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The Friendship of Edna St. Vincent Millay and Elinor Wylie

When one thinks of Jazz Age literature, novels by F. Scott Fitzgerald or D. H. Lawrence might come to mind. Lyrical and provocative poetry was also part of Roaring Twenties culture. Two of the most beloved, and provocative, poets during the 1920s were Edna St. Vincent Millay and Elinor Wylie.

Both Millay and Wylie were dedicated lyrists and writers, despite their tempestuous personal lives. They both navigated the pitfalls of fame, scandal, and illness – all while leaving an indelible mark on American poetry.

Elinor Wylie

The poet and novelist Elinor Wylie was born in Somerville, New Jersey on September 7, 1885. She was born into an affluent family marred by personal tragedy. Her parents’ marriage was deeply unhappy, and two of Elinor’s siblings committed suicide, with a third sibling attempting it.

Elinor’s father was a high-profile lawyer who became Solicitor General of the United States in 1897. Elinor grew up in Washington, D.C. from the age of twelve.

Elinor’s godfather was a Shakespeare scholar named Henry Howard Furness. Unusually for the time, he insisted that his goddaughter have the best education possible, including European governesses.

A beloved Irish maid instilled a love of folk tales in Elinor, and a teacher at her private school introduced her to the poetry of William Blake, John Donne, and Percy Bysshe Shelley; the latter would remain her greatest inspiration and favorite poet.

When Elinor showed an inclination towards being a “blue-stocking” (a common pejorative for an intellectual or career-minded woman) her parents were horrified. Elinor was supposed to be a debutante and have a dazzling society marriage.

In 1905, Elinor married an aspiring poet named Phillip Hichborn, but soon after the marriage he began falling into rages and displaying signs of mental illness. Sadly, he committed suicide in 1916. Many years later his and Elinor’s only child—also named Phillip, also a hopeful poet, and also possibly suffering from mental illness—met the same end as an adult.

A prominent, and married, Washington lawyer named Horace Wylie pursued Elinor. The two ran away in 1910, leaving behind their spouses and children. The two were condemned by society, and knowingly or not, Elinor had followed in Shelley’s footsteps. For the rest of her life her literary achievements were rarely noted without also mentioning this scandal.

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Elinor Wylie
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Edna St. Vincent Millay

The poet and playwright Edna St. Vincent Millay was born in Rockland, Maine on February 22, 1892. Her parents separated when she was young, and her father gave little financial support to the three children he left behind.

Millay’s mother, Cora, was a strong-willed woman and supported her daughters by her work as a traveling nurse and occasional wigmaker. “The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver” was one of the poems that contributed to Millay’s eventual Pulitzer Prize, and it is a moving tribute to her sacrificial mother. It was one of the favorite poems of singer Johnny Cash, and he recited it from memory on his television show in 1970.

Cora frequently had to take work away from home, leaving her three daughters alone for days at a time in their seaside home in Camden, Maine. Due to their mother’s absences, Millay and her younger sisters, Norma and Kathleen, were extremely close knit. All three were musically gifted, with great charm, intense inner lives, and varying shades of red hair.

Despite being a voracious reader and a precocious writer, Millay’s first ambition was to be a concert pianist. She was eventually told that her hands were too small, she then shifted her focus to writing poetry, both as a means to support her family and as a way to make a mark on the world.

She wrote: “Life is brown and tepid for many of us. I want to write so that those who read me will say… ‘Life can be exciting and free and intense.’”

In 1912, at the young age of twenty and hitherto very isolated, Millay was able to write the long poem “Renascence” with its lines of startling boldness, maturity, and emotional depth:

Mine was the weight
Of every brooded wrong, the hate
That stood behind each envious thrust,
Mine every greed, mine every lust.

The poem was entered into a national competition to be included in an upcoming anthology, the Lyric Year. Although she did not win first prize, the poem skyrocketed Millay into the literati of the period. With the help of a patron, she attended the prestigious Vassar College. While there, Millay studied classical poetry, racked up broken hearts among her younger classmates, and nearly got expelled just before graduation. Afterwards, she headed for New York City.

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Edna St. Vincent Millay in her college days
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“I, Being Born a Woman:” Scandals and Success

Elinor married Horace Wylie in 1916 after he obtained a divorce from his wife. Due to her lover’s encouragement, Wylie anonymously published her first book of poetry in England in 1912, Incidental Numbers. After the outbreak of World War I in Europe, the disgraced couple returned to the United States, frequently moving due to social ostracism.

