Nava Atlas's Blog, page 11

Film and Stage Adaptations of 84 Charing Cross Road

In the decades after 84, Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff was published, it was adapted for the stage, film, and radio. The adaptations brought the book to new audiences and were incredibly popular, although they received mixed critical reviews. 

Written by American author and playwright Helene Hanff, 84 Charing Cross Road is an eclectic, endearing collection of her twenty-year trans-Atlantic correspondence with London antiquarian bookshop Marks & Co. on Charing Cross Road. The book was a cult success in both America and the UK.

Today, the film is still available to watch on major streaming channels, and the play is regularly performed by theatre companies on both sides of the Atlantic.

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The book that started it all

In 1949, struggling New York playwright Helene Hanff wrote her first letter to London bookshop Marks & Co, after seeing one of their advertisements in the New York Times Saturday Review of Literature. She enclosed a list of books that she was looking for, explaining that:

“The phrase ‘antiquarian booksellers’ scares me somewhat, as I equate ‘antique’ with expensive. I am a poor writer with an antiquarian taste in books and all the things I want are impossible to get over here except in very expensive rare editions, or in Barnes & Noble’s grimy, marked-up school-boy copies…”

This letter was the start of twenty years of correspondence between Helene and Frank Doel, the chief buyer and manager of Marks & Co. Over time the letters grew to include other members of staff at the shop, as well as Frank’s wife Nora, and a business arrangement grew into a deep friendship.

Helene sent gifts, holiday packages, and food parcels to the shop, both to thank them for their efforts in finding her books and to help alleviate the worst of British post-war rationing. The letters covered subjects as diverse as John Donne, the perfect recipe for Yorkshire puddings, baseball, and the coronation of Elizabeth II.

Although Helene wanted desperately to travel to the UK, her financial circumstances precluded it, and Frank died unexpectedly from peritonitis in 1969. It was only then that Helene thought of gathering their correspondence into a book. 84 Charing Cross Road was published in 1970, and its success finally enabled Helene to make the journey to visit London and the now-closed bookshop.

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84 Charing Cross Road – the play

In 1980, British theatre director James Roose-Evans adapted the book for the stage, with Helene’s help. Ironically, given that she was a playwright herself, it was the only thing of hers that was ever produced for the theatre. It premiered at the Salisbury Playhouse in 1981, before transferring to the West End and later Broadway.

It played at the Ambassadors Theatre in London from November 1981 to April 1983 and starred Rosemary Leach as Helene and David Swift as Frank. Helene was in London at the time and attended the opening night. Reviews were universally good, and Irving Wardle wrote in The Times that the poignancy of the occasion seemed like “the end of a fairytale.”

The play then toured nationally in the UK, and and Bill Gaunt took over the lead roles. The tender, bittersweet comedy was a hit with audiences, and its appeal lasted long after the first run finished. It returned to the Salisbury Playhouse in February 2015, with Clive Francis and Janie Dee as Frank and Helene, and then in 2018 began another nationwide tour at the Cambridge Arts Theatre, with Clive Francis starring again alongside Hollywood actress Stefanie Powers as Helene.

The Broadway production, however, was not so successful. It opened in December 1982 at the Nederlander Theater, with Ellen Burstyn and Joseph Maher in the lead roles, but the reviews on this side of the Atlantic were mixed. Frank Rich wrote in the New York Times:

“After seeing Charing Cross Road, the tiny divertissement that opened at the Nederlander Theater last night, you don’t feel as if you’ve been to the theater, but to afternoon tea … [it] is a staged reading that’s been tricked-up into a Broadway production by the casting of a star and by the erection of an imposing Oliver Smith set … 84 Charing Cross Road is high-minded but resolutely nonintellectual — a play for those who get more pleasure out of owning handsome old books than reading them.”

It ran for 96 performances before closing.

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84 Charing Cross Road – the film

In the mid-1980s, production began on a film adaptation of the book. The screenplay was adapted by Hugh Whitemore from the play script (not directly from the book itself), and the film was directed by David Hugh Jones.

The all-star cast included Anne Bancroft as Helene, Anthony Hopkins as Frank, and Judi Dench as Frank’s wife Nora, and Anne Bancroft’s husband Mel Brooks was also an executive producer.

It was co-produced in Britain and the US by Brooksfilms and Columbia Pictures and was shot on location in both London and New York with two entirely separate production teams. This is reflected in the closing credits, when a split screen shows Helene Hanff in New York and Frank Doel in London, and the crews for the two cities scroll side by side.

The London settings included Buckingham Palace, Trafalgar Square, St James’s, Westminster, Soho Square, White Hart Lane in Tottenham, and Richmond, while famous New York settings included Central Park, Madison Avenue, and St Thomas Church. Most of the interior sequences were filmed at Lee International Studios and Shepperton Studios in Surrey.

The film received mixed critical reviews. Variety described it as “an appealing film on several counts, one of the most notable being Anne Bancroft’s fantastic performance in the leading role. She brings Helene Hanff alive in all her dimensions, in the process creating one of her most memorable characterizations.”

Gene Siskel wrote in the Chicago Tribune , “Years ago, 84 Charing Cross Road would have been called “a woman’s picture” or a “perfect matinee.” But it’s that and more. It should be irresistible to anyone able to appreciate the goodness of its spirit and its spirited characters…”

In the New York Times, however, Vincent Canby called it “a movie guaranteed to put all teeth on edge…a movie of such unrelieved gentleness that it makes one long to head for Schrafft’s for a double-gin martini straight up and a stack of cinnamon toast from which the crusts have been removed.”

For the Chicago Sun-Times, Roger Ebert wrote: “The film is based on a hit London and New York play, which was based on a best-selling book. Given the thin and unlikely subject matter, that already is a series of miracles. And yet some people are pushovers for this material. I should know. I read the book and I saw the play and now I am reviewing the movie, and I still don’t think the basic idea is sound…”

Despite these few lukewarm reviews, the film was a success at the box office, taking over a million dollars in the US. It also appeared at the 1987 São Paulo International Film Festival, the 1988 Munich Film Festival, and the 1987 Moscow International Film Festival, where Anthony Hopkins won an award for Best Actor and David Hugh Jones was nominated for the Golden Prize for direction.

Anne Bancroft won a Best Leading Actress BAFTA award in 1988 for her portrayal of Helene, while Judi Dench was nominated for Best Supporting Actress, and Hugh Whitemore was nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay. In 1989, Helene Hanff and Hugh Whitemore shared the USC Scripter Award for the screenplay.

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84 Charing Cross Road – on the radio

The book has also been adapted for British radio several times. It was first broadcast on BBC Radio 3 in 1976, in an adaptation by Virginia Browns that starred as Helene and as Frank.

James Roose-Evans, having already written the play script, adapted it again for radio in 1992; this production starred Frank Finlay and Miriam Karlin. A further production in 2007 starred Gillian Anderson and Denis Lawson and was broadcast on Christmas Day on BBC Radio 4.

Contributed by Elodie Barnes. Elodie is a writer and editor with a serious case of wanderlust. Her short fiction has been widely published online and is included in the Best Small Fictions 2022 Anthology published by Sonder Press. She is Books & Creative Writing Editor at Lucy Writers Platform, she is also co-facilitating What the Water Gave Us, an Arts Council England-funded anthology of emerging women writers from migrant backgrounds. She is currently working on a collection of short stories, and when not writing can usually be found planning the next trip abroad, or daydreaming her way back to 1920s Paris. Find her online at  Elodie Rose Barnes. 

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Samira Azzam, Journalist, Broadcaster, and Short Story Writer

Samira Azzam (September 13, 1927 – August 8, 1967) was a journalist and broadcaster who left her mark on Palestinian literature. Her numerous short stories reflected the Palestinian experience of the 1950s and 1960s.

She was born in Acre (in what was then the Palestinian Mandate and today is Israel). Acre is located on the Mediterranean coast, often known locally as Akko.

Had she lived today, she might have been a social media influencer, as she started writing reviews and essays for the newspaper Filistin, signing them “A Girl from the Coast” while a still a teen. Azzam was apparently a dedicated student: she became a teacher at the age of sixteen. 

 

A Life on the Move

 While she was born into a middle-class family of Orthodox Christians, Azzam had great insight into the lives of people forced to make difficult choices due to poverty.

When Azzam was about twenty-one, in 1948, she and her family went to Lebanon as a result of Israel’s forced displacement of about half the population of Palestine, an event known as the Nakba, or Catastrophe. The rest of her short life would be deeply affected, like the lives of the people around her, by the conflicts and political upheavals of the region. 

As a writer and social critic, Azzam took part in the literary community of Beirut, Lebanon’s capital. She wrote short stories. As Ranya Abdelrahman explains in the introduction to her translation of a collection of Azzam’s stories, Out of Time, Palestinian literature of this era focused on short stories because they could be published inexpensively and read aloud on the radio.

Azzam’s professional life had her moving about. Two years after her family relocated to Lebanon, Azzam went to Iraq. There she taught and may have been the headmistress of a girls school. It was also while she was in Iraq that Azzam began working for the Near East Asia Broadcasting Company where she wrote for the program “Women’s Corner.”

Azzam moved back and forth from Beirut to Iraq in the late 1950s, as regime changes in Iraq affected her ability to work as a broadcaster from Baghdad. In Beirut she was the host of a popular morning show.

 

A Writer of Short Stories

While in Iraq, Azzam wrote for an Iraqi newspaper, and published two collections of short stories in the 1950s, Little Things (1954) and The Big Shadow (1956), and began translating works from English to Arabic. Her translations included works by George Bernard Shaw and Pearl S. Buck.

In 1959, Azzam married Adib Yousef Hasan and together they briefly lived in Iraq before, due to the political climate, moving the back to Beirut, where she began publishing and wrote for two women’s magazines—Sawt Al-Mar`a (Women’s Voice) and Dunia Al-Mar`a (Women’s World).

She also worked for the Franklin Institution for Translation – work that continued bringing English-language works by writers such as John Steinbeck and Edith Wharton to Arabic. In 1960, she published another collection of short stories — And Other Stories.

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Out Of Time

Her short story collection The Clock and the Man was published in 1963. The title story of that volume has become one of Azzam’s best-known works, partly because of an essay by Adania Shibli, author of the much-translated novel Minor Detail (2017), about the impact of that story on her own sense of her Palestinian identity.

Explaining that it was one of the few Palestinian stories to escape being cut from the school curriculum by Israeli censors, Shibli, who was born in 1974, describes her surprise at reading it in her primary school. It is a simple story about a man who takes it upon himself to act as an alarm clock, knocking on doors to wake all those in his neighborhood who work for a certain company and thus must catch an early train.

The narrator eventually learns the reason for the man’s behavior: his son was killed trying to catch the morning train and he wants to save others from that fate. For Shibli, however (whose essay “Out of Time” appears at the beginning of the Out of Time anthology), this short story was evidence of a world she had never known. She wondered:

“Were there once Palestinian employees who commuted to work by train? Was there a train station? Was there once a train whistling in Palestine? Was there ever once a normal life in Palestine? So where is it now, and why has it vanished?”

 

Last Years

Through the 1960s, Azzam began working on her first novel, Sinai Without Borders. Azzam helped found a Palestinian radio station and increased her political activism in this period. In June of 1967, she was a co-founder of the Committee of Arab Ladies.

The organization was created to aid Palestinian refugees fleeing territories captured by Israel in the Arab-Israeli or Six-Day War. Israel’s victory in that war was said to be a great shock to Azzam.

She destroyed the manuscript for her novel, and she died of a heart attack a few weeks later on August 8, 1967 at thirty-nine years old.  Following Azzam’s death, two more collections of her stories were published: The Festival Through the Western Window(1971) and Echoes (2000).

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Narrative Techniques

In 2022 ArabLit published of Out of Time, a collection of thirty-one of Azzam’s stories. Ranya Abdelrahman translated the collection. Prior to this, only a handful of English versions of Azzam’s stories were available. Before they were only available in anthologies such as Arab Women Writers (2005) and Opening the Gates: A Century of Arab Feminist Writing (1990).

Unfortunately, the stories in Out of Time, which clearly span Azzam’s career, are updated as to their original publication. 

The stories in Out of Time as well as those in the other anthologies are a pleasure to read. Truly short (some as little as two pages), they present a range of experiences. Many of the stories have a first-person plural narrator, a technique that creates the sense of a communal voice. 

For example, “The Inheritance” begins, “We have to confess that Abu Naseef’s family was impatient for him to die,” while “The Aunt’s Marriage” opens with “It was only natural, since Umm (Mother) Youssef was visiting, for us to loosen our tongues and delve more freely into the affairs of neighbors, both near and far.”

And yet another example, “The Roc (a legendary bird of prey) Flew Over Shahraban,” starts with “Slowly, we raised our heads as hellish cries echoed in our ears, and we looked up in awe and fear.”

 

Women With Difficult Choices

Many of Azzam’s stories portray women faced with difficult choices. One of those stories, oft-cited in essays about Azzam, is “Her Story.” Narrated by a woman forced into prostitution to survive, the story offers the impassioned tale of an orphaned girl tricked, seduced, and exploited who begs her younger brother, filled with shame after he discovers her occupation, not to kill her for both their sakes. 

But not all her stories portray women in brutal conditions. “A Silken Dream” tells the story of Souad, a young woman who longs to buy a dress she can’t afford to impress her new suitor’s family the first time she meets them. When he assures her that his clothes are cheap, “her face relaxed, and contentment made its way back to her features. It seemed to her that she had never seen Mansour more manly, or more elegant than he was at that moment in his cheap khaki shirt.”

 

Psychological Insights

Many of Azzam’s stories portray with powerful psychological insight the struggle by both men and women to maintain pride in the face of poverty and oppression. “No Harm Intended,” a two-pager, is another of those narrated by “we,” in this case the daughter of a family who owns a candy store.

She describes how she and her brother mock a man who comes begging for sweets, how they are reprimanded by their father who pities the man, and how, after their father prepares a little gift for the beggar to celebrate Eid, the beggar refuses the gift and never again returns to their shop. 

Some commentators explain Azzam’s lack of visibility today by claiming that her stories were not political enough at a time when Palestinians were grappling with one political crisis after another. And yet in stories like “Zagharid” (a word referring to the trilling ululation made during weddings and other celebrations), Azzam portrays the pain of a woman in Jaffa unable, due to political restrictions, to travel to Beirut to make her own zagharid at her only son’s wedding. 

 

A Modern Perspective

Some of Azzam’s stories are quite modern in their outlook. “A Virgin Continent,” translated by Arab Women Writers, is five pages long and written only in dialogue between a woman and her male partner.

As they discuss prior relationships, resentments and jealousies escalate and the woman notes that her partner needs to see himself as “the discoverer of a virgin continent” in imagining her as having had no history before she became involved with him. 

In yet another story, “The Passenger,” a very urban and accomplished woman, awaiting a flight in the Beirut airport, is overcome by the grief of a peasant family bidding farewell to a relative about to become the first person in their family to travel on a plane as he prepares to board one for the first time in his life.

This story skillfully exhibits Azzam’s ability to cross class lines and embrace the emotional world of her fellow Palestinians, whatever their circumstances.

Contributed by Lynne Weiss: Lynne’s writing has appeared in Black Warrior Review; Brain, Child; The Common OnLine; the Ploughshares blog; the [PANK] blog; Wild Musette; Main Street Rag; and Radcliffe Magazine. She received an MFA from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and has won grants and residency awards from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the Millay Colony, the Vermont Studio Center, and Yaddo. She loves history, theater, and literature, and for many years, has earned her living by developing history and social studies materials for educational publishers. She lives outside Boston, where she is working on a novel set in Cornwall and London in the early 1930s. You can see more of her work at LynneWeiss.

Further reading

Khalil-Habib, Nejmeh. “Samira Azzam (1926-1967): Memory of the Lost Land.” (undated) 

Hakeem, Mazen, trans. “Samira Azzam: A Profile from the Archives.” Jadaliyya 27 April 2014. 

Fawzy, Ibrahim. “Samira Azzam: A Palestinian Scheherazade Out of the Shadows.” Rowayat, A Literary Journal, #6. (undated) 

Jalal, Maan. “Palestinian author Samira Azzam’s short stories translated into English for new book.” The National, March 21, 2023. 

More about Samira Azzam

  Collections of Short Stories

Little Things (1954)Big Shadows (1956)And Other Stories (1960)The Clock and the Man (1963)The Festival Through the Western Window (1971)Echoes (2000)

Full Texts

Arab Lit – Out of Time: The Collected Short Stories of Samira Azzam Bread of Sacrifice Tears from a Glass Eye Man and His Alarm Clock

More Information

Interactive Encyclopedia of The Palestine Question

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Forever Amber by Kathleen Winsor (1944), the Banned Bestseller

Forever Amber  by Kathleen Winsor (1944) tells the sprawling story of Amber St. Clair, a beauty who cunningly ascends the class structure of Restoration-era England. After a humble upbringing, sixteen-year-old Amber’s encounter with a troupe of traveling soldiers turns into her ticket out of the countryside – and her journey of social advancement begins.

Amber’s fictional narrative is interwoven with true historic facts of the English Restoration; she is born of circumstances resulting from the English Civil War, becomes a survivor of the plague, and witnesses the Great Fire of London.

Amber meets a vast array of characters from all the English classes, her adopted farmer parents, the mischievous highwayman Black Jack Mallard, her true love royalist Lord Bruce Carlton, and King Charles II. These encounters amount to a sweeping portrait of the English Restoration.

On her nearly 1,000-page path to the throne, Amber leaves a trail of scandal in her wake — theft, abortion, and sexual desire. She climbs up the ranks of 17th-century society as the mistress or wife of ever richer and more important men, all the while loving the one man she could never have.

Forever Amber scandalized and enthralled the reading audience. Fourteen American states, as well as all of Australia, banned the book upon release, citing claims of obscenity. Nevertheless, the novel skyrocketed in popularity, and in 1947 was made into a film. 

 

Publishers’ synopses of Forever Amber

From the  Chicago Review Press edition (2000): “Abandoned, pregnant, and penniless on the teeming streets of London, 16-year-old Amber St. Clare manages, by using her wits, beauty, and courage, to climb to the highest position a woman could achieve in Restoration England—that of favorite mistress of the Merry Monarch, Charles II.

From whores and highwaymen to courtiers and noblemen, from events such as the Great Plague and the Fire of London to the intimate passions of ordinary—and extraordinary—men and women, Amber experiences it all. But throughout her trials and escapades, she remains, in her heart, true to the one man she really loves the one man she can never have.”

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The 1947 film adaptation of Forever Amber
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Anticipating Forever Amber, and a movie deal

From the Lexington Leader, (KY) October 1, 1944:  The Macmillan Company will publish its big fall book Oct. 16, and you can mark the occasion as a red-letter day in your reading. The book is Forever Amber, a novel by Kathleen Winsor.

When I said “big” I was not thinking of size, but of quality, sales, and popularity. But the novel is far from short in length, running close to a thousand pages. Unless I miss my guess, Forever Amber, a story of turbulent Restoration England, will outstrip that other Macmillan story, Gone With The Wind, in every department of public appeal. I think it a much better story.

Kathleen Winsor is really Mrs. Robert John Herwig, wife of a Marine on duty in the South Pacific. (Those who read the sports pages will recall that Herwig was an all-American gridder at the University of California back in 1936 and 1937 and an all-American basketballer that former year.)

She graduated from the University of California in 1938 and her only writing for publications prior to this novel were football feature articles for the Oakland Tribune in 1937, the year that California went to the Rose Bowl.

Macmillan reports that Miss Winsor’s novel had its inception in a term paper which her husband did on the death of Charles II. The young bride picked up one of the books he was using for reference, became fascinated with the Restoration, and got the idea for a novel. She worked as a receptionist on the Oakland paper for about six months in hopes of becoming a reporter but gave up and started writing the story which turned out as Forever Amber.

You would never guess it from the novel nor from looking at her, but Miss Winsor is a plodding methodic worker. In setting out on her tremendous novel she outlined a definite schedule and stayed with it.

She took one week off every month, and even when she was trailing along with her husband from camp to camp her manuscript was a constant companion. If she were obliged to miss a day, she made up for it, and in the final stages was busy eight hours a day, seven days a week.

Miss Winsor kept tabs on how much time she spent on this novel. She wrote six complete drafts. This amounted to 9,241 pages or 2,310,250 words. She used 1,303 hours for reading and researching, 380 hours indexing her notes, and 3,284 hours writing the book, a total of 4,967 long hours on the whole job spread over about five years.

Macmillan paid the usual advance for a novel amounting to about a dollar an hour for the time spent on this particular one. The first printing which goes on sale Oct. 16, is 150,000 copies at three dollars each.

Miss Annie Laurie Williams, noted for big deals involving movie rights to the books, got hold of Miss Winsor soon after the manuscript reached Macmillan. That was before the record-breaking $125,000 MGM novel award.

But Miss Williams did not submit Forever Amber in the contest, because she believed that the movies would pay considerably more for the picture rights than a mere $125,000!

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Kathleen Winsor was just twenty-five when Forever Amber was published; it would remain her most successful work. This is from the back cover of a later edition of the book, in paperback

A 1944 reviews of Forever Amber

From the original review in The Rutherford Courier, Oct. 13, 1944: This is the Gone With the Wind of the Restoration period of Old England. Instead of Scarlett, the heroine’s name is Amber. Rhett Butler, here, becomes Bruce, Lord Carlton. The scene, instead of the Southland, is all England, from the debtor’s pens in Newgate prison to the bedroom of King Charles II.

The theme is–well, just to make every page as magnetically interesting as possible. The result is a book that one finds hard to put down, though every one of its 900-odd pages.

Like Gone With The Wind, Forever Amber is the story of a beautiful yet resourceful and determined woman who gets everything she wants except, in the end, the man she really loves. Amber is the daughter of high blood, but this is a secret that only the reader knows, and that Amber never learns.

Reared in a peasant household, she meets Lord Carlton as he, with other Cavaliers, passes through her tiny town en route back to London with Charles II. From the violent episode of her first meeting with Bruce, she never forgets him. She accompanies him to London but is left alone when he sets off privateering.

Amber, through a succession of marriages, “keepings,” and responses to the King’s night-time summons, eventually becomes the king’s mistress, a duchess, and perhaps the most influential woman in the Court, and hence all of England. Ruthless and scheming, she stops at nothing – and if there is any experience a woman ever had which Amber missed, it was omitted from the book surely unintentionally.

But the frank and violent action and the sex of this book are merely what make it run fast. Underneath there is good solid writing in the vivid picture of old England as it must have been in those times, with all its squalor and ignorance as well as extravagance and luxury.

The account of the bubonic plague epidemic in London is a truly sharp scene. Lord Carlton had the plague too, and Amber nursed him back to life, and in doing so caught the plague herself. This part of the story is told at length and is realistic detail, and it is a tribute to the author’s skill that interest never lags even here. 

The author, Kathleen Winsor, until she wrote this book had never written anything for publication except a few newspaper articles.

She is the wife of Lieut. Robert John Herwig, All-American football center from California U. in 1936 and 1937. They met in college; she became interested in the subject of Charles II when her husband had to write a term paper on the subject, and this book is the result.

The publishers state that they intended to give the book unprecedented promotion, and this can hardly help being a best-seller, perhaps THE best-seller of the 1940s. It is a natural for the movies. And there’s no justice unless Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh get the leading roles. In technicolor. — R.C.L.

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First edition cover
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Further reading about Forever Amber by Kathleen Winsor

Original review in  the Atlantic (December 1944) Review in Austenprose 1947 film adaptation on Rotten Tomatoes

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Alice Childress, Author of Trouble in Mind

Playwright and novelist Alice Childress (October 12, 1916 – August 14, 1994) was a prolific and influential contributor to American theater and letters throughout the second half of the twentieth century. Her first full-length play, Trouble in Mind, premiered in 1955 and won an Obie.

Another play, Wedding Band, was shown on network television in 1974 (though network affiliates in several southern states refused to carry it).  

None of this would have mattered to Childress who said, “I never was ever interested in being the first woman to do anything. I always felt that I should be the 50th or the 100th. Women were kept out of everything.”

She saw being “first” not so much as a triumph but as an indictment of a society that had prevented women from achieving the things she did before she did them.

Despite her many accomplishments as a playwright, however, she is best known today as the author of A Hero Ain’t Nothin’ But a Sandwich, a groundbreaking young adult novel about a 13-year-old heroin addict that was highly praised—and the subject of a 1982 Supreme Court case, Island Trees Union Free School District v. Pico.  

 

Early Life

Childress was born Alice Herndon in Charleston, South Carolina, on October 12, 1916 (though she would later shave years off her age by claiming a birth year of 1917 and even 1920). Her father, Alonzo Herrington, worked in insurance, and her mother, Florence White, was a seamstress.

After her parents split up (some accounts say when she was five; others when she was nine), Childress was sent to Harlem to be raised by her maternal grandmother, Eliza Campbell.   Childress later said her relationship with Campbell was among the most fortunate things in her life.

 

Remarkable Grandmother 

Born to an enslaved woman, Campbell’s formal education did not go beyond fifth grade. Even so, she had an active and curious mind. She encouraged her granddaughter to make up stories about the people they observed on New York City’s streets and then write them down.  

She immersed young Alice in the cultural richness of the city. They went to art galleries and visited other neighborhoods for festivals and to encounter people of other ethnic backgrounds. After these outings, Campbell often asked Alice what she had observed and suggested she write it down.  

Campbell took Alice to church, where Alice heard the powerful stories of those who stood to tell the congregation of their troubles—loved ones in jail, sickness and pain, financial troubles, or deaths and suicides. According to biographer La Vinia Delois Jennings, these accounts gave the future playwright and novelist details she would use in her future work. 

Childress received support from teachers as well, including those at Wadleigh High School, New York’s first high school for girls. Starting in junior high, Childress worked in theater projects with leftist sympathies, like those of the Urban League and the Negro Theatre Youth League of the Federal Theatre Project.

The death of Childress’s grandmother forced Childress to drop out of school after two years of high school, however. According to one source, she supported herself as a domestic worker at times, as well as taking on other types of work. When Childress was about nineteen, she married Alvin Childress, also an actor. In 1935, they had a daughter.  

  

The American Negro Theatre 

In 1941, Childress joined the American Negro Theatre (ANT), founded just two years earlier as a cooperative. Actors, playwrights, directors, and stage crew divided not only expenses and profits but also all the roles of theatrical work. Thus, Childress had the chance to act, write, and direct as well as do make-up, costumes, and erect sets.

She worked alongside rising talents Ruby Dee, Ossie Davis, Sidney Poitier, and Harry Belafonte, all of whom would go on to become well-known actors. Childress’s husband Alvin was also part of the ANT. 

In 1944, Childress had a role in Anna Lucasta, the ANT’s first Broadway production, and was nominated for a Tony. She and Sidney Poitier were part of the touring production, which also included Dee and Davis. In his autobiography, Poitier said that Childress “encouraged me to explore the history of Black people … she was instrumental in my meeting and getting to know the remarkable Paul Robeson.”  

Later, Childress, Davis, Dee, and Poitier would be blacklisted for their connections to Robeson and the ANT. This may be why none of them were tapped for roles in the 1958 Hollywood version of Anna Lucasta, which featured Sammy Davis Jr. and Eartha Kitt. 

 

Women in Theater

Childress and Poitier did not see eye-to-eye on everything. Poitier was among those Black people who argued that any play about Blacks and whites had to involve lynching or some other life-or-death situation.   

Childress saw things differently. Frustrated by the lack of roles for women in the theater, in 1949 she whipped out a one-act play called Florence that she wrote in a single day. It portrays a chance meeting between two women, one Black and one white, on a train bound for New York City.  

Florence is a Black woman who is on her way to New York to talk her daughter out of pursuing a career in theater. After a conversation with a white woman who suggests her daughter become a housemaid to a theater director, a furious Florence decides to encourage her daughter in her determination to succeed in theater. Although it was a small production, the play won recognition for Childress as a playwright.  

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Becoming a Playwright 

In 1950, Childress wrote Just a Little Simple, based on Langston Hughes’s novel Simple Speaks His Mind. This was followed in 1952 by Gold Through the Trees, a musical for which Childress composed lyrics and orchestrated music.

It included a portrayal of Harriet Tubman working in a New Jersey laundry to pay for her trips to rescue enslaved people in the South; a depiction of a young Black man unjustly imprisoned for rape; and a scene in which three young South African activists meet to plan a campaign against apartheid.    

 Trouble in Mind opened off-Broadway in 1955. It was so successful that a Broadway opening was scheduled for 1957, but as described in my discussion of the play in another essay on this site, Childress was unwilling to make the revisions needed to create the unrealistic happy ending of racial harmony for this play, and the opening never took place. 

 

Attracting the Attention of the FBI 

Childress walked the walk and created characters who talked the talk. Though Childress never joined the Communist Party, the radical content of Childress’s work came to the attention of the FBI. In The Other Blacklist: The African American Literary and Cultural Left of the 1950s, Mary Helen Washington describes the detailed records the agency kept on Childress between 1951 and 1957.

Her teaching in leftist institutions, her efforts to raise money for South African resistance, her support for Paul Robeson (who lost his passport in the McCarthy era), and her involvement in numerous organizations demanding equality for African Americans (then regarded as subversive) are all carefully noted.  

Her commitment to her leftist principles went beyond her writing and her social activism. When her husband Alvin Childress accepted a role in the popular (and highly racist) television show Amos n’ Andy, she divorced him.  

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A Voice for Domestic Workers 

Childress took part in the rich cultural and political life of Harlem. Working on Paul Robeson’s newspaper Freedom, she shared an office with among others, the young Lorraine Hansberry. W.E.B. Du Bois had an office in the same building as well and she often saw him at work.  

Childress wrote more than thirty columns for Robeson’s Freedom. Writing in the voice of a fictional domestic worker named Mildred Johnson, Childress commented on all sorts of topics. She expressed support for Black History Month and South African freedom struggles, but she also expressed her views of her white employers.

These columns were expanded and collected into Like One of the Family, a collection of satirical and witty vignettes. While many of the vignettes and monologues of Family are funny, Mildred also argued for the need for public protest and for domestic workers to organize and unionize.    

Mildred keeps her independence by living in her own apartment and working for a number of different women. When one of them asks her to produce a medical certificate of good health (because she believes Black people are diseased), Mildred counters by requesting a similar certificate for every member of the household whose laundry she must handle.

 

A Prolific Writer 

In 1957, Childress married Nathan Woodard, a jazz musician. Childress and Woodard worked together on several plays and musicals, including the children’s musical Young Martin Luther King (1968) and Moms: A Praise Play for a Black Comedienne (1987)—a tribute to Jackie “Moms” Mabley. 

Moms was commissioned by Childress’s friend Clarice Taylor, who had a recurring role as Bill Cosby’s mother on The Cosby Show and was well-received off-Broadway. Unfortunately, Childress and Taylor ended up in a copyright dispute in which Childress received $30,000 in damages. 

From 1966 through 1968, Childress was a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. She had been recommended for the fellowship by Tillie Olsen. While at the Radcliffe Institute, she worked on The African Garden, a play she described as being about “poor whites and poor blacks who have caught the most hell in life.”  

In 1968, following the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., Childress began to think about writing for children. That was when she and her husband Woodard wrote Young Martin Luther King (originally titled Freedom Drum).  

 

Wedding Band

Her 1966 play, Wedding Band: A Love/Hate Story in Black and White was Childress’s most successful and controversial work. Her portrayal of a loving relationship between a Black woman and a white German American man in South Carolina during World War I was seen by some Black nationalists as a betrayal.

Childress, however, said that Wedding Band was “about Black women’s rights…The play shows society’s determination to hold the Black woman down…”  Wedding Band was performed in 1972 at the New York Shakespeare Festival with Ruby Dee as the lead. ABC offered a televised version a few years later, but eight network affiliates in southern states refused to air the production. 

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A Hero Ain’t Nothin’ but a Sandwich 

Her concern about reaching young people led to A Hero Ain’t Nothin’ but a Sandwich. This searing novel about a young heroin addict was highly praised as a “surprisingly exciting” use of the author’s “considerable dramatic talents to expose a segment of society seldom spoken of above a whisper” in the New York Times.  

Feminist literary critic Susan Koppelman Cornillon (Images of Women in Fiction) said that Hero “revolutionized writing for young adults by introducing the nitty-gritty realities of urban life.” The American Library Association named Hero best Young Adult Book of 1975 and it was made into a feature film starring Paul Winfield and Cicely Tyson in 1977.  

In 1993, she explained what gave her the idea for the title: 

I was down in Greenwich Village. I saw a man who looked like he was done in by drugs, leaning against a plate-glass window of a restaurant. And he’s weeping and about to go over. At the top of his head was a sign on the window that said,“A Hero.” Then he slid to the ground; the rest of it said “Sandwich, $1.50.” And I said to my companion, “We’re living in a time when a hero ain’t nothin’ but a sandwich.”   

In 1975, Hero became the subject of a lawsuit when a school district in Long Island, New York, ordered that Hero, along with several other books, be removed from school libraries. The case eventually went to the U.S. Supreme Court, and in 1982, the Court ruled that libraries were places of “voluntary inquiry” and that the removal of books violated the First Amendment. 

 Childress later wrote two more novels aimed at younger readers: Rainbow Jordan (1981), about an adolescent girl abandoned by her mother, and Those Other People (1989), about a young man coming to terms with his homosexuality.  

 

Final Years 

In 1984, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst named Childress Artist-in-Residence. She received a number of awards in the 1980s, including from Radcliffe College, the Harlem School for the Arts, and the NAACP.

She continued writing and speaking into the 1990s, received an honorary doctorate from the State University of New York, and received a tribute at the Langston Hughes Festival at New York’s City College. 

The death of her daughter of cancer in 1990 was a blow, but in 1992, Trouble in Mind opened in London to strong reviews. Her own health was failing by March 1994, when she was inducted into the South Carolina Academy of Authors.  

Alice Childress died of cancer in Queens, New York, on August 14, 1994. Her papers are in the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture of the New York Public Library.   

Contributed by Lynne Weiss: Lynne’s writing has appeared in Black Warrior Review; Brain, Child; The Common OnLine; the Ploughshares blog; the [PANK] blog; Wild Musette; Main Street Rag; and Radcliffe Magazine. She received an MFA from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and has won grants and residency awards from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the Millay Colony, the Vermont Studio Center, and Yaddo. She loves history, theater, and literature, and for many years, has earned her living by developing history and social studies materials for educational publishers. She lives outside Boston, where she is working on a novel set in Cornwall and London in the early 1930s. You can see more of her work at LynneWeiss.

More about Alice Childress

Major Works

Plays

Florence (1949)Just a Little Simple (1950)Gold Through the Trees (1952)Trouble in Mind (1955)Wedding Band: A Love/Hate Story in Black and White (1966)The Freedom Dream, later retitled Young Martin Luther King, Jr. (1968)String (1969)Wine in the Wilderness (1969)Mojo: A Black Love Story (1970)When the Rattlesnake Sounds (1975)Let’s Hear It for the Queen (1976)Sea Island Song, later retitled Gullah (1977)Moms: A Praise Play for a Black Comedienne (1987)

Novels

Like One of the Family (1956)A Hero Ain’t Nothin’ but a Sandwich (1973)A Short Walk (1979)Rainbow Jordan (1981)Those Other People (1989)

Biography

Alice Childress by La Vinia Delois Jennings (1995)

More information

History Matters Roundabout Theater Company American Conservatory Theater Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library Obituary (NY Times)

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8 Essential Novels by South African Author Nadine Gordimer

Nadine Gordimer (November 20, 1923 – July 13, 2013) was a South African activist and Nobel Prize-winning author. Following is a compilation of 8 essential novels by Gordimer, a good place to start when getting acquainted with her work.

Nadine Gordimer was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1991, three years before South Africa’s first free elections. Her work was especially relevant during the first free elections in 1994 – they remain relevant as the country moved into its next election date in March 2024.

She was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1991, three years before South Africa’s first free elections.

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About Nadine Gordimer

Nadine Gordimer was born November 20, 1923, in the small mining town of Springs, South Africa about thirty miles from Johannesburg. A privileged upbringing gave her a secure foundation. She began writing at nine years old and by 1937, she was a published teenage author in the Sunday Express. She enrolled for college studies at the University of Witwatersrand but left after a year to pursue writing.

She was ahead of her time by publishing her first novel The Lying Days (1953) at the height of governmental literature bans. Burger’s Daughter and July’s People were banned just months after their release, citing the time’s archaic censorship views.

Gordimer’s writing was soon internationally read, in part because she was a banned author in her home country. A South African Childhood was one of her many essays written for the New Yorker – a very rare accomplishment for authors of the time.

She involved herself in the struggle against apartheid laws, inspired by Bettie du Toit’s protest arrest. She co-founded the Congress of South African Writers (COSAW) and was a notable member of the African National Congress (ANC). Gordimer also formed notable friendships, like that of Bram Fischer and George Bizos, attorneys to Nelson Mandela during his trial. The experiences formed the roots for her novel Burger’s Daughter.

Here are eight essential novels to know in Nadine Godimer’s catalog. 

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The Lying Days (1953) 

The Lying Days is Nadine Gordimer’s first published novel, preceded by the short story collection Face to Face (1949). It’s one of her most autobiographical works, drawing some of its storyline from her youth. Both Gordimer and the story’s protagonist spent their childhoods in small mining towns.

The story begins when  the protagonist, Helen Shaw, makes her way out of the small town to find a better life. The novel follows Helen as she comes of age and gains conciousness of the world around her. The Lying Days explores disenchantment and journeying through unfamiliar environments.

According to Oxford, it stands with A World of Strangers and Occasion for Loving as part of her “more traditional” novels.

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Occasion for Loving (1963)

Occasion for Loving takes on the subject of a different kind of government ban, which prohibited mixed-race relations and punished them with harsh sentences. Relationships across race were highly illegal – even writing about the topic could get authors in hot water with the government.

Considerable courage was needed just to write (or publish) a novel  at this time when Afrikaans authors like Ingrid Jonker were part of the equally rebellious Sixtiers movement. A 2017 academic study commends Occasion for Loving for its “discourse, power, and resistance” as an anti-apartheid novel.

The novel couples an affluent white woman with an African artist. Their love is illegal but runs strong through the storyline. The book uses love to expose the injustice of its times.

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The Conservationist (1974) 

The Conservationist follows the wealthy yet discontent businessman, Mehring, who decided to forgoe city life and buy a farm. Mehring must reflect on his unraveling life, all the while the dead body that was found on his property is looms over.

Mehring’s privilege and downfall acts as an allegory for apartheid. The Conservationist looks at the dance of life and death, set against the backdrop of apartheid South Africa.

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Burger’s Daughter (1979) 

 

Burger’s Daughter was banned just three months after its release. The story’s told from the perspective of the daughter of anti-apartheid activist Lionel  Burger’s. Throughout the book, Rosa Burger, the story’s protagonist, is coming to terms with her country and heritage.

Gordimer’s work often reflected themes of activism – Burger’s Daughter is a strong example with reference to the ANC and Communist Party. Gordimer faced censorship with courage by publishing the censorship commission’s opinions in a collection of essays titled What Happened to Burger’s Daughter  where she voiced her thoughts on banned writing

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July’s People (1981)

July’s People is about an alternate South African future, where Gordimer envisioned what South Africa would look like if a civil war had occurred.

The book takes a dystopian tone, playing on the country’s increased volatility at the time. Its cultural impact can’t be underestimated – especially at a time when art pieces like Black Jesus could have gotten their artists arrested, interrogated, or killed.

The South African Human Rights Commission (SAHRC) refers to July’s People in its eponymous report about 2021 unrest in Southern Africa. This novel sent a clear and hard to ignore message to the government.

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The House Gun (1998) 

The House Gun begins with the phrase, “Something terrible happened.” Characters Harald and Claudia, both affluent whites, find themselves in the throes of a traditional whodunit spiced with politics. Everyone has heard of a house cat or house plant, the “house gun” emerged with the country’s paranoia in times of unrest or uncertainty.

This was one of Gordimer’s first novels written after the end of apartheid. Published after the 1994 elections, The House Gun explored the new laws and feelings in the country – including what fear and unfamiliarity could do to the average household.

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The Pickup (2001)

The Pickup brings readers back to romance, following Julie Summers and Abdu. The story begins in South Africa, where Abdu is an illegal immigrant to the country. Together, the couple moves to Abdu’s home country, where Julie becomes an illegal immigrant. The Pickup flips character perspectives on their heads, making each a fish out of water.

It’s on our list of 10 Unforgettable Books by South African Women Authors and one of several Gordimer novels to receive the Booker Prize.

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Get a Life (2005)

Get a Life is a book about living, but also about dying. Environmental activist, Paul Bannerman, is diagnosed with thyroid cancer and moves back in with his parents. He’s caught in conflict due to the consequences  of his radiation treatments. Save one, or save many?

Get a Life addresses morality and humanity. Environmentalism is also a huge theme- one that may have evoked thoughts of her hometown where there is the unforgotten impact on the Earth from mining.

Contributed by Alex J. Coyne, a 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.

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Helene Hanff – Author of 84, Charing Cross Road

Helene Hanff (April 15, 1916 – April 9, 1997) was an American author and playwright. She is best known for her book 84, Charing Cross Road, an endearing collection of her twenty-year correspondence with the London antiquarian bookshop Marks & Co. on the eponymous street.

This novel was written at a low point in her career, but later went on to gain a cult following and to be adapted for film and stage.

 Early life: theatre and writing

Helene was born in Philadelphia, PA, to Arthur and Miriam Levy Hanff. Both of her parents were passionate about the theatre. Even during the Depression, her father, a shirt salesman, still took the family to the theatre every week by slipping new shirts to the box office staff in exchange for tickets.

It instilled a love of theatre in Helene too, and she wanted desperately to be a playwright. However, the family could not afford to send her to college. Helene was granted a one-year scholarship to Temple University.

Secretly, she relieved when it was not extended: “In my year at Temple I’d learned nothing about English Literature or the art of writing, which was all I wanted to learn.” Instead, Helene turned to educating herself on writing and literature through books.

Making use of the public library, she started at ‘A’ and worked her way along the shelves looking for what she wanted:

“What I wanted was the Best – written in a language I could understand…Most of the textbooks confined themselves to nineteenth and twentieth-century writers, omitting what I’d been taught were the greatest works of English literature: Shakespeare, Milton, and the Bible. And all of them were written in learned academic language that was over my head.”

Under Q she finally found what she was looking for, On the Art of Writing by Arthur Quiller-Couch. It was this book that she claimed really ignited her love of English literature, and she later paid tribute to Quiller-Couch in her 1986 book Q’s Legacy. 

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Underfoot in New York

In 1938 she won a fellowship from the Bureau of New Plays, and shortly after that moved to Manhattan where she was mentored by Theresa Helburn, a co-director of the Theatre Guild. Therese reputedly told her, “Your plays are terrible, just terrible. But never mind. You have talent.”

She got a job at the publicity department of the Guild, where she once spent a whole night adding exclamation marks to a first-night press release when the producers suddenly decided the new play needed one (it was Oklahoma!). She also studied once a week with Therese.

Helene wrote 20 plays throughout the 1940s, but although options were taken on them none were ever produced: she admitted later that “I wrote great dialogue, but I couldn’t invent a story to save my neck.” She later chronicled her attempts to break into playwriting in her 1961 memoir, Underfoot in Show Business.

 

Correspondence with Marks & Co. 

In the 1950s, Helene supported herself in a meager fashion by mainly writing screenplays for television, including Playhouse 90, The Adventures of Ellery Queen, and Hallmark Hall of Fame. She also reviewed books for film companies to advise on how they might be adapted.

Lord of the Rings was apparently a great ordeal, for which she charged ten times her usual fee as compensation for the “mental torture” of trying to understand and summarize the plot – and wrote articles for encyclopedias and children’s history books. She later said, “I was a failed playwright. I was nowhere. I was nothing.”

She continued to read voraciously and being a passionate Anglophile, preferred to order her books from a bookshop in London rather than buy “Barnes & Noble’s grimy, marked-up schoolboy copies”, even though she could ill-afford it.

She began to order from Marks & Co. on Charing Cross Road, having seen one of their adverts in the New York Times Saturday Review of Books. Eventually, an entire wall of her studio apartment was filled from floor to ceiling with the books she had ordered.

Her main correspondent at the bookshop between 1949 and 1969 was Frank Doel, whose “proper British reserve” was gradually worn down in the face of Helene’s exuberance and eccentricities. Later letters also included other members of the shop’s staff and Frank’s family.

To her British correspondents, Helene was a window into a typical New York lifestyle of picnicking in Central Park, following the baseball leagues and living in a brownstone tenement building. She was also a generous friend who sent food parcels and nylon stockings in an attempt to alleviate for them the worst of British post-war rationing.

Her letters about books were lively, witty, and acerbic – ignoring conventional niceties and grammar as well. One bellowing missive read:

“WHAT KIND OF A PEPYS’ DIARY DO YOU CALL THIS? This is not pepys’ diary, this is some busybody editor’s miserable collection of EXCERPTS from pepys’ diary may he rot. I could just spit. where is Jan. 12, 1668, where his wife chased him out of bed and round the bedroom with a red-hot poker?…”

She was also effusive in her thanks – although still with her trademark wit – when the bookshop got her orders right. When a pristine copy of Elizabethan Poets arrived on Helene’s birthday in 1951, she wrote, “I’ve never owned a book before with pages edged all round in gold…I shall try very hard not to get gin and ashes all over it, it’s really much too fine for the likes of me.”

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84, Charing Cross Rd

In 1969, news came of Frank’s unexpected death from peritonitis. Helene had not realized that Frank was ill and received the news from a Marks & Co. secretary who did not know her, asking if she still wanted to order a book.

“Coming when it did,” she later wrote, “the news was devastating. It seemed to me that the last anchor in my life – my bookshop – was taken from me. I began to cry, and I couldn’t stop.”

It was then that she thought of gathering the correspondence into a book. 84 Charing Cross Road was published in America in 1970 by Grossman, and in Britain in 1971 by Andre Deutsch. It had a decent critical reception: Thomas Lask wrote in the New York Times, “Here is a charmer: a 19th-century book in a 20th-century world. It will beguile an hour of your time and put you in tune with mankind.”

However, it was the book’s popular success that took Helene by surprise. She herself thought of the book as a “New Yorker story…a nice little, short story”, and the following that it gained astounded her.

She received hundreds of letters, phone calls, and gifts. One phone call reportedly came from a woman in Alaska, and when Helene commented that the phone call to New York must be costing a fortune, the woman replied, “We live 300 miles from the nearest town. I didn’t want to wait until spring when the roads clear and we can get into town to the post office [to write].”

The book was also hugely popular in Britain, and Helene particularly loved the story of the nuns of Stanbrook Abbey near Worcester, who had a single copy that was placed in a glass case. One nun was elected to turn one page a day so that the whole community could read it together.

 

“The end of a fairytale”

It was due to the success of the book that Helene finally had the money to travel to England (as well as to pay her never-ending dentist’s bills). There, she met Frank’s family and visited the now boarded-up bookshop, gave radio and print interviews, attended the London launch, and was regularly invited to dinner by fans of the book.

She documented the trip in The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street (1973).  In 1980 the book was adapted for the stage (ironically the only thing of Helene’s that was ever produced for the theatre), first in London’s West End and later on Broadway.

On the West End opening night, Helene appeared on stage to embrace the actress who had played her, Rosemary Leach. The next day, Irving Wardle wrote in The Times: “The sight of Helene Hanff on the set of the bookshop she made famous, and blinking under the applause of the town she could never afford to visit, made last night’s opening into the end of a fairytale…”

In 1982, Helene reflected on the changes 84 Charing Cross Rd had brought to her life:

“It’s unreal to me, what the last 10 years have been like…The fans – people all over the world who regard me as a friend! And in London there is a brass plaque on the wall with my name on it, to mark the spot where the bookshop once stood, because I wrote letters to it. In your own mind, you’re still an uneducated writer who doesn’t have much talent, and yet here you are with a plaque on the wall in London! You don’t even dream about things like that.”

In 1987 the book was made into a film starring Anne Bancroft and Anthony Hopkins.

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Last years

Despite its success, 84 Charing Cross Rd did not provide Helene with much in the way of long-lasting economic stability. In her last years, she freely admitted that she was “broke”, existing on royalties and Social Security, and a five-thousand-dollar grant from the Author’s League Fund to help pay her hospital bills.

She continued to write, although her later books are less well-known (Apple of My Eye in 1977 and Q’s Legacy in 1986). Between 1978 and 1984 she also gave regular monthly talks for the BBC Woman’s Hour entitled “Letter from New York”, and these were later collected and published in 1993.

Helene never married nor had children and refused to talk much about her personal life. She died in the De Witt Nursing Home in Manhattan, from complications of diabetes, just a few days shy of her 81st birthday.

Contributed by Elodie Barnes. Elodie is a writer and editor with a serious case of wanderlust. Her short fiction has been widely published online and is included in the Best Small Fictions 2022 Anthology published by Sonder Press. She is Books & Creative Writing Editor at Lucy Writers Platform, she is also co-facilitating What the Water Gave Us, an Arts Council England-funded anthology of emerging women writers from migrant backgrounds. She is currently working on a collection of short stories, and when not writing can usually be found planning the next trip abroad, or daydreaming her way back to 1920s Paris. Find her online at  Elodie Rose Barnes. 

More About Helene Hanff

Major Works

Underfoot in Show Business (1962)Queen of England: Story of  Elizabeth I (1969)84, Charing Cross Road (1970)The Dutchess of Bloomsbury Street (1973)Apple of My Eye (1977)Movers and Shakers: Young Activists of the Sixties (1982)Letters from New York (1992)

Biography

Helene Hanff: A Life by Stephen Pastore (2011)Letter from New York by Helene Hanff (2023)

More information

Obituary in The Independent The Helene Hanff Reading List A Life in Books

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Joan Lindsay, Author of Picnic at Hanging Rock

Joan Lindsay (November 16, 1896 – December 23, 1984) was an Australian author, essayist, and visual artist, best known for her mystic novel Picnic at Hanging Rock.

She began her literary career at forty years old when Through Darkest Pondelayo (1936) was published. Picnic at Hanging Rock (1966) was published when she was seventy-one.

 

Early Life

She was born Joan à Beckett Weigall in East St Kilda in Victoria to an upper-class Edwardian family. Her father Sir Theyre à Beckett Weigall was a judge and her mother Annie Sophie Henrietta was the daughter of Sir Robert Hamilton, the governor of Tasmania.

She attended Clyde Girls Grammar School, a private girls’ school, which she used as inspiration for the Appleyard College in Picnic at Hanging Rock.

Joan describes herself as having an “extraordinary memory of her youth” and recounts her first word, “beautiful,” as she stood in a garden of pansies at only three years old. Her “gloriously eccentric” childhood was filled with fascinating visitors to her home like the anthropologist Baldwin Spencer, literary scholar Sir Archibald Strong, and her cousins Panleigh and Merric Boyd who both went on to be celebrated artists.

Joan studied painting at the National Gallery of Victoria Art School. While she continued to paint throughout her life, she never pursued it professionally. In part, this decision was made because she felt she could not express herself well enough through painting. This realization sparked her decision to become a writer – a medium in which she could better express herself.

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Joan in 1914
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Marriage

 From a young age, Joan knew she wanted to marry into the Lindsay family. Irish-born Dr. Robert Lindsay and his wife Jane had ten children. Five of those ten brought the family to prominence because of their careers in art and literature.

Joan got her wish when she eloped with Daryl Lindsay in London on St. Valentine’s Day 1922. Their marriage made waves . Those in her milieu could not understand why she would marry such a bohemian, but Joan was not phazed. She likened herself more to the Bloomsbury Group than her establishment family.

 

Eccentric Beliefs

St. Valentine’s Day was special to Joan. In addition to it being her anniversary, it’s the same day that she set the events in her novel, Picnic at Hanging Rock.

“Daryl and I were married in London on St Valentine’s Day nineteen hundred and twenty-two – the only date I have ever remembered, except 1066 and Waterloo,” said Joan. She even had an extensive collection of intricately handmade Valentine’s Day cards.

Joan had an unconventional, free-spirited, attitude toward time, often disregarding it completely. Time was often a theme she played with in her writing. In a 1973 interview, she said, “I have an extraordinary gift, you might call it a very sinister one of stopping people’s watches just by sitting beside them.” She elaborated on her relationship with time:

“I’ve been terribly interested in time, always; I always felt that it was something that was all around one. Not just in a long line in a calendar. I feel that one’s in the middle of time and that the past, present, and future is all around and I’m in the middle of it.”

Joan balanced her eccentricities with the demeanor of a high-society woman of the early 1900s. In interviews, she can be seen wearing pearls, and had a polite and measured way of speaking. Yet at the same time, she had an air of mystery and youthfulness.

Janelle McCullough, author of Beyond the Rock: The Life of Joan Lindsay said in an ABC radio interview, “She was enigmatic, she loved a mystery, she was herself a mystery … she was a mystic. She was able to see things we can’t.”

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Joan and Daryl Lindsay
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Through Darkest Pondelayo and Other Novels

Her first novel, Through Darkest Pondelayo (1936), tells the story of two women on a fantastic adventure to the eponymous fictional cannibal island. Written in the style of journal entries or letters back home, the novel was published under a pseudonym, adding to the immersive experience.

The satirical novel featured photographs of the characters in comical situations and intentional errors in the writing to give the feeling of a real travelogue. A review of the novel wrote that the publishers “entered fully into the spirit of the thing, presenting the book on exaggeratedly thick paper in the true manner of offering a book of tremendous importance.”

There were no other novels until Time Without Clocks (1962) and Facts Soft and Hard (1964), but in these intervening years Joan was a prolific essayist and contributor to journals.

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Picnic at Hanging Rock (1967)

Picnic at Hanging Rock was her biggest success and became a cult classic. In the year 1900, students at Appleyard College set out on a Valentine’s Day picnic at the geologic wonder, Hanging Rock.

The book is an ode to femininity, with men only featured as secondary characters, as well as to the natural world. The mood shifts after the disappearance of three of the girls who wandered further up the rock.

The novel follows the aftermath and ripple effect of this event on the school, the other students, and the rural town that neighbors the school. The book was met with much praise but also some confusion, as Joan offers no satisfying ending to her mystery, but instead invites readers to indulge in mystery itself.

In 1975 Peter Weir directed the iconic, stunning film version of Picnic at Hanging Rock.

Before publishing Hanging Rock, Joan removed the final chapter of the book on an editor’s suggestion. This chapter displays her fascination with space and time as she explains the girls’ disappearance through a supernatural hole in time. This chapter was published posthumously as The Secret of Hanging Rock (1987).

 

Later Life

Joan continued writing and living in her beloved Victoria home, Mulberry Hill. Syd Sixpence (1982), a children’s book  published when she was  eighty-six, was her last full-length work.

After she died of stomach cancer in 1984, her home was gifted to the National Trust. Today, people can visit, as well as  take the writing workshops at the house that inspired Time Without Clocks.

“In the studio at Mulberry Hill we discovered that cut flowers have an astonishing range of movement, turning their heads, slipping in and out of water, drooping, straightening, flinging themselves clean out of the container.  Buds open and shut while you wait, or drop off, leaves uncurl.  Certain flowers placed in the same vase with incompatibles will keel over and die, while the gentle lily, well known to painters for its persistence in following the light, can wreck a carefully arranged bunch overnight, unless it is stored in a darkened room.” (—Time Without Clocks, 1962)

More about Joan Lindsay

Major works by Joan Lindsay

Through Darkest Pondelayo (1936)Time Without Clocks (1962)Picnic at Hanging Rock (1967)Syd Sixpence (1982)The Secret of Hanging Rock (1987)

Further reading

Australian Dictionary of Biography University of Queensland Interview with Joan Lindsay Beyond the Rock: The Life of Joan Lindsay by Janelle McCulloch

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Madame de Staël, French Political Theorist & Woman of Letters

Madame de Staël (April 22, 1766 – July 14, 1817) was a French intellectual, writer, and political theorist.  She was a staunch supporter of freedom of speech, democracy, women’s rights as well as a political enemy of Napoleon Bonaparte.

Looking at Germaine’s portrait, with her grandiose turban, silk gown, and shawl draped over her arms, the last thing she brings to mind is an 18th-century French revolutionary, but that is precisely what she was.

The author Francine du Plessix Gray called Germaine “the first modern woman.”

 

Early Life

She was born Anne Louise Germaine Necker in Paris to wealthy Swedish parents Jacques Necker and Suzanne Curchod. Her father was Louis XVI’s Minister of Finance; her mother hosted a salon where she entertained guests including Edward Gibbon, Voltaire, and Diderot.

A precocious only child, Germaine was allowed to attend her mother’s salons. Protestant and forward-thinking for their day, her parents believed she should be educated in all subjects, and allowed for the influence of Dante, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Shakespeare in her studies.

At the age of twenty, she began to publish her work, starting with the novels Sophie (1786), Jeanne Grey (1790), and Lettres sur J.J. Rousseau (1788).

It was a time of political turbulence in France. Germaine’s father was forced into exile due to financial mistakes, political opposition, and Marie Antoinette’s animosity. While most would have been sent to prison for such offenses, it’s likely he was given the lesser punishment of exile because he had loaned the national treasury 2.5 million livres. The family fled to their chateau, Coppet, on Lake Geneva in Switzerland. 

 

Marriages and Children

When the family returned to France in 1785, their focus was on a marriage for Germaine. Even as a teenager, she had received marriage proposals, which were promptly turned down by her family.  

She was married off to Eric Magnus, Baron of Staël-Holstein, an attaché of the Swedish government who had been promised an ambassadorship to France and a pension by the King of Sweden. Together they had three children – sons August and Albert and a daughter Albertine (though is widely believed that Albertine was actually the daughter of Benjamin Constant, rather than of Baron Staël-Holstein)

Young Germaine had the money, and the Baron had the political stature. It wasn’t a match made in heaven, though it was mutually beneficial to their social status. This marriage ended when Baron Staël-Holstein died in 1802.

She then started a serious relationship with political activist and author Benjamin Constant. Though they never married, they were a politically-minded power couple.  Constant once wrote about her, “If she knew how to rule herself, she would rule the world.” It is widely believed that Albertine, was actually Constant’s daughter rather than Baron Staël-Holstein’s. Germaine and Constant separated when he married Charlotte von Hardenberg in 1808. 

She remarried in 1816 to the much younger Swiss soldier Albert Jean Michel de Rocca. Together they had a son, Louis-Alphonse de Rocca.

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Germaine and her daughter, Albertine 
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French Revolution

In the early days of the revolution, Germaine lived in Paris, attending the National Assembly, writing, and cheering the fall of Louis XVI.

She hosted an influential salon whose guests included Thomas Jefferson, Marquis de Lafayette, and the philosopher Thomas Paine. Politically, she sided with the radical Jacobins who wanted a parliamentary monarch. However, she gradually moved toward the more moderate Girondists.

In 1793 the Reign of Terror began with mass killings as the Jacobins purged the Girondists. With the help of her father, she escaped to the chateau in Switzerland. In 1795, when the political climate relaxed she returned to Paris.

 

Napoleon

Napoleon Bonaparte assumed power in 1799.  From the start, Germaine and Napoleon disliked one another. The future self-crowned emperor took issue with her political work, partly because she opposed him, and also because he didn’t like outspoken women in political roles. He once told a colleague he wished she would stick to her knitting.

The pas de deux between the two lasted for a dozen years, as she was forced into exile from time to time.  She was always writing, always influencing, always lambasting his tyranny and despotism; perhaps she contributed to his eventual downfall. Germaine was the thorn in Napoleon’s side.

Napoleon censored her books Corinne or Italy and De l’Allemagne after she published them in France. He then exiled her from Paris and further retaliated by banishing anyone who visited her in Switzerland.

 Exile and Influence

Even in exile, Germaine was highly influential. Her salon at Coppet, which Stendhal said was the “general headquarters of European thought,” was visited by Francois-Rene de Chateaubriand, Lord Byron, and Prince Augustus of Prussia.

In her years of exile, she traveled to Austria, Germany, Russia, Sweden, England, Italy, and Turkey – always writing, always socializing. She met with Czar Alexander to talk politics, influencing treaties between Russia and Sweden as well as England and Prussia. After the English defeated France at Waterloo, she convinced the Duke of Wellington to decrease the presence of his Army of Occupation in France.

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Letter written by Germaine de Staël
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Literary Legacy

Germaine was a major talent and has been nearly forgotten, unlike her contemporary, Jane Austen. She epitomized romanticism in French literature — the emotional, the lyrical, and the autobiographical. She wrote essays, plays, political treatises, and travelogues, and a memoir of her years in exile. Her novels were often translated and read widely. 

In addition to politics, she wrote on controversial topics like adultery, suicide, and even a defense of Marie Antoinette. Over time, she influenced writers like Henrik Ibsen, Herman Melville, Harriet Beecher Stowe, George Eliot, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, to name a few.       

By 1814 the Bourbons had been restored to power and Louis XVIII was on the throne. By then, she returned to Paris, converted to Catholicism, and after a seizure, was paralyzed.

Madame Germaine de Staël died on July 14, 1817, of a brain hemorrhage.  Poetically, her death came on Bastille Day, a holiday that marks the beginning of the French Revolution — when the people triumphed over tyranny.   

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Contributed by Tyler Scott, who has been writing essays and articles since the early 1980s for various magazines and newspapers.  In 2014 she published her novel The Excellent Advice of a Few Famous Painters. She lives in Blackstone, Virginia where she and her husband renovated a Queen Anne Revival house and enjoy small town life.

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Memorable quotes by Madame Germaine de Staël

“Love is the whole history of a woman’s life; it is but an episode in a man’s.”

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“Happiness is a wondrous commodity.  The more you give, you more you have.”

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“A religious life is a struggle and not a hymn.”

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“One must choose in life between boredom and suffering.”

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“Exile: A tomb in which you can get mail.”

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“Intellect does not attain its full force unless it attacks power.”

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“The more I see of men the more I like dogs.”

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Further reading

Fairweather, Maria.  Madame de Stael. London: Constable, 2005. Du Plessix Gray, Francine. Madame de Stael: The First Modern Woman.  New York: Atlas, 2009. De Stael, Germaine.  Corinne, or Italy, available in Oxford Word’s Classics, Oxford University Press.

Sources

The Encyclopedia Britannica, Chicago, 1952.Watkin, Amy.  Germaine de Stael: Napoleon’s Worst Enemy. McSweeney’s, Nov. 19, 2015.Halstead, Susan. Coppet, Constant, and Corinne: The Colorful Life of Madame de Stael.  British Library Blog, July 2017.Holmes, Richard. The Great de Stael, The New York Review, May 2009.Schiff, Stacy.  The Secret of Madame de Stael’s Success, Slate, Oct. 2008.Bedell, Geraldine.  Napoleon’s Nemesis (review of Madame de Stael by Maria Fairweather). The Guardian, Feb. 2005.Escarpit, Robert. Germaine de Stael, French-Swiss Author. Britannica (online).A Short History of Germaine de Stael, The Connexion, Dec. 2020.Wiener, James Blake. Madame de Stael- Enemy of Napoleon, Swiss National Museum blog, May 2021.

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10 Fascinating Facts About Isabella Stewart Gardner

Chasing Beauty: The Life of Isabella Stewart Gardner (Mariner Books, March 2024), award–winning author Natalie Dystra delivers the definitive biographical portrait of the ambitious and innovative­—and until now misunderstood—woman behind one of America’s most important art collections.

With access to all archival holdings at the Isabella Stewart Garner Museum—including thousands of digitized and newly accessible letters and other unpublished records—as well as original sources in Paris, Venice, and more. Dykstra brings Isabella to life as never before.

An incredible achievement of storytelling and scholarship, Chasing Beauty illuminates the fascinating ways the museum and its holding can be seen as a kind of living memoir—how Isabella “put herself on display… her taste, her passions, her sorrow, her nerve, her capacious curiously, relationships,” Dykstra reveals.

Isabella’s meticulous curation of the exhibits became her voice, enabling her story to be told through the objects she cherished most.

Enjoy the following fascinating facts about the life of the American art collector Isabella Stewart Gardner, excerpted from material provided by Mariner Books, the publisher of Chasing Beauty by Natalie Dykstra.

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Isabella Stewart Gardner in 1888
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Isabella married Boston Brahmin Jack Gardner at age 19

Before her marriage to Jack, her childhood was spent in New York and Paris where she studied art, music, dance, French, and Italian. Provided with a picture of her childhood, one begins to understand why the spirted, original, sophisticated young Isabella (known then as Belle) was not later embraced by Boston society.

 

She had a competitive, simpatico relationship with John Singer Sargent

Together Gardner and Sargent—considered the most successful portrait painter of his time—constructed quite the scandal surrounding his iconic 1888 portrait. Jack Gardner said to his wife at the time. “It looks like hell, but it looks like you.”

 

Isabella was an entrepreneur

Much attention has been devoted to how Isabella used glamour and even scandal to assert her cultural position. Chasing Beauty shows how the public performance was in many ways a screen for her more serious, radical work of competing as a connoisseur/collector in order to create her sui generis museum.

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“Mrs. Gardner in White” by  John Singer Sargent (1922)

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She had a fraught but essential relationship with Bernard Berenson

Jack Gardner came to mistrust Berenson, the brilliant historian of the Italian Renaissance, for his lack of transparency in business matters. Isabella, however, knew how to parry with Berenson but not keep him close, as she relied on him to secure her greatest art purchases.

 

Jack Gardner was a loving and supportive husband

Jack showcased Isabella’s moves, supported her ambitions—and forgave her after one notable affair of the heart. Jack’s parents, typically Bostonian in most ways, were fiercely loyal to her as well, which bolstered her nerve. They were married for 38 years.

 

Isabella was friends with Henry James

Isabella’s friendship with Henry James textured one his novels – elusive and complicated; but the friends understood each other. James compared her to a shining jewel in a magnificent setting and finding in her character inspiration for his fiction.

 

Isabella was a spiritual woman

Isabella turned to the spiritual as a means of healing. Later in life she paid attention to social causes, particularly those helping women, children, and others in need— she gave substantial funds, for example, towards the building of an African American Episcopal church on Beacon Hill.

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Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum Courtyard Boston, MA

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The museum was performance art for Isabella

It acted as a kind of “Isabellaland,” as a memoir using objects instead of words. She juxtaposed the life and movement of the dancer in Sargent’s El Jaleo with grief and memory at the other side of the Spanish Gallery, in the small chapel, a memorial to her only child who died before the age of two.

Radically, she placed Titian’s great Europa above a framed section of satin taken from one of her own Charles Fredrick Worth-designed gowns. She also filled the Raphael Room with objects that show or fill a woman’s life: paintings depicting—her collections most frequent motif—Madonna and Child; cassoni filled with luxurious fabrics; fine old Italian furniture arranged as if for a parry.

 

Isabella was a “late bloomer”

Isabella’s later decades are often skimmed over, despite having compelling and moving accomplishments as she aged. Isabella opened her museum in 1903, as she was about to turn sixty-three. She became more expansive and curious as she got older.

She found family-like relationships with artists and writers, designers and activists. Her relationship with in her sixties with Okakura Kakuzō, Japanese art expert living in Boston for a time, was especially intense and remarkable.

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Chasing Beauty is available on Bookshop.org*, Amazon*,
and wherever books are sold
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About Natalie Dystra, Author of Chasing Beauty

Natalie Dykstra is the author of Clover Adams: A Gilded and Heartbreaking Life. Her work on Isabella Stewart Gardner has won a Public Scholars Award from the National Endowment for the Humanities and an inaugural Robert and Ina Caro Research/Travel Fellowship sponsored by the Biographers International Organization (BIO). Dykstra, emerita professor of English at Hope College in Michigan, lives with her husband in Waltham, MA.

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*These are Bookshop.org and Amazon affiliate links. If a product is purchased after linking through, Literary Ladies receives a modest commission, which helps us to keep growing.

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Trouble in Mind by Alice Childress – Playwright, Novelist & Activist

Alice Childress’s first full-length play, Trouble in Mind, premiered in 1955 at an interracial theater co-sponsored by a Presbyterian church and a synagogue in Greenwich Village.

According to accounts at the time, the audience “applauded and shouted bravos, and would not leave their seats until the author was brought on stage.” Despite initial audience enthusiasm, decades would pass before the play received the recognition it has today as a classic of American theater.

The show received an Obie Award for best original off-Broadway play that season and was slated to open on Broadway in 1957, but Childress herself pulled the plug on that production.

Childress said she spent two years rewriting the play, especially the ending, to satisfy the would-be producers with a “heart-warming little story.” But in the end, Childress found she could not write a version that pleased her backers and that also met her own demands.

 

A Portrayal of White-Dominated Theater

Childress’s struggles with Trouble mirror the play itself. Set backstage, it presents the behind-the-scenes banter and rehearsals of the cast and crew as they prepare to perform a play called Chaos in Belleville, meant to be an anti-lynching play.

Childress was very familiar with the challenges for Black actors. She was a co-founder of the American Negro Theatre and performed and directed with that company for a decade. She also worked in white-controlled venues, including on Broadway and for radio and television.

Often told she was “too light” for Black roles and “too Black” for other roles, she began writing herself because she wanted to create a wider range of opportunities for Black performers. She also felt some satisfaction in taking up a pen, noting that African Americans were the only racial group ever barred from literacy in the United States.

 

Enter Wiletta, Our Hero

The central figure in Trouble is Wiletta, a middle-aged Black woman who has a starring role for the first time in her long career. Previously, she has played “character parts,” or stereotypes—“mammy” roles, mothers talking their sons out of demanding equality, wives of men who keep them “laughin’ all the time” despite their refusal to work or come home at night.

“You ever hear of a lazy, no-good, two-timin’ man keepin’ a woman laughin’ all the time?” Wiletta asks Al Manners, the white director of the play.

Manners sees himself as a liberal. He believes he should be congratulated for being willing to work with Black performers on a show that is critical of lynching, though the play was written by a white man who distorts the attitudes of those involved. Manners tries to elicit a stronger performance from Wiletta, claiming he wants “truth.”

“Truth,” he explains, “is simply whatever you can bring yourself to believe.”

Yet Wiletta finds herself unable to inhabit her role as a mother who urges her adult son, who has committed the “crime” of voting, to turn himself in to the authorities who promise to keep him safe from a lynch mob by putting him in jail. She knows what the outcome will be. “I don’t see why the boy couldn’t get away… something’s wrong,” she objects.

Manners dismisses her concerns, telling her that they don’t “want to antagonize the audience.” “It’ll make ‘em mad if he gets away?” Wiletta asks.

Manners asks Sheldon, an elderly Black actor who is desperate for work as he faces housing insecurity, whether he finds the script offensive. Sheldon assures Manners that the script is fine, but then he goes on to describe a lynching he witnessed as a child in Virginia. Manners responds that such accounts make him feel “wretched, so guilty.”

Wiletta seizes the opportunity to suggest changes in the script. Rather than passively urging her son to turn himself in, she wants to say, “Run for it!” pointing out that she would rather he died while seeking his freedom rather than walking to his own destruction.

Manners rejects her suggestions. Her objections become more heated, and the rest of the cast—both Black and white—begin to fear for their own jobs.

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Broadway and Revivals

Trouble in Mind ends with no clue as to whether “Chaos in Belleville” will go forward or not. We do know that nearly twenty-five years would pass before Trouble in Mind had another significant production, this time by the New Federal Theatre Project in 1979.

Further productions followed, but at a slow pace. There was a London premier in 1992, and then New York’s Negro Ensemble Company mounted a production in 1998.

While the play contains references to events of the 1950s—the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Little Rock school desegregation riots—it has only been in the 21st century that its importance has been recognized by the mainstream theatrical world. Yale Repertory Theater produced it in 2007 and 2019; the Arena Stage produced it in Washington, D.C. in 2011.

After a 2010 production in San Francisco, there were numerous productions in Chicago, Seattle, Ontario, North Carolina, and New Jersey. The play’s long-delayed Broadway premiere in was in 2021.

That production was nominated for four Tonys, including Best Revival, Best Actress (LaChanze as Wiletta), Best Featured Actor (Chuck Cooper as Sheldon), and Best Costume Design. Since then, there have been further opportunities to see this work, including in London, Chicago, Winnipeg, Hartford, and Boston.

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A Hero Ain’t Nothin’ But a Sandwich
is one of Alice Childress’s best-known works
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A Realistic Ending

The version of Trouble in Mind generally mounted today offers an ending that is far from happy—yet not without hope.

According to Judith E. Barlow, in her introduction to Plays by American Women, 1930–1960, Childress’s ending implies “a bond among all oppressed peoples,” as Wiletta finds a sympathetic, though relatively powerless, ally in Henry, the elderly and overlooked Irish doorman, after everyone else in the cast and crew has abandoned her.

Present-day renditions of Trouble in Mind are hailed for their timeliness. Yet, according to Katy Perkins, who knew Childress well and edited an anthology of her plays, Childress “hated the saying ‘ahead of your time.’ Her thing was that people aren’t ahead of their time; they’re just choked during their time, they’re not allowed to do what they should be doing.”

Ahead of her time or not, Childress, who lived into the late 20th century (1916–1994), went on to write numerous plays and novels, most famously, A Hero Ain’t Nothin’ but a Sandwich (1973). She did not live long enough to see this renewed interest in her theatrical work, but one suspects it wouldn’t have mattered to her.

Like her character Wiletta, Childress looked into herself to find her truth. And then she said what she wanted to say when she wanted to say it. That it has taken the rest of the world decades to listen was not her concern. Time has vindicated the realism of her play and the truth of her message.

Sources:

Barlow, Judith E. Plays by American Women 1930-1960. Applause Theatre Books, 2001Green, Jesse. “Review: ‘ Trouble in Mind,’ 66 Years Late and Still On Time ,” The New York Times, 18 Nov. 2021Phillips, Maya. “ Alice Childress Finally Gets to Make ‘Trouble’ on Broadway ,” The New York Times, 3 Nov. 2021Rule, Sheila. “ Alice Childress, 77, a Novelist; Drew Themes From Black Life ,” The New York Times, 19 Aug. 1994

Contributed by Lynne Weiss: Lynne’s writing has appeared in Black Warrior Review; Brain, Child; The Common OnLine; the Ploughshares blog; the [PANK] blog; Wild Musette; Main Street Rag; and Radcliffe Magazine. She received an MFA from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and has won grants and residency awards from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the Millay Colony, the Vermont Studio Center, and Yaddo. She loves history, theater, and literature, and for many years, has earned her living by developing history and social studies materials for educational publishers. She lives outside Boston, where she is working on a novel set in Cornwall and London in the early 1930s. You can see more of her work at LynneWeiss.

You may also enjoy: 8 Black Women Playwrights of the Early 20th Century

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