perched atop her crib, peering down at her. Silent and serene, its knees were folded into its chest like a gargoyle. I knew the vision was only a figment of my imagination because I knew I was dreaming. But I still couldn’t move, and the thought was already gnawing at me that this gargoyle was, in some transcendent sense, real.

Why else would dreams take symbolic form if not to condense meaning too vast and complicated for our waking, literal minds to unpack? So I tried to scream myself awake, alert my wife lying beside me, unstick myself from the throes of sleep paralysis. Something stirred, my wife rolled over and shook me awake, and the transition was like a dive into cold water. A little birth.

When I see my daughter, asleep in her crib, cataloging the objects of the day, ossifying babble into a native tongue, I’m gripped by a tension between love and fear—love for this separate soul too divine for language, and fear for a world whose claws are out.

The Vedantists would say my fear is a manifestation of Ahaṁkāra, or egoic attachment. Buddhists would blame a kind of metaphysical ignorance known as Avidyā. But the lesson is more or less the same: Let go of the ego and fear will scatter. (Or, if you prefer the stylings of Frank Herbert: “Fear is the mind killer.”) What remains is the very bridge between subjects, that which expands over a vast and illusory sea of things.

That’s love. Pure and simple. And it seems Clement Hurd might have had this in mind. As his son Thacher Hurd told NPR in 2022, Goodnight Moon “mirrors what’s happening for the child, but it also gives them a feeling of some other world, something else that’s sort of a larger, more peaceful world.”

What would you call such a place? Maybe you should ask your dreams.

Read the essay in full on Substack.

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Toni Cade Bambara: Author, Culture Worker, Thought Leader

Miltoni Mirkin Cade, better known by her pen name Toni Cade Bambara (March 25, 1939 – December 9, 1995) was an author of fiction, editor, professor, screenwriter, documentarian, and civil rights activist. 

Bambara started her career as a writer, but in her later years, expanded her work into new fields, like making documentary films and writing screenplays for television. She also worked as a professor of Afro-American Studies at multiple universities.

As an author, she is best known for her short story collections. In 2013, a little over seventeen years after her death, Bambara was inducted into the Georgia Writers’ Hall of Fame in recognition of her tremendous talents.

 

Early Life in New York City

Bambara was born in Manhattan (Harlem, to be exact). Her family to Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn, later to Queens, and eventually to Jersey City. Her experiences growing up in poor neighborhoods were a driving force behind many of her creative works.

As a child, her mother encouraged her to write and helped foster the creativity for which she was known later in life. Bambara always credited her mother for believing in her and helping her to foster her future writing career.

Her name was important to her. At a young age, she changed her first name from Miltona to Toni, and before the age of forty, added Bambara, the name of an African tribe. She felt it represented the totality of her life’s experiences that led her to discover her place in the world.

 Becoming an Established Writer

Just a few months before Bambara graduated from Queens College (as one of the very few non-white students) in 1959, she published her first short story. “Sweet Town” was a story of a teenager’s first love, shrouded in mystery.

““Sweet Town,” like nearly all of her fictional works, was not strictly autobiographical. Bambara didn’t want bad reactions from friends and family, so she wrote her stories with the same background that she had in real life, but the characters were never clearly based on anyone she knew personally.

She continued to write after this initial success, often as collections in the formof short stories. Her most famous work is arguably “The Lesson,” a short story about a teacher who takes a group of schoolchildren from their poverty-ridden neighborhood to a toy store aimed at wealthy white people to highlight inequality.

In addition to being a compelling short story, “The Lesson” also served as a means for Bambara to convey one of her most deeply held personal beliefs: that institutional racism limits economic opportunities and resources for Black Americans. It was published as part of the short story collection titled Gorilla, My Love.

Another major work published during this time was the 1971 short story, “Blues Ain’t No Mockin Bird.” It tells of a Black family whose lives are disrupted by white cameramen filming a piece about food stamp recipients. It was very well-received and continues to be discussed more than fifty years later.

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Later Career and Teaching in Atlanta

Two years after The Lesson was published, Bambara moved from the NYC Metro Area to Atlanta, Georgia. She would become closely associated with the city in her later life. As both of her parents’ families came from Georgia, she often remarked that the South had always “felt like home.”

While in Atlanta, she co-founded the Southern Collective of African American Writers, a group developed to encourage Black authors in the South and amplify their voices. Much of their work focused on social justice, the unique experiences of African Americans living in the region, and inequality.

Bambara also taught English and Afro-American Studies at Emory, Spelman, and Atlanta Universities. After Spelman College rejected her idea to teach a course on female African American writers, Bambara decided to teach the class independently from her home.

In 1980, she wrote her first full-length novel, The Salt Eaters, about several characters who lived during the Civil Rights and Women’s Rights movements. Its experimental style earned it consideration as a masterpiece of creative writing.

 

Final Years and “Those Bones Are Not My Child”

For the last tweet years of her life, Bambara worked on her final novel. Those Bones Are Not My Child was based on the true story of more than African-American children who were kidnapped and murdered between 1979 and 1981.

Bambara wrote the 1984 screenplay for a television film version of Tar Baby, based on personal friend and fellow writer Toni Morrison’s novel of the same name. After Bambara died of colon cancer in 1995, Morrison edited and published the novel, which she referred to as Bambara’s magnum opus.

Although she wrote several screenplays throughout her life that were later produced, generally as documentaries. This became a focus in her later years. The most renowned were W.E.B. DuBois: A Documentary in Four Voices, and The Bombing of Osage Avenue, about the HOPE bombing, the incident in which the U.S. National Guard bombed a Black neighborhood in Philadelphia in the 1980s.

Another vital role Bambara undertook was that of editor. She compiled short stories written by others, which allowed her to use her platform to help them reach new audiences.

 

Writing Style and Trademarks

Although Bambara didn’t overtly base any of her characters on people she knew, most of her works center on a Black woman, often young, as the primary protagonist or narrator. Sometimes this took the form of a fictionalized version of herself as the lead character. Her works were expressly political, often vehicles for expressing her beliefs, opinions, and experiences as a Black woman.

Another trademark of Bambara’s writing was the use of African American vernacular dialect, now commonly called AAVE. She personalized her stories by writing in the same manner that she spoke, giving them an authentic flavor.

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The Legacy of Toni Cade Bambara

Bambara could be called many things, but one of the terms she liked the least was “artist.” As she explained, she never wanted to be called an artist because thinking of oneself in that way can lead to feeling self-importance or arrogance.

Instead, Bambara described herself as a “culture worker.” She felt that creating art was no different than any other job and didn’t see herself as being more important than a factory worker or a doctor: “As a culture worker who belongs to an oppressed people, my job is to make revolution irresistible.”

Today, Bambara is remembered as an influential Black writer of her generation. Her works, especially “The Lesson,” are still taught and discussed in colleges and universities across the country.

Further reading

Georgia Writers Hall of Fame Resembling a Revolutionary: My Sister Toni Remembering and Honoring Toni Bambara Archive at Spelman College

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Celebrating Jane Austen in 6 Intriguing Essays

This roundup of intriguing personal essays celebrates Jane Austen’s life and legacy, and the unique place she holds  in literary history.

In 2025, the year of Jane Austen‘s 250th birthday, her influence and talent have been recognized far and wide. Unusually for a woman of her time (she was born in 1775) her talent was recognized early on and taken seriously by her entire family.

Despite the popular portrayal of her as all charm and modesty, Jane was a writer and observer in full mastery of her gifts. She cared deeply about getting published and being read, despite myths to the contrary. Six exquisite novels crafted with compassion, humor, and insight into the travails of the sexes and social classes assured her lofty position in literary history.

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On First Reading Pride and Prejudice

By Carol J. Adams: I first read Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice in the spring of 2005, while my mother-in-law recuperated in rehab from a broken leg. A year earlier she moved in with my husband Bruce and me.

It had been a difficult year, and she was soon to return. I wanted to make things easier for all of us, and was earnestly making lists of how to do that. “This time it will be different,” I told myself. And I turned back to Pride and Prejudice.

Flo Gibson narrates the Pride and Prejudice audio book. Flo (I think of her as Flo) pronounces the famous opening sentence: “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.” And off we went again. She never tired of reading to me and I never tired of listening.

Each time I entered the world of Pride and Prejudice, I felt a physical high. Each time, listening or reading, my only responsibility to this fictional world was to continue listening or reading. The novel’s wit and irony provided relief. Those single men in possession of good fortunes… do they know they are in want of wives?  Read the rest of On First Reading Pride and Prejudice.

 

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Jane Austen, the Secret Radical

In Jane Austen, the Secret Radical, author Helena Kelly looks past the grand houses, drawing room dramas, and witty dialogue that have long been the hallmarks of Jane Austen‘s work to bring to light the serious, ambitious, subversive concerns of this beloved writer.

Kelly illuminates the radical views — on such subjects as slavery, poverty, feminism, marriage, and the church — that Austen deftly and carefully explored in her six novels, at a time when open criticism was considered treason.

Kelly shows us that Austen was fully aware of what was going on in the world during the turbulent times she lived in, and sure of what she thought of it. Above all, Austen understood that the novel — until then dismissed as mindless and frivolous — could be a meaningful art form, one that in her hands reached unprecedented heights of greatness.

Read the rest of Jane Austen, the Secret Radical: How She Would Have Liked to be Read.

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What (Jane Austen’s) Women Want

This musing that ondering the question of what Jane Austen’s women want, is by Janet Saidi, from The Austen Connection:  If you’re like me, you’ve many times had to explain what Jane Austen is really about — you might find yourself explaining to friends who just don’t get it, that Austen is not all about finding a man who’s wealthier and more powerful than you are, to marry.

As we’ve said before and will point out often in these letters, the stories also — while not technically Romance-genre stories — introduce, build on, and play off of our favorite Romantic Tropes, from the hate-to-love or friends-to-lovers storylines, to the Alpha male, forbidden love, and proximity plots.

But we also know that within this scaffolding of she-who-identifies-as-girl-meets-complicated-person-who-identifies-as-boy, there is a lot of meandering to get to our much-anticipated engagement, and there’s also some analysis after the Love Declaration, where Austen shows us what she’s been doing all the while.

Sure, these novels follow the traditional Marriage Plot. These novels may have invented the plot as we know it today. Read the rest of What (Jane Austen’s) Women Want.

 

Jane on the Brain: Jane Austen and Empathy

This excerpt from Jane on the Brain by Wendy Jones considers how Jane Austen’s stories not only convey empathy through mirroring and identification, but they’re about empathy as well — who has it, who lacks it, and how some of her characters deepen their capacity for this important quality.

Her novels get us to focus on the experience of empathy (neuroscientists would say they prime us to think about it) by showing its value repeatedly.

So we find ourselves reflected in novels that are all about the value of being able to find yourself reflected in other minds and hearts. Yet we’re not fascinated by empathy because it’s brought to our attentions, but rather we pay attention because empathy is essential to our well-being. And this is yet another reason we’re drawn to Austen — she understands this about us.

Perhaps it seems strange to characterize Austen’s novels as being about empathy. After all, Austen’s great subject is love: its different varieties, its frustrations, its nuances, and, above all, its satisfactions.  And not just love between couples, but also between friends, parents and children, siblings. Austen certainly understood this most precious of human emotional resources. Read the rest of Jane on the Brain: Jane Austen and Empathy.

 

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Why Has Mr. Darcy Been Attractive to Generations of Women?

A delightful musing by Sarah Emsley: “Darcy is Still the Ultimate Sex Symbol” is the title of an article by Katy Brand in The Telegraph. The article features a photograph of Colin Firth and his famous wet shirt from the 1995 A&E/BBC Pride and Prejudice series. But now that I have your attention, I want to ask for your help in identifying what it is that makes Mr. Darcy so attractive — in the novel. Early in the story, he happens to accompany Mr. Bingley to the first assembly.

Within a few lines he becomes a “sex symbol,” with his “fine, tall person, handsome features, noble mien; and the report which was in general circulation within five minutes after his entrance of his having ten thousand a year.”

He’s attractive because he’s handsome and rich. The men at the assembly judge him to be “a fine figure of a man,” while “the ladies declared he was much handsomer than Mr. Bingley.” Read the rest of Why Has Mr. Darcy Been Attractive to Generations of Women?

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Reading (and Watching) Pride and Prejudice in India

Here is a first person musing by our correspondent, Melanie Kumar, in Bangalore, India: Like most teenagers in India who enjoyed the English classics, Pride and Prejudice came into my life. It prompted me to borrow the Complete Works of Jane Austen from the library and to read all her novels.

But if you were to ask me to recall the plots today, Pride and Prejudice is the one that has etched itself most clearly in my mind.  This could also be because I had to study this novel as part of my English Honors program in college. I recall the name of the teacher who took up this book but can’t remember many insights that she left me with.

What comes to mind is that she spoke of it as a “drawing room novel,” as a lot of the action indeed takes place in these various home settings, starting with that of the Bennet family in Pride and Prejudice.

But can one fault the teacher? Jane Austen did write the book in something of a bubble, after all. If there is a historical context to a novel, a teacher can probably reference it for students to think about it. Pride and Prejudice was devoid of any such allusions, except for being referred to as a novel of manners and satire. Read the rest of Reading (and Watching) Pride and Prejudice in India.

 

Jane Austen’s novels

Sense and Sensibility   (1811)
Pride and Prejudice  (1813)
Emma  (1815)
Mansfield Park   (1814)
Northanger Abbey   (1818; posthumous)
Persuasion  (1818; posthumous)

 
 

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The Grimké Sisters’ Fight for Abolition and Women’s Rights

In 1838, Sarah and Angelina Grimké were likely the best-known — and most hated — women in the United States. Both published extensively, including essays and pamphlets promoting abolition and women’s rights.

Arm in Arm: The Grimké Sisters Fight for Abolition and Women’s Rights by Angelica Shirley Carpenter (Zest Books, 2025), introduces these fascinating figures to middle grade through high school readers, but can be enjoyed by all ages.

Sarah Grimké (1792 – 1873), the more reserved sister, preferred writing, while Angelina Grimké (1805 – 1879) loved the spotlight. Her spirited speeches often left audiences in tears.

Born to a wealthy family of enslavers in Charleston, South Carolina, they grew up in luxury, funded by the unpaid labor of three hundred men, women, and children. Of eleven Grimké children, only Sarah and Angelina turned against slavery.

Becoming abolitionists

As young adults, the sisters moved to Philadelphia and became Quakers. Then they became abolitionists, and were among the first women ever to speak in public in the United States. Women were not supposed to speak in public then, but the sisters did; at first to women only. Eventually men wanted to hear them, too, and they began speaking to mixed groups.

Newspapers called them “two fanatical women,”  “old maids who wanted to attack society,” “abnormal creatures,” and “crack pots, cranks, and freaks.” So they added a second cause to their campaign: women’s rights. “We abolition women are turning the world upside down,” Angelina said.

The Congregational Church published a warning against them: “When woman assumes the place and tone of a man as a public reformer,” it said, “her character becomes unnatural . . . . the way [is] opened for degeneracy and ruin.” This criticism was based on the belief that women were inferior to men because Eve, by tempting Adam, had introduced evil into the world.

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Sarah answers her critics

Sarah’s rebuttal, Letters on the Equality of the Sexes, and the Condition of Women (1838) is now considered the first complete feminist statement, foundational to the women’s movement. Sarah thought that God had created Adam and Eve as equals, who had committed the same sin of eating the forbidden fruit.

“Even admitting that Eve is the greater sinner,” she wrote, “it seems to me man might be satisfied with the dominion he has claimed and exercised for nearly six thousand years . . . All history attests that man has subjected women to his will, used her as a means to promote his selfish gratification, to minister to his sensual pleasures, to be instrumental in promoting his comfort; but never has he desired to elevate her to that rank she was created to fill.”  

This book includes Sarah’s most famous quote, used often by the late supreme court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg: “I ask no favors for my sex,” Sarah wrote. “… All I ask of our brethren is, that they will take their feet from off our necks, and permit us to stand upright on that ground which God designed us to occupy.”     

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An important document   

In 1838, Angelina became the first woman ever to address an American legislative body, at the Massachusetts State House. Later that year she married the famous abolitionist Theodore Dwight Weld.

Three days after their wedding, she spoke about abolition and women’s rights at the new Pennsylvania Hall in Philadelphia. The next night, a pro-slavery mob burned it down.

Angelina and Theodore invited Sarah to live with them. The three retired from speaking, but kept writing. Together they produced the landmark American Slavery As It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses (1839), regarded as one of the “twin bibles” of the abolition movement, the other being Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) by the sisters’ friend Harriet Beecher Stowe.

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An expanded family of civil rights activists

Much later, when they had grown old, their lives took a surprising turn that enabled them to live out the principles they had believed in for decades. After the Civil War they learned that their brother Henry fathered three sons with his enslaved mistress.

The older boys, Archibald and Francis, attended college in Pennsylvania. The youngest attended briefly but went back south and lost contact. The sisters welcome Archibald and Francis into their family. They went on to become leaders in the twentieth century civil rights movement. Archibald’s daughter, Angelina Weld Grimke, becomes a poet and playwright, a prominent figure in the Harlem Renaissance.

Who could fail to be inspired by Angelina’s life motto: “I recognize no rights but human rights.”

 

About Arm in Arm and its author,
Angelica Shirley Carpenter

Historian Angelica Shirley Carpenter quotes primary sources to tell the sisters’ story in her new book, Arm in Arm: The Grimké Sisters Fight for Abolition and Women’s Rights (Zest Books, September 9, 2025). Published as a young adult biography, with many archival images, it has crossover appeal for adults, too, as Carpenter investigates why the sisters, once so famous, were later forgotten by historians.

Kirkus says “This relatively short book (296 pages) thoughtfully presents a period of upheaval and change and traces the sisters’ long-lasting impact as well as recent, more critical perceptions of their motivations and behavior that bring welcome nuance to their story.” School Library Journal deems the book “informative and engaging . . . . Recommended for all libraries.”

Back matter includes an author’s note, a Grimké family tree, a glossary, 26 pages of source notes, a selected bibliography, and suggestions for further reading.

In an earlier biography, Born Criminal: Matilda Joslyn Gage, Radical Suffragist (South Dakota Historical Society Press, 2018), Carpenter reintroduced a feminist leader who had been written out of history by her “friends,” Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Anthony and Stanton, but not Gage, play roles in Arm in Arm, too. Matilda Joslyn Gage, well aware of the Grimké sisters’ achievements, cited them as role models for her own, later work.

Angelica Shirley Carpenter’s complete bibliography and full reviews of the book may be seen on her website, angelicacarpenter.com.

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The Lives of Iconic Women Poets in Documentaries & Biopics

Presented here is a collection of documentaries and biopics exploring the lives of iconic women poets: Maya Angelou, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Julia de Burgos, Emily Dickinson, Ingrid Jonker, and Sylvia Plath. 

On the surface, it wouldn’t seem like a full-length film about a poet would be anything to write home about, so to speak. But behind their deep, soulful lines were complex lives, not always spent at a desk. 

Best of all, most of the films in this roundup can be viewed gratis on YouTube by following the links provided.

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Maya Angelou: And Still I Rise

This 2017 documentary about Maya Angelou, who personifies the “Phenomenal Woman” of her famous poem, is available to view gratis on YouTube. The description from the producer, BBC One:

“Documentary portrait of the trail-blazing activist, poet and writer Maya Angelou. Born in 1928, she enthused generations with her bold and inspirational championing of the African-American experience that pushed boundaries and redefined the way people think about race and culture.

Maya Angelou was captured on film just before she died in 2014, and this documentary celebrates her life and work, weaving her words with rare and intimate archival photographs and videos.

It reveals hidden episodes of her exuberant life during some of America’s defining moments, from her upbringing in the Depression-era south to her work with Malcolm X in Ghana and her inaugural speech for President Bill Clinton, the film takes us on an incredible journey through the life of a true American icon. Contributors include Bill Clinton, Oprah Winfrey, Quincy Jones, Hillary Clinton, and Maya Angelou’s son Guy Johnson.”

 

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Burning Candles:
The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay

Burning Candles: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay is a documentary celebrating the iconic American poet. It’s available to view gratis on YouTube. From the producer’s description of the 2009 film:

“Encouraged to read the classics at home, she was too rebellious to make a success of formal education, but she won poetry prizes from an early age, including the Pulitzer Prize in 1923, and went on to use verse as a medium for her feminist activism. She also wrote verse-dramas and a highly praised opera, The King’s Henchman.

Millay was a prominent social figure of New York City’s Greenwich Village just as it was becoming known as a bohemian writer’s colony, and she was noted for her uninhibited lifestyle, forming many passing relationships with both men and women. She was also a social and political activist and those relationships included prominent anti-war activists.

She became a prominent feminist of her time; her poetry and her example, both subversive, inspired a generation of American women. Her career as a poet was meteoric. She became a performance artist super-star, reading her poetry to rapt audiences across the country.”

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A Quiet Passion (Emily Dickinson)

Film critics loved Terence Davies’s A Quiet Passion, but Emily Dickinson fans gave this 2016 biopic mixed reviews, as you can see in the Amazon reviews.Though it’s a beautifully photographed film, one wonders how much “poetic license” was taken with the story of the brilliant poet who rarely strayed from her family’s Amherst home.

Some viewers objected to how Emily and her family are portrayed in the film, feeling that it took too many liberties. I’m more on the thumbs-down side of this film. It took me bit of adjustment to accept as the poet, having become used to seeing her as Miranda on Sex and the City. Her performance can be commended, but scenes of Emily’s illness and what seem like seizures seemed over the top.

At the very least,  the film can nudge us to read more of Emily Dickinson’s breathtaking poetry. Here are 10 of her well-loved poems, a mere fraction of her incredible output.

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My Letter to the World (Emily Dickinson)

If you prefer a documentary to a fictionalization like the one above, My Letter to the World came out in 2018, not long after A Quiet Passion, above. The same producers of the latter created this documentary. From Music Box Films:

“An in-depth exploration of the life and work of the great American poet Emily Dickinson, narrated by Cynthia Nixon. Bringing to light new theories about Dickinson’s personal relationships and most revered work, this feature documentary rewrites the widely accepted narrative of the poet as a strange recluse in white, and breathes new life into the Dickinson legacy over 130 years after her death.”

Watch the trailer of My Letter to the World.

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Julia, Todo en Mí (Julia de Burgos)

This  2002 film is a docudrama — part documentary, part re-enacted — about the esteemed Puerto Rican poet Julia de Burgos. A lovely Spanish language film with English subtitles, it’s available to watch for free on YouTube. Here, the description is translated by Google Translate & edited by yours truly (a student of Spanish!):

“Julia, All in Me offers a poetic journey through the life, literary work, and humanistic thought of Puerto Rican Julia de Burgos, who Nobel Prize winner Pablo Neruda prophesied as “one of the great poets of the Americas.” The story of Julia de Burgos is told in her own voice, through fragments of the letters she wrote to her sister Consuelo, from her voluntary exile in New York and Cuba from 1940 until her early death in 1953.

Historical moments—the Spanish Civil War, World War II, the social and political climate in Puerto Rico, New York, Cuba, and Europe—are intertwined with Julia’s loves and passions, described with a revelatory vision that transcends time. This moving epistolary testimony is intertwined with the participation of personalities from Puerto Rico and abroad, who read her poems and pay a beautiful tribute to the island nations distinguished poet Julia de Burgos.” 

Enjoy this selection of poems by Julia de Burgos in their original Spanish and in English translation.

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Black Butterflies (Ingrid Jonker)

Ingrid Jonker (1933 – 1965) was a South African poet and founder of the emerging counterculture literary movement of her time. Her views and work strongly opposed the apartheid government of the time. From the producers, here’s a brief description of Black Butterflies, a fictionalized biopic (2012):

“Poetry, politics, madness, and desire collide in the true story of the woman hailed as South Africa’s Sylvia Plath. In 1960s Cape Town, as Apartheid steals the expressive rights of blacks and whites alike, young Ingrid Jonker finds her freedom scrawling verse while frittering through a series of stormy affairs.

Amid escalating quarrels with her lovers and her rigid father, a parliament censorship minister, the poet witnesses an unconscionable event that will alter the course of both her artistic and personal lives … As a woman governed by equal parts genius and mercurial gloom, Jonker could inspire passion but never, it seems, love — a sad truth critically conveyed by van Houten. Jonker’s inner turmoil mirrored her country’s upheaval, but van der Oest is never heavy-handed with her parallels of the poet and the South African maelstrom happening around her.”

Like several other films in this roundup, it’s available to watch in full on YouTube, gratis.

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Sylvia (Sylvia Plath)

Of course, I have to mention Sylvia, the 2002 biopic starring Gwyneth Paltrow. She was a great casting choice for the brilliant American poet Sylvia Plath (with Daniel Craig as Ted Hughes, her husband and fellow poet in their awful marriage), but the film received tepid reviews at best, and audiences had mixed reactions. In this lengthy article, the screenwriter details the difficulties of bringing Plath’s tragic life to film.

It’s now quite difficult to find the film online, though holdouts with DVD players might have more luck finding it through their local library systems. Here’s the official trailer.

There don’t seem to be any documentaries of a full scale — that is, 90 minutes or so — about Sylvia Plath. This one from 1988, part of the Voices and Visions series nearly does the job at 56 minutes. It’s  available to watch on YouTube. However, its production values make it a bit dated and dull, so if you do want to watch it, do so with lowered expectations.

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10 Fascinating Facts About Louise-Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun

The latest biography from historian Judith Lissauer Cromwell, Louise-Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun: Portrait of an Artist, 1755–1842 (McFarland, 2025), follows the remarkable life of this painter whose portraits of European royalty and nobility hang in many of the world’s most important museums.

As a young woman in the male-dominated society of 18th-century France, Louise-Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun was denied an artistic education and forced to nurture her passion outside of conventional schooling. Vigée Le Brun’s vibrant art, in addition to her charm and beauty, caught the attention of Queen Marie-Antoinette, who honored her as her chosen painter.

At the pinnacle of her fame and fortune, however, the Revolution forced Vigée Le Brun to flee, leaving everything behind except her only child, a daughter.

Drawn from Vigée Le Brun’s memoirs, archival research, and reexamination of the judgment of her contemporaries, this biography paints a fascinating picture of a single working mother who survived because of her cachet, charisma, and artistic talent.

Cast on a storm-tossed continent, solely reliant on her palette, she produced some of her major works during her twelve-year exile, returning to France to continue her work after Napoleon had restored stability. Vigée Le Brun’s story is one of triumph, adversity, perseverance and ultimately, peace.

Judith Lissauer Cromwell has contributed 10 fascinating facts about Louise-Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun, a painter whose life and work merits wider recognition.

 

Vigée Le Brun was a feminine icon in her day

Famed throughout Europe and North America for her portraits, Vigée Le Brun, a lover of art, music, letters, and nature, had traveled widely. She knew everybody who mattered in the European world of culture and politics and had painted many of them.

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Portrait of Quieen Marie Antoinette
by Louise-Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun, Versailles Museum

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She was Queen Marie-Antoinette’s favorite artist

Marie-Antoinette’s exacting mother, the Empress of Austria, wanted a formal portrait of her daughter as Queen of France.  Several prominent male artists had, over a ten-year period, failed to please.  Desperate, Marie-Antoinette decided to try a young female artist who had become the fashion in Paris.  Vigée Le Brun’s Marie-Antoinette in Full Court Dress succeeded.  This joint triumph created a bond between queen and artist.

Vigée Le Brun painted many portraits of Marie-Antoinette.  Some went to the queen’s friends in foreign countries, others to French embassies in foreign capitals.  King Louis XVI presented a formal portrait of himself and of Marie-Antoinette (by Vigée Le Brun) to the US Congress to mark the birth of the new nation.  Exposure as the French queen’s painter brought her universal fame. 

Vigée Le Brun was basically self-taught

Barred from a traditional art education because of her gender, Vigeé Le Brun relied on herself to nurture her passion for painting and her ambition to be a great artist.  She developed her unique style by studying master painters. 
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She had an unsatisfactory marriage

At age twenty, the painter made a marriage of convenience to a prominent Parisian art dealer, mainly to escape an unhappy home life.  He was not “a bad man,” Vigée Le Brun tells us, “his nature showed a great mixture of sweetness and vivacity; he treated everyone very kindly…a likeable person.  But his reckless passion for women of ill repute, combined with his lust for gambling, resulted in the loss of his fortune and mine, which he fully controlled.”

Jean-Baptiste Pierre Le Brun divorced his wife during her exile, which allowed the painter full control of her earnings so that when she returned to France, Vigée Le Brun had enough to live on comfortably.

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Louise-Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun: Portrait of an Artist, 1755–1842
is available wherever books are sold
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Vigée Le Brun was socially prominent

Her pretty face, attractive figure and sense of fashion, her charm and gift for making friends, but above all her talent and determination to succeed, propelled the young painter into the top echelons of scintillating Old Régime society. 

The only artist with a salon in the heyday of Paris salons, Vigée Le Brun’s salon attracted prominent members of the bohemian world of arts and letters and aristocrats bored by the stiff formality of Versailles.  It did not matter if the simple food ran out, or a prince of the blood had to sit on the floor because there were not enough chairs; music, laughter, and good conversation satisfied everyone.

 

She was fashion-forward

Frustrated by the Versailles court’s formal, ornate, and uniform dress with its stiff corsetry, its blank rouged faces under elaborately coiffed hair, Vigée Le Brun persuaded her sitters to wear simple, pliant, muslin dresses and shawls, unpowdered, naturally arranged hair, and minimal makeup. Vigée Le Brun made an effort to get to know her subjects so that she could portray them as vital human beings.

Having helped to promote a simpler way of dressing in Paris, Europe’s fashion capital, Vigée Le Brun introduced her style to St. Petersburg, where she spent half of her twelve-year exile.  The new fashion became so popular that aristocratic ladies were able to convince an extremely reluctant Catherine the Great to allow it at official court functions.

 

Vigée Le Brun suffered vicious calumny

The public’s love of reading salacious gossip about the rich and famous stimulated the fertile imagination of pamphleteers.  Pre-revolutionary Paris buzzed with made-up tales, especially about Marie-Antoinette and, since she and Vigée Le Brun were as much friends as two women of such disparate social levels could be, some of the fabricated mud flung at the queen spattered onto her favorite painter. 

Vigée Le Brun could ill afford to ignore the slander because, as a female artist, her credibility depended on keeping her spotless reputation. The lies Parisian pamphleteers spread about Vigée Le Brun were a major reason for her flight from Paris as the Revolution ramped up.

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Julie Le Brun by Louise Elisabeth Vigee Le Brun
(image courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Open Access)
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She suffered great tragedy in losing her daughter

Vigée Le Brun adored her only child. She took pretty little Julie with her into exile, lavished love and attention on her, and made sure she had an excellent education.  At age nineteen Julie fell in love with a handsome nonentity. Vigée Le Brun opposed their marriage; the ensuing fracas revealed Julie’s less attractive qualities and caused an irreparable rift with her mother. The marriage ended badly; and syphilis led to Julie’s early death.

 

Vigée Le Brun wrote her memoirs

Reflecting on her legacy towards the end of her life, on the cruel and unmerited slander she, as a successful woman in a man’s world, had suffered, Vigée le Brun decided to seize control of her life story by creating her last self-portrait.  Souvenirs recounts Vigée Le Brun’s life as she wanted posterity to know it; Souvenirs also presents posterity with Vigée Le Brun’s last, vivid, and richly colored depiction of the Old Régime.

 

Her paintings have two-fold importance

Today, Vigée Le Brun’s paintings hang in some of the world’s most important galleries, not only for their artistic value but also because she immortalized many of Europe’s movers and shakers at a time when the West stood at the cusp of the modern age.

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About the author, Judith Lissauer Cromwell: After a successful corporate career, Judith returned to academia as an independent historian and biographer of powerful women. Her experience as a magna cum laude graduate of Smith College, holder of a doctorate in modern European history with academic distinction from New York University, veteran of corporate America, mother, and grandmother, enrich Cromwell’s perspective on strong women in history. 

She is the author of the biographies Dorothea Lieven: A Russian Princess in London and Paris, 1785-1857; Florence Nightingale, Feminist; and Good Queen Anne: Appraising the Life and Reign of the Last Stuart Monarch. Her latest biography, Louise-Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun: Portrait of an Artist, 1755-1842 provides a fresh and balanced perspective on the life of a renowned, yet often overlooked, painter. Learn more about Judith’s work at JudithCromwell.com.

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Comtesse de la Châtre (Marie Charlotte Louise Perrette Aglaé Bontemps, 1762–1848)
by Louise-Elisabeth Vigee Le Brun
(image courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Open Access)

An Interview with Judith Lissauer Cromwell

What inspired you to write about Vigée Le Brun?

I had never heard of Vigée Le Brun until New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art held a retrospective of her work. Reviewers praised the exhibit, so I went to see it. Vigée Le Brun’s

paintings were riveting, her brief introductory biography intriguing. This remarkable woman, I vowed to myself, would be the subject of my next book.     

Why is Vigée Le Brun, the most sought after portraitist in late 18th and early 19th century Europe, not well-known today?

Until the present day, art historians (mostly male) have generally tended to ignore female artists. Because of her association with Marie Antoinette and the court at Versailles, Vigée Le Brun became famous as a court painter. Certainly, she focused on the aristocracy and the French

court before the Revolution, but both before and after the Revolution, her work, indeed, some of her most celebrated paintings, are not of aristocrats.     

What is the most surprising thing you discovered about Vigée Le Brun?

The tremendous hurdles she faced in achieving her goal to become a great artist. What a multi-faceted woman she was. How the political events she lived through affected her even though she had little to no interest in politics. Her resilience; how she managed to continue her brilliant career during twelve years of exile far from her beloved family and homeland.  

Why have you focused on only fifty of Vigée Le Brun’s paintings when her complete oeuvre includes around eight hundred? How did you decide which paintings to include in your biography?

Rather than cramming into the book as many illustrations as possible from Vigée Le Brun’s copious work, I decided to highlight paintings that are either especially important in her life or exemplify her most illustrious efforts.          

Why does Vigée Le Brun’s art, life, and legacy matter to readers today?

Despite incredible odds, she achieved her childhood goal of becoming a great artist early in life. Aside from her art and the fame it brought her, Vigée Le Brun’s diverse interests, not to mention her looks, charm, and social position (everyone who mattered in the world of culture, society, and politics knew her) made Vigée Le Brun a feminine icon. Dedication to her art brought Vigée Le Brun solace in times of stress and happiness regardless of life’s knocks.     

Which museums hold a selection of Vigée Le Brun’s paintings? Where should readers go to see her art in person?

New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Louvre (Paris) currently have some of Vigée Le Brun’s paintings on view; The Hermitage, (St.Petersburg, Russia); the National Gallery, (London); and the Versailles et Trianon museums (Versailles, outside Paris) all own several of Vigée Le Brun’s paintings.

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The Healing Effects of Nature in Heidi and The Secret Garden

Johanna Spyri and Frances Hodgson Burnett illustrate the effects of nature on well-being through the symbolism and imagery of nature in their novels, Heidi and The Secret Garden. In both of these beloved classic novels, the authors show how the characters’ interactions with nature sets them on transformative journeys that help heal physical ailments and mental distress.

Spyri’s Heidi (1881) follows a young girl who has lost her parents and is taken to the Swiss Alps to stay with her grandfather. Mary Bernath, literature professor at Bloomsburg State University, writes that “Heidi’s home in the Alps is an idyllic place, far from the modern world and its concerns.”

After a short time, she is sent to the city of Frankfurt to be a companion to Klara, a slightly older girl who is unable to walk. While in Frankfurt, Heidi falls ill and yearns to return to the natural world of the Alps.

Burnett’s The Secret Garden (1911) shares with Heidi a theme of nature playing a role in healing various physical and psychological ailments. It has “remained a timeless classic for its themes of friendship and the power of nature to heal the body and spirit,” according to Literary Ladies Guide.

The Secret Garden’s Mary is an orphan, like Heidi. She loses her parents to a cholera epidemic in colonial India and must return to England to stay with a remote uncle at his estate. There, Mary unlocks a neglected garden, and as she “cares for the plants in the garden with the help of her cousin Colin Craven, its restorative powers help her overcome her grief.” (Garden Museum).

 

Each protagonist goes through a unique journey. Heidi withers in Frankfurt and thrives in the Alps. Mary’s discovery of the garden in the heart of her uncle’s estate helps her find peace and health through the environment. When discussing these characters’ journeys, Nava Atlas stated that “they had to develop a determined spirit, overcome obstacles, and gain a sense of independence.”

Both stories contain the trope in which an invalid returns to health by strengthening their relationship with nature.

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Klara visits Heidi — illustration by Jessie Wilcox Smith
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Animal Symbolism in Heidi & The Secret Garden

Johanna Spyri uses goats to symbolize a relationship with nature and to suggest that the interaction can uplift mental well-being. In Frankfurt, Heidi was “under the constant scolding of the housekeeper, who would not let her cry, the child was repressing her homesickness and unhappiness, and she began walking in her sleep.”

When she is able to return to the Alps from Frankfurt, she’s ecstatic to see her friends and grandfather. When Peter arrives with the goats, “Heidi was delighted to see them all again. She put her arm around one and patted another. The animals pushed her this way and that with their affectionate nudgings.” While Heidi is delighted to be reunited with her human and animal friends, the goats’ affection demonstrates a symbiotic relationship. Heidi’s excitement at the reunion greatly contrasts with her depressed state in Frankfurt.

Burnett uses a robin to symbolize Mary’s relationship with nature. In The Secret Garden, the robin has a more discreet role but still provides emotional support to Mary. When she sees this robin while outside playing, it becomes a kind of a companion to her. Seeing the robin again reminds her “of the first time she had seen him. He had been swinging on a treetop then and she had been standing in the orchard. 

Emma House, curator of The Secret Garden exhibit at the Garden Museum, commented that “the robin has sort of a practical use because he helps find the key and the opening to the garden … by using the robin to find the garden, she is keeping the garden in the children’s world.”

 

The robin has a less direct presence in Mary’s life, since she sees it from afar, whereas Heidi interacts directly with the goats. In both novels, the animals help the characters heal from past experiences. In Heidi’s case, the goats provide excitement and joy after her homesick and miserable stay in Frankfurt. For Mary, the robin is familiar and safe, leading her to a world where she can heal from her traumas.

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Plant Symbolism in Heidi & The Secret Garden

Spyri uses plants, especially flowers, to symbolize nature’s ability to assist healing. After Heidi’s return, Klara visits her in the Alps for few weeks; during this time, Klara learns to walk. The girls explain “how Klara’s desire to see the flowers had induced her to take the first walk, and so by degrees one thing had led to another.”

Here, the flowers that inspired Klara to walk are symbolic of her growing connection with nature. This journey happens by small degrees over an extended period, demonstrating a relationship with natural world that’s most effective over time, rather than a one-time cure.

In The Secret Garden, Colin, who is unable to walk, goes through a transformation that can be compared with Klara’s. Shortly before learning to walk, Colin is in the garden, planting a rose. His “thin white hands shook a little and Colin’s flush grew deeper as he set the rose in the moulds and held it while old Ben made firm the earth.”

After spending time in the garden, the rose acts as a symbol of Colin’s newfound relationship with the natural world, and enjoying its benefits. At first he can barely leave his bed; then he is able to spend time in the garden, and is finally being able to stand and walk.

While Klara and Colin are in different environments, they undergo similar transformations. Richard Almond, a professor at Stanford College of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, states that “Klara’s recovery is like Colin’s … where multiple influences, including that of nature, contribute to the overcoming of developmental blocks.”

In her analysis of The Secret Garden, Janet Grafton, English professor at Vancouver Island University, states that “Burnett’s belief in the connection between environment and health are inherent and implacable.”

This is represented in both novels through the children’s journey in nature, where they are compelled to eventually take, their first steps. Atlas stated in our interview that “The wonders of the natural world in both books offer a promise of health, strength, and happiness.”

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Heidi and Peter — illustration by Jessie Wilcox Smith
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Change Symbolism

Spyri uses flowers as a symbol to display the negative effects of separation from the natural world. Upon finding some beautiful flowers in the mountains, Heidi puts them in her apron to bring home: “But the poor flowers, how changed they were! Heidi hardly knew them again. They looked like dry bits of hay, not a single little flower cup stood open.

“Oh grandfather, what’s the matter with them?” exclaimed Heidi in shocked surprise, “They were not like that this morning, why do they look like that now?”

“They like to stand out there in the sun and not to be shut up in an apron,” said her grandfather.

Burnett similarly uses the garden’s change and growth as a symbol the characters’ journeys. When Mary first finds the secret garden, “There were neither leaves nor roses on them now, and Mary did not know whether they were dead or alive, but their thin gray or brown branches and sprays looked like a hazy mantel spreading over everything.”

The garden is in a state of disarray, like Mary’s own state as she copes with the loss of her parents. As she works in the garden, she and the plants grow and heal together.

Initially, “the neglected garden represented lost hopes, secrets, and life in decline,” said Atlas, but it slowly became stronger under Mary’s care. On the other hand, the lively flowers shriveled away when Heidi removed them from their natural surroundings. The authors create change in the plants to reflect the characters’ journeys from illness and health.

 

 Conclusion

In their classic novels, Frances Burnett and Johanna Spyri convey the intricate relationship between humans and nature. As modern technology develops, it becomes increasingly challenging to stay in touch with nature. It has been interesting to ponder how the humans relationship with nature changed since Heidi and The Secret Garden were written.

Now, more than ever, it is important to stay connected nature, as so eloquently conveyed by Johanna Spyri and Frances Burnett in their timeless tales.

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 Further reading and sources

Almond, Barbara, and Richard Almond. “Heidi (Johanna Spyri): The Innocence of the Child as a Therapeutic Force.” Children’s Literature Review, edited by Tom Burns, vol. 115, Gale, 2006.

Atlas, Nava. “Heidi by Johanna Spyri (1881).” Literary Ladies Guide, 22 May 2024

Bernath, Mary G. Heidi. Children’s Literature Review, edited by Tom Burns, vol. 115, Gale, 2006. Gale Literature Resource Center; originally published in Beacham’s Guide to Literature for Young Adults, edited by Kirk H. Beetz and Suzanne Niemeyer, vol. 2, Beacham Publishing, 1990. Accessed 18 April 2024.

Burnett, Frances. The Secret Garden (originally published in 1911) London, Puffin Classics edition, 2015.

Children’s Literature Review. “Heidi.” Children’s Literature Review, edited by Tom Burns, vol. 115, Gale, 2006. Gale Literature Resource Center

Garden Museum. “The Secret Garden.” Garden Museum, 24 Aug. 2022

Grafton, Janet. “Girls and Green Space: Sickness to Health Narratives in Children’s Literature.” Children’s Literature Review, edited by Lawrence J. Trudeau, vol. 215, Gale, 2017. Gale Literature Resource Center. Originally published in Knowing Their Place? Identity and Space in Children’s Literature, edited by Terri Doughty and Dawn Thompson, Cambridge Scholars, 2011

Nejade, Rachel M et al. “What is the impact of nature on human health? A scoping review of the literature.” Journal of global health vol. 12 04099. 16 Dec. 2022,

Silver, Anna Krugovoy. Wuthering Heights and The Secret Garden: A response to Susan E. James.” Connotations, vol. 12, no. 2-3, May 2002, pp. 194+. Gale Literature Resource Center

Spyri, Johanna. Heidi (originally published in 1881). London, Arcturus Publishing Limited 26/27 Bickels Yard edition, 2019.

  

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Fadwa Tuqan: From Societal Suppression to Poetess of Palestine

Despite the challenges and pressures that Palestinian women writers have historically faced from displacement, occupation, and societal pressures, prominent writers have emerged steady and strong, whether in Palestine or exiled in the diaspora. Poet Fadwa Tuqan (1917 – 2003) was one of these women. 

Palestinian women writers, like other women writers across the globe, did not have it easy, especially those who lived through the Nakba. This was the 1948 catastrophe when more than 700,000 Palestinians were displaced from historical Palestine (modern day Israel) to Gaza, the West Bank, Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon.

Added to this displacement were societal pressure and cultural norms that put women at a disadvantage compared to their male peers.

 

Early life in Nablus

Fadwa Tuqan is now known as “the poetess of Palestine.” She was born in Nablus, a city in northern Palestine, in 1917, into an affluent family who lived in a large home inherited from their ancestors.

Fadwa grew up in a male-dominant household and society, and was shunned by her father — he was hoping his newborn would be a boy. Her mother tried to abort her and threw the “burden” of raising Fadwa onto their housemaid. Her mother took away all her dolls when she was eight, and when Fadwa shared stories using her imagination her mother would brush them off as “nonsense.”

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House of Al-Bayk Tuquan, courtesy of Yalla Falasteen
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Many of her writings described the environment and male-dominated society she grew up in, where “women were prisoners between walls.” Though her family was wealthy and could easily afford her schooling, her brother Yousef removed her from the education system while she was in elementary school due to “societal pressures;” he found out that a boy who was fond of Fadwa was following her home from school. 

Her brother Ibrahim went off to study literature at the American University of Beirut in Lebanon. After his graduation in 1929, he was determined to help his sister continue her studies. He taught Fadwa the art of rhyming in Arabic poetry. She began submitting her poems to literary magazines in Cairo and Beirut under pseudonyms, gaining self-confidence as her work was accepted and published. 

Ibrahim Tuqan, who became a reknowned Palestinian poet in his own right, writing the Arab national poem “Mawtini” (now the national anthem of Iraq), was the only one of her brothers that fully supported her.

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In Jerusalem and London

In 1939, Fadwa left Nablus to live with Ibrahim in Jerusalem, where she finally broke free of the walls in which her family had confined her for so long. In Jerusalem, Fadwa was introduced to a society of poets, writers, and politicians, became active in literary and cultural clubs, and started going to the library and cinema. 

In A Mountainous Journey: A Poet’s Autobiography, Fadwa wrote about her difficult and unfair life, including how she contemplated suicide multiple times. In Jerusalem, she began taking English lessons at an evening school at the YMCA so that she could begin reading and self-studying English Literature.

In 1962, Fadwa moved to London for two years where she took courses in English and Literature at Oxford University continuing her self-development and learning journey. 

Upon returning from London, Fadwa decided to claim her autonomy, away from the confines of her family and the society in which she had grown up. She built her own house in the west of Nablus, where she continued to live independently.

As with her poetry, she knew her family would never accept her marriage to a stranger from another country. Her first love was Egyptian lyricist and poet Ibrahim Naja, about whom she had written some of her best poetry. Their relationship remains alive through her poetry for him and the love letters they had exchanged. 

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Stamp commemorating Fadwa’s centenary
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EXISTENCE
Translated by Michael R. Burch

In solitary life, I was a lost question;
In the encompassing darkness,
my answer was concealed.

You were a bright new star
radiating light from the darkness of the unknown,
revealed by fate.

The other stars rotated around you
—once, twice —
until it came to me,
your unique radiance.

Then the bleak blackness broke
And in the matching tremors
of our two hands
I found my missing answer.

Oh you! Oh you intimate, yet distant!
Don’t you remember the coalescence
Of your spirit in flames?
Of my universe with yours?
Of the two poets?
Despite our great distance,
Existence unites us – Existence!

 

Grieving a beloved brother; and the Nakba

Fadwa witnessed the Nakba in 1948 and didn’t remain silent. She was part of the Jordanian delegation for a peace conference organized by the World Peace Council in Stockholm and later delegations to Holland, the Soviet Union, and China. After the death of her beloved brother and mentor Ibrahim in 1941, her father urged her to write political and national poetry to steer her away from the emptiness she was feeling after losing Ibrahim.

But she resisted and instead published her first poetry collection in 1946, My Brother Ibrahim, as a way to grieve her loss. It was only after her father’s death in 1948 that she start writing nationalist and resistance poetry without anyone’s influence.

Her resistance poetry had such an impact that Moshe Dayan, commander of the Jerusalem front in the 1948 Arab-Israeli war said that Fadwa’s poetry was the equivalent of facing twenty enemy fighters.

MY SAD CITY
translated by Charlie Huntington

“On the day of Zionist occupation”
The day we saw the death and deception, 
The floods fell back, 
The windows to heaven closed, 
And the city held its breath. 
Day the waves retreated, day that 
The ugliness of the abyss 
Exposed its face to the light.
Hope burned 
As an agony of misfortune strangled 
My sad city. 
Gone are the children and songs;
Not a glimpse, not an echo
The sorrow in my city crawls shamefully,
Staining her steps. 
The silence in my city –
Silence like mountains at rest, 
Like a dark night, a painful silence
Burdened with the weight of death and defeat. 
Alas! Oh, my sad, silent city 
Are you thus at harvest time, 
Your crops and fruits aflame? 
Alas! Oh, what an end! 
Alas! Oh, what an end! 

Fadwa is considered a feminist of her time; although she was forced to leave elementary school and never completed her education with a degree, she fought her way through her life and career becoming the first Palestinian female poet, publishing eight poetry collections between 1946 and 2000.

Selections of her poetry have been translated into more than five languages, including Hebrew, and her two autobiographies, A Mountainous Journey and The Most Difficult Journey, were translated and published in English in 1990 and 1993 respectively.

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A Mountainous Journey is a compilation of all her journal entries until 1967. In The Most Difficult Journey she speaks of her life under the occupation after the Palestinian Nakba in 1948 and the 1967 Naksa. A documentary of her life was produced by Palestinian Novelist Liana Badr titled Fadwa: A Poetess from Palestine. Her life was featured on Al Jazeera Documentary, and Ilam Media also produced a short film about her after her death. You can watch it here with English subtitles.

On December 12, 2003, Fadwa passed away in her hometown of Nablus, leaving behind a legacy of political activism, literature, and a new path for Palestinian women writers to follow. 

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Contributed by Lama Obeid, a writer from Palestine. Her poem “My Father a Refugee” has been published in the anthology To Lay Sun into a Forest, published by Sidhe Press. Lama enjoys experimenting with poetry and fiction, and hopes to become a published author of an anthology and a memoir in the future. Lama also publishes her writing on her Substack, I Come From There.

Further reading

7 Poems by Fadwa Tuqan Fadwa Tuqan’s Legacy as a Feminist Icon A Romantic Feminist Poet and Reluctant Political Witness You may also enjoy: Samira Azzam, Journalist, Broadcaster, and Short Story Writer  

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