Wylie’s poetry began to be published in multiple magazines, and early admirers of her poetry were novelists Bram Stoker, the author of Dracula, and the young Ernest Hemingway. She befriended writers John Peale Bishop and Edmund Wilson, who were also devoted friends of Millay. She also met the widowed poet William Rose Benét.

Both Benet and his brother Stephen Vincent would later win Pulitzer Prizes for poetry, William in 1942 and Stephen in 1944. William took it upon himself to advance Wylie’s literary career, and the two fell in love, which led to the end of Wylie’s second marriage.

Wylie’s brother Morton Hoyt married and divorced Eugenia Bankhead, the sister of the controversial actress Tallulah, a total of three times. When Bankhead once asked Wylie if she had had many lovers, the latter icily replied that “she was conservative about love and had simply married when she had experienced it.”

Wylie struggled to be taken seriously as a poet, which was made even more difficult by her unconventional past. She possessed great determination and once responded to her critics with, “I have a typewriter and a better brain them all of them, and they won’t succeed. I’ll beat them all yet!”

In 1921, Nets to Catch the Wind was published, Wylie’s first volume of poetry printed in the United States. The writer Babbette Deutsch called Nets “almost one uninterrupted cry to escape.” It is generally considered to contain many of her greatest poems, particularly “The Eagle and the Mole” and “A Proud Lady.”

“The Eagle and the Mole” is one of Wylie’s most beloved and anthologized poems, and vividly describes conformity (“The huddled warmth of crowds / Begets and fosters hate”) while offering a balm for the nonconformist’s inevitable rejection by their peers:

Avoid the reeking herd, 
Shun the polluted flock,
Live like that stoic bird,
The eagle of the rock.

Similarly, in “A Proud Lady” she describes the “hate in the world’s hand,” a scornful hate she was well acquainted with, and a hate she defied with her poems:

But you have a proud face
Which the world cannot harm,
You have turned the pain to a grace
And the scorn to a charm.

You have taken the arrows and slings
Which prick and bruise
And fashioned them into wings
For the heels of your shoes.

Millay—who by now had weathered stormy relationships with both men and women and was likewise committed to pursuing her art at any cost—undoubtedly found much in Wylie’s verses that resonated with her struggle for artistic freedom.

In her poem “Weeds” she described the hateful outside world as “The baying of a pack athirst.” She enthusiastically reviewed Nets to Catch the Wind in the Literary Review.

“The book is an important one,” Millay wrote, “important in itself as it contains some excellent and distinguished work and…because it is the first book of its author, and thus marks the opening of yet another door by which beauty may enter the world.”

Millay’s biographer Daniel Mark Epstein writes that Millay’s glowing review “launched Wylie’s career in the 1920s as a love poet second only to Millay herself, who proved memorably generous to spirits with whom she felt artistic kinship such as Wylie.”

A Few Figs from Thistles, Millay’s second collection of poetry published in 1920, contained some of Millay’s most enduring poems, including “Recuerdo,” “I think I should have loved you presently,” and “First Fig,” which encapsulated the devil-may-care attitude that the flappers and “New Women” of the 1920s personified:

My candle burns at both ends;
    It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends—
    It gives a lovely light!

In four lines, Millay took a sledgehammer to the last remnants of Victorianism and became one of the most quoted poets of her generation. It was inevitable that Millay and Wylie, two lovers of beauty (and flagrant rule-breakers) would eventually become friends as they swam against the current of public opinion.

 The Friendship of Millay and Wiley

In 1922 the literary critic and writer Edmund Wilson introduced Wylie to Millay, who was a former girlfriend he was still pining for. Epstein writes that “From the day Millay met Wylie, the two women were devoted to each other, corresponded, and visited each other’s homes.”

Unfortunately, there appear to be no color photographs of Wylie and Millay, and no photographs of the two women together. They would have made a striking pair: Millay, petite, freckled and gamine with red-gold hair and Wylie, tall, aloof, and regal with dark auburn hair. Both were known for their tousled bobs and preference for simply cut gowns in rich fabrics.

Both poets briefly wrote for the popular magazine Vanity Fair, and both published their first poetry collections after leaving the place of their births. Millay publishing Renascence and Other Poems after moving to the bohemian Greenwich Village, and Wylie publishing Incidental Numbers after her shocking elopement to England.

Along with having heartbreak, rejection, and red hair in common, the two writers shared similar themes and techniques in their poetry oeuvre.  Both belonged to the lyric genre of poetry, which was known for its focus on nature and loyal adherence to the more traditional forms of poetry such as elegies, odes, and sonnets.

They were not always in agreement with each other. Millay strongly disapproved of Wylie’s imitation of the Irish poet William Butler Yeats in her poem “Madman’s Song.” Both writers, despite this the two had much in common, such as their social backgrounds.

Poetry was their preferred medium, but they also wrote in other genres to support themselves. While living in Greenwich Village, Millay also acted in the Provincetown Players (which included writers Djuna Barnes and Susan Glaspell) and wrote several plays, including the very successful Met Opera libretto The King’s Henchman.

Wylie wrote four novels, including The Venetian Glass Nephew, set in Renaissance Italy, and The Glass Angel, in which she decided to give her beloved Shelley a different fate than his untimely death (the novel is undoubtedly a very poetic work of fan fiction).

Wylie adored Shelley so much that she purchased several of his personal effects with her royalties from The Orphan Angel, and Benét wrote that his wife was “spontaneous and baffled [like Shelley] by the matter-of-factness of the world.” After Wylie’s death Millay wrote in a poem dedicated to her friend: “I think that…Shelley died with you–) / He live[s] on paper now, another way.”

In 1923 Wylie saw the publication of both her novel Jennifer Lorn and her poetry collection, Black Armour. 1923 was also a big year for Millay: she married the wealthy, handsome, and supportive Dutch merchant Eugen Boissevain.

After the wedding (donning a stunning green dress with mosquito netting for an impromptu veil) Millay promptly entered the hospital for appendicitis surgery. Soon afterwards she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for poetry, becoming the first woman recipient of the newly established honor.

In 1927, the League of American Penwomen asked Wylie to be a guest of honor at an author’s breakfast in Washington, D.C. They later canceled their invitation due to Wylie’s personal history, and an incensed Millay wrote them a letter, sending a copy of it to Wylie.

Millay was invited to the same event and wrote to the League of her decision to decline: “It is not in the power of an organizations which has insulted Elinor Wylie to honor me…I too am eligible for your disesteem. Strike me too from your lists, and permit me, I beg you, to share with Elinor Wylie a brilliant exile from your fusty province.”

In her diary, Millay raged against the insult to her friend, writing “I wished I had been a Fifth Avenue street sparrow yesterday—or in other words:

I wish to God I might have shat
On Mrs. Grundy’s Easter hat.

“Mrs. Grundy” was a popular term at the time for a priggish, prudish person—similar to today’s usage of the name “Karen” to describe a middle-class woman who polices behavior. Millay, with her own colorful past, despised women who judged or undermined other women.

In gratitude for Millay’s solidarity, Wylie responded: “My darling—A thousand thanks for your brilliant and noble defense…I have written you a ballad—to you—which perhaps you’ll like. Hope so, at least.”

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“To Hold Secure the Province of Pure Art”:
Shared Poetry Subjects

In her writing, Millay aspired “To hold secure the province of pure art” and to craft “the deeply loved, the labored polished line,” and these were undoubtedly Wylie’s aspirations as well. They pursued the writing of poetry with unwavering commitment, and refused to associate with those who did not take their work seriously. It also appears that, commendably, they were not jealous of each other’s achievements.

Wylie was an aesthetic writer, which critics frequently and disparaging commented on, and she labored to craft indelible images with her verse. Delicate objects d’art was a frequent motif in her poetry, and lavishly described colors and textures. 

Millay crafted haunting descriptions of nature as well but appeared more dedicated to crafting a poem that resonated with musicality, perhaps fitting for a failed concert pianist. The few recordings available of Millay reading her poetry bring out the musical nature of her verses, and with her deep voice her poems sound like songs.

Holly Peppe, a former president of the Millay Society, wrote that “Whether her subject was nature, love, loss, spiritual rebirth, personal freedom, women’s sexuality, or the state of the world, Millay was always conscious of how musicality in poetry would help deliver its message.”

Both Wylie and Millay gravitated to poems with short lines and stanzas, and both frequently wrote about the beauties of nature and about love affairs that were less than satisfactory, but these were not the only poetry subjects that they shared.

Fully aware that their own singular looks and allure would fade Wylie and Millay had ambivalent views about beauty, which they both painted as possessing human characteristics.

Wylie wrote of beauty in the eponymous poem:

O, she is neither good nor bad,
But innocent and wild!
Enshrine her and she dies, who had
The hard heart of a child.

In her poem “Assault” Millay writes of beauty:

I am waylaid by Beauty. Who will walk
Between me and the crying of the frogs?
Oh, savage Beauty, suffer me to pass,
That am a timid woman, on her way
From one house to another!

Both meditated on the inevitability of death with quiet reflection; both appear to have regarded it as natural a fact as sleep.

When I am dead, or sleeping
Without any pain
My soul will stop creeping
Through my jewelled brain. (Wylie’s poem “Song”)

And here a while, where no wind brings
The baying of a pack athirst,
May sleep the sleep of blessèd things,
The blood too bright, the brow accurst. (Millay’s poem “Weeds”)

However, Millay also memorably protested against death in one of her most emotionally charged poems “Dirge Without Music”:

 Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave
Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;
Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.
I know.  But I do not approve.  And I am not resigned.

Although it appears Wylie and Millay did not refer to themselves as flappers, both were unabashedly avant-garde, and both wrote honestly about women and their experiences in a beautiful and dangerous world.

As if singing in a duet, Millay wrote in her poem “I, being born a woman and distressed / By all the needs and notions of my kind” and Wylie echoed the thought, “I am, being woman, hard beset;/ I live by squeezing from a stone / What little nourishment I get.”

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“The Blood too Bright, the Brow Accurst”:
Death Comes for the Poets

Both Wylie’s and Millay’s poetry was wildly popular among the public, which may have been a reason that critics frequently took aim at their women-centric verse. Another reason for criticism was likely due to their uncompromising unconventionality.

Neither Wylie or Millay believed in compromising their hunger for passion, or with subduing their ambition to be great poets. Both women were identical in their belief that love was worth pursuing, no matter what convention and society decreed, no matter the personal cost.

Had I concealed my love
And you so loved me longer,
Since all the wise reprove
Confession of that hunger
In any human creature,
It had not been my nature. (Wylie, “Love Song”)

It well may be that in a difficult hour,
Pinned down by pain and moaning for release,
Or nagged by want past resolution’s power,
I might be driven to sell your love for peace,
Or trade the memory of this night for food.
It well may be. I do not think I would. (Millay, Sonnet XXX)

Even some of Wylie’s poet contemporaries, including Sara Teasdale, could not or would not separate Wylie’s tangled personal life from her polished writing. Despite her own unconventional personal life, the poet Amy Lowell threatened Wylie shortly before marrying Benét. “But if you marry again, [I] shall cut you dead‐and I warn you all Society will do the same. You will be nobody.”

There was a notable double standard. Wylie’s career was damaged, while her near contemporary Ernest Hemingway who, despite a catastrophic personal life, is still regarded as an extraordinary writer and soundly admired for his iconoclasm.

After marrying Benét, he and Wylie frequently visited Steepletop, the home of Millay and the devoted Boissevain. The lovely country abode in upstate New York, which is currently not open to visitors, was named after the pink steeplebush wildflower that bloomed on the property.

The two women read poetry in front of a fire, intensely discussing the poems “St. Agnes Eve” and “Epipsychidion.” Wylie read Shelley’s poem the “West Wind” aloud and cried out to her friend, “The best poem ever written!”

The next day Wylie read her own novel Mortal Image (perhaps with a critical eye, hoping for reassurance from a fellow writer) while Millay played “first Chopin, then Bach, then Beethoven on the piano. I play so badly. But not too badly, I think, to be not allowed to play them. It was fun, Elinor there reading, & listening too.”

The uplifting literary friendship would soon end. Millay once wrote to her mother, “You see, I am a poet, and not quite right in my head, darling.” She was increasingly troubled by “extravagant depression” and a plethora of health problems. Likewise, Wylie suffered from extremely high blood pressure all her life, which caused crippling migraines, and eventually her death.

On December 16th, 1928, Wylie, who had just finished proofreading her last volume of poems, Angels and Earthly Creatures, asked aloud “Is that all it is?” and suddenly died of a stroke.

The day after, Millay was casually told of her friend’s passing right before she was to give a poetry reading. “Stunned, shaken, Millay made her way to the podium and, waving aside the fanfare and applause, began reciting Wylie’s verses, poem after poem, from memory.”

Millay’s next book was dedicated to her friend:

When I think of you,
I die too.
In my throat, bereft
Like yours, of air,
No sound is left,
Nothing is there
To make a word of grief.

Wylie was “so gay and splendid about tragic things, so comically serious about silly ones,” wrote Millay, “Oh, she was lovely! there was nobody like her at all.” Millay attended Wylie’s funeral, and the latter was buried in her favorite silver gown by Poiret.

Judith Farr, the poet and Emily Dickinson scholar wrote that, “the career of Elinor Wylie is remarkable for what might be called intensity of performance.” Her poetry likely influenced Millay’s collection Fatal Interview, a collection of sonnets that was published three years after Wylie’s death and was dedicated to her. Fatal Interview relates the history of a tragic love affair just as in Wylie’s “one person” sonnet sequence in Angels and Earthly Creatures.

Oh, she was beautiful in every part!
The auburn hair that bound the subtle brain;
The lovely mouth cut clear by wit and pain,
Uttering oaths and nonsense, uttering art…
The soaring mind outstripped the tethered heart.

After sustaining a severe back injury in a car accident in 1936, Millay became addicted to morphine, as well as alcohol. However, she did successfully break her addiction and resumed writing.

Her husband died in 1949 after, like Wylie, suffering from a stroke following lung surgery. Millay spent the next year preparing a new volume of poetry but passed away in 1950 after suffering a heart attack. Mine the Harvest was published posthumously four years later.

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The Legacy of Two Red-Headed Rebels

The verse of Millay and Wylie was largely separate from the Modernist movement, which included the poets T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. This earned criticism from both contemporary and subsequent literary critics, who frequently accused Millay and Wylie’s poetry as being too old-fashioned or “sentimental.”

In retrospect, their poetry has aged better than some by the lionized Modernist poets Eliot and Pound, who were both notoriously anti-Semitic and often chauvinist. Much of Millay’s poetry written during the 1940s fervently condemned fascism and championed democracy, and she often recited her verses on the radio during World War II.

Millay and Wylie were dedicated to portraying the varied experiences of women in a man’s world, and many of their poems, both lyrical and grimly realistic, are still relevant today. 

In 1931, three years after Wylie’s death, Millay wrote about women’s’ struggle in pursuing careers in the arts, words that her friend would likely have agreed with:

“What you produce, what you create must stand on its own feed regardless of your sex. We are supposed to have won all the battles for our rights to be individuals, but in the arts women are still put in a class by themselves, and I resent it, as I have always rebelled against discriminations or limitations of a woman’s experience on account of her sex.”

Further Reading and Sources 

Poetry Foundation – Edna St. Vincent Millay Steepletop Museum What Lips My Lips Have Kissed: The Loves and Love Poems of Edna St. Vincent Millay
by Daniel Mark EpsteinSavage Beauty by Nancy MilfordThe Life and Art of Elinor Wylie by Judith FarrA Private Madness: The Genius of Elinor Wylie by Evelyn HivelyElinor Wylie: A Life Apart by Stanley Olson Poetry Foundation – Elinor Wiley

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Contributed by Katharine Armbrester, who graduated from the MFA creative writing program at the Mississippi University for Women in 2022. She is a devotee of Flannery O’Connor and Margaret Atwood, and loves periodicals, history, and writing.

The post The Friendship of Edna St. Vincent Millay and Elinor Wylie appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.

Rosamond Lehmann, Author of Dusty Answer

Rosamond Lehmann (February 3, 1901 – March 12, 1990) was an English novelist known for her sensitive portrayal of the emotional fabric of women’s lives and was part of the famous Bloomsbury Group in 1920s London.

Her first novel, Dusty Answer, caused a scandal for its subtle portrayal of lesbian characters, and is still her best-known work. Her novels as well as some of her non-fiction have been reissued by Virago and are now back in print.

 

Early Life

Rosamond Nina Lehmann was born in Bourne End, Buckinghamshire, the second of four children. Her father, Rudolph, was the editor of Punch magazine and became a Liberal MP in 1906. Her mother, Alice Davis, was originally from Boston, MA.

Rosamond had three siblings, John, Helen, and Beatrix. John would later become a writer and editor himself, working with Leonard Woolf at the Hogarth Press. Beatrix would become a well-known writer and actress.

Her childhood was spent in an idyllic setting, in a large Edwardian-style house on the banks of the Thames. She and her siblings were largely raised by nannies and governesses, only “coming down after tea” to see their parents.

Later, Rosamond would say that she always had the sense that she wanted to write. Remembering her first poem, written while sitting in a walnut tree and eating toffee she said, “I wrote all about fairies, and moonbeams, and nature, and it all poured out in rhymes.”

Her mother, who Rosamond remembered as “very puritanical and upright” (and who she once drew swiping at the air with a tennis racquet shouting in a speech bubble, “I HATE everybody”) was not encouraging of her efforts, saying to a friend that “Rosie writes doggerel.” Her father, however, was much more encouraging.

 

First (Hasty) Marriage

In 1919 Rosamond achieved a place at Girton College, Cambridge, to read English, and graduated with an honors degree.

She met her first husband Leslie Runciman, later Lord Runciman, the Methodist head of a ship-owning family in 1924. They married the same year, but the relationship was not a success. Rosamond was obliged to move to Newcastle to be with her husband, which she hated. She would later call this her “bleak period of exile in the detested North of England.”

Leslie was determined not to have children and pressured Rosamond into an illegal abortion in London. She later wrote about this experience in her 1936 novel The Weather in the Streets. The two separated and divorced in 1927.

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Dusty Answer: Scandal and Success

During this disastrous marriage, however, Rosamond wrote her first novel Dusty Answer about a young girl’s first experiences of love. The book explored what would become classic Lehmann themes of betrayal and romantic disappointment.

The novel had a slow start until it was hailed as “quite the most striking first novel of this generation” by the writer Alfred Noyes, and it became a bestseller.

Rosamond said that the subsequent reviews and publicity “made me feel as if I’d exposed myself nude on the platform of Albert Hall.”

Not all the attention was positive. Leonard Woolf’s National and Athenaeum accused Lehmann of the “clumsiness and lack of economy…[which] so often accompanies freshness and exuberance in the work of inexperienced novelists.” In addition, the coding of some characters as gay and lesbian was not subtle enough for some readers. One mother wrote, “Before consigning your book to the flames, [I] would wish to inform you of my disgust that anyone should pen such filth…”

As in all her later novels, Rosamond demonstrated an uncanny empathy for women’s experiences, so much so that she often received letters from women and teenage girls saying, “How did you know? This is my story.”

This empathy, however, would not always be well-received or understood by male critics. The Manchester Guardian’s reviewer complained of Rosamond’s 1953 novel The Echoing Grove that “so prolonged a voyage in an exclusively emotional and sexual sea afflicts a male reader at least with a sense of surfeit.”

 The New Yorker’s reviewer went one step further, claiming that The Echoing Grove was fundamentally flawed because it attempted to blame women’s troubles on men, when the problem was actually “destiny.” The reviewer wrote, “Women, especially women writers have no use for destiny; they wouldn’t compose a Hamlet if they could.”

 

Second Marriage

In 1928 Rosamond married again, to Wogan Philipps, later Lord Milford, an aspiring artist and baron’s son. They had two children: a son, Hugo and a daughter, Sally.

With the success of Dusty Answer, Rosamond, and by extension Wogan too, found themselves at the heart of glamorous 1920s London. “Ros and Wog,” as the couple were known, mingled with Bloomsbury stalwarts such as Lytton Strachey, Vanessa and Clive Bell, and Leonard and Virginia Woolf. The couple lived an apparently charmed life at Ipsden House in Oxfordshire.

Virginia Woolf praised Rosamond’s work, and her “clear hard mind beating up now & again to poetry,” although Rosamond was never entirely sure how to respond to Virginia’s blend of teasing and flattery.

As Rosamond’s work became ever more successful, Wogan began a string of affairs, and later disappeared to the Spanish Civil War. Rosamond, meanwhile, began an affair with Goronwy Rees, whom she met at a visit to Elizabeth Bowen’s house in 1936, and only ended it when she read of his engagement in the newspaper. She divorced Wogan in 1944.

 

Professional Success and Personal Tumult

During the 1930s Rosamond wrote prolifically. Her second novel A Note in Music (1930), about two women trapped in loveless marriages in a northern town, was less warmly received than Dusty Answer but still sold well.

She then wrote Invitation to the Waltz (1932) and The Weather in the Streets (1936), both of which were bestsellers and featured the same main character, Olivia Curtis. The Ballad and The Source followed in 1945.

She also contributed a number of short stories to the magazine New Writing, edited and run by her brother John.

During World War II she lived in the country with her two children, and in 1941 began an intense relationship with the married poet Cecil Day-Lewis — so intense that he called it his “double marriage.”  Although he never left his wife for her, he eventually left them both for the actress Jill Balcon in 1950.

Rosamond’s heartbreak and bitterness was echoed in her 1953 novel The Echoing Grove, about the reunion of two sisters after the death of a man who was husband to one and lover to the other. The drama of the split also spilled over to her friends and social acquaintances, all of whom were exhorted to take sides, intervene with Day Lewis on her behalf, or simply to sit and listen to her anger and upset.

 Tragedy and Spiritualism

In 1958 Rosamond’s daughter Sally died at the age of twenty-four. Grief-stricken, Rosamond doubted whether she would ever write again.

She became interested  —  some said to the point of obsession — in spiritualism, believing that Sally was still alive and helping St. Francis of Assisi to teach unborn birds to sing. Her beliefs were derided by her friends. Laurie Lee called them “self deception on such a moving scale,” and many people blamed spiritualism for Rosamond’s retreat from social and public life and from fiction writing.

In 1967 The Swan in the Evening was published, a fragmented autobiography and spiritual insights, focused psychic experiences after Sally’s death. This was followed by A Sea-Grape Tree in 1977, in which she further explored psychic phenomena.

Rosamond later became vice-president of the Kensington College of Psychic Studies and the editor of their magazine Light.

 Last Years and Legacy

For most of her later life Rosamond lived alone in a house in Kensington, London.She was known as a difficult and demanding woman who played “destructive emotional games,” but also as a courageous writer who was committed to her work at PEN International, which she joined in 1942. She was also made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 1982.

Her books, which had fallen out of print, were republished by Penguin and Virago in the early 1980s. The BBC produced television dramatizations of Invitation to the Waltz and The Weather in the Streets, and a radio version of The Echoing Grove.

Rosamond was pleased with the renewed attention, calling it her “reincarnation.” However, she had problems with her eyesight and general health, and when she died at home on March 12, 1990, she was almost blind from cataracts.

Many of her books remain in print, and in 2002 The Echoing Grove was made into a film called Heart of Me, starring Helena Bonham Carter, Paul Bettany and Olivia Williams.

Dusty Answer, Invitation to the Waltz, The Ballad and the Source, The Weather in the Streets, The Echoing Grove, The Swan in the Evening, A Note in Music are all back in print, published by Virago.

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 Rosamond Lehmann

Major Works

Dusty Answer (1927)A Note in Music (1930)Invitation to the Waltz (1932)The Weather in the Streets (1936)No More Music (1939)The Ballad and the Source (1944)The Gypsy’s Baby & Other Stories (1946)The Echoing Grove (1953)The Swan in the Evening: Fragments of an Inner Life (1967; nonfiction)A Sea-Grape Tree (1976)Moments of Truth (1986; nonficition anthology)

Biographies

Rosamond Lehmann by Diana E Lestourgeon (1965)Rosamond Lehmann by Judy Simons (1992)Rosamond Lehmann: A Life by Selina Hastings (2002)Rosamond Lehmann and Her Critics by Wendy Pollard (2004)Rosamond Lehmann: a Thirties Writer by Ruth Siegel (1990)

More information

The Art of Fiction, No. 88 (The Paris Review) Doom and Bloomsbury (The Guardian) The Swan in the Evening (English Pen)

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Precious Bane by Mary Webb, the 1926 novel

Precious Bane, the 1926 novel by English author Mary Webb, is a coming–of–age novel set in the English countryside. Our heroine, Prue Sarn, is a sharply observant young woman of Shropshire during the Napoleonic Era who has been born with a disfigured lip.

Her harelip leads the others in her superstitious village to treat her as an outsider due to the association it shares with witchcraft. Despite the hardships of rural life, her disfiguration and its resulting perceptions Prue endearingly finds beauty and compassion for all around her. 

 The colorful cast of Precious Bane includes Prue’s brother Gideon, whose temperament is the of polar opposite of hers. Gideon, the inheritor of the family farm, cannot see anything in his environment outside of its potential to be exploited for personal monetary gain.

In contrast Prue’s romantic interest Kester Woodseaves, a skilled weaver, shares a profound empathy for his world and sees this same beauty in.

English traditions and folklore fill out the world around Prue as her disfigurement encourages the suspicion of her community and ultimately the false accusation of murder and witchcraft to which Prue must defend. Ultimately Mary gifts her audience with a happy ending deserved by such a kind hearted and empathetic protagonist.

. . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . .

A 1929 review of Precious Bane by Mary Webb

From an original review in The Hartford Courant, April 7, 1929. Mary Webb’s Precious Bane is a Charming Novel with Shropshire Background

 Perhaps the first dominant thought of any sensitive reader as he lays down these two books after perusal, is that of rebellion and protest against the baffling cruelty of a fate which sends such a writer as Mary Webb to her untimely death and permits the continued existence of the myriad literary pigmies who supply their futile grist to the vast mill of contemporary fiction.

A portrait of Mrs. Webb faces the title page of Armour Wherein He Trusted. Like the fabled Lady of Shalott, who worked her spells so close to the scenes of Precious Bane Mary Webb had a lovely face – intellectual, thoughtful, and sweet. Not bearing any actual likeness to the face of Anne Douglas Sedgwick, but of the same type-sensitive, delicate, and fine.

Of mixed Welsh and Scottish ancestry, Mrs. Webb (Mary Meredith) spend the greater part of her life in her native Shropshire, at one time working with her husband as a market gardener, and with him selling their produce at their own stall in Shrewsbury market. In 1921, however, the Webbs came to London, making their home at Hamstead.

As all the reading worlds knows now, the grand vogue for Mrs. Webb’s novels was started when Mr. Stanley Baldwin, himself of Shropshire descent, became so impressed with Precious Bane that he wrote a warmly appreciative letter to its author. Precious Bane had, however, already won the Femina Vie Heureuse Prize for 1924-5, this prize being given annually, for “the best work of imagination in prose or verse descriptive of English life by and author who had not attained sufficient recognition.”

A Sweet Character

Like Mrs. Webb’s other novels, Gone to Earth, Seven for a Secret, and the rest, Precious Bane is a tale of remote country life, and it is a story so beautiful in spirit, so exquisitely told, so instinct with a sort of spiritual exaltation, that the sense aches at it. There is a quality of high nobility in all of Mrs. Webb’s novels, uneven as they are in point of literary excellence, but her whole splendid gift crystalizes in Precious Bane which stands like a tall tower among its fellows.

Precious Bane is the story, related in the first person of a farmer’s daughter, Prudence Sarn, who was born with a disfigured lip, the result, so the neighbors believe, of a crossing of her mother’s path by a hare; the child is always looked at askance in the little community, and is even suspected of witchcraft.

Very skillfully and beautifully does Mrs. Webb contrive to convey, through Prudence’s own narrative, the impression of the girl’s lovely nature; of her innate loving kindness toward all creation, her loyalty, her sweet, sound, trustworthiness.

And, interwoven inextricably with the tale of Prue’s personal experience, are the threads of strange superstitions, folk lore, weather wisdom, homely philosophy, ingrained custom, stark brutalities, and the sounds, sights and scents of the farmstead and the woods and fields at all seasons of the revolving year.

 

Sympathetic Introduction

Mr. Baldwin has written a deeply sympathetic and a really penetrating introduction to Precious Bane, in which he truly notes that the strength of the book lies “in the fusion of the elements of a nature and man, observed in this remote countryside by a woman even more alive to the changing moods of nature than of man.”

And again, Mr. Baldwin writes – “Her sensibility is so acute and her power of words so sure and swift that one who reads some passages in Whitehall has almost the physical sense of being in Shropshire cornfields.”

There is something in Prue Sarn’s telling of her own story which will remind certain readers of Geoffrey Dennis’s splendid and unappreciated novel, of a poignant childhood. Mary Lee, a book which one hopes may someday come into its rightful heritage of fame; and there are country folk in Precious Bane who will inevitably suggest their Wessex prototypes – the uncanny figure of the local wizard, Beguildy, for example and many of the farm people.

The strange burial customs, the games, such as “The  Game of the Costly Colors,” in playing which the village women indulge their love for gambling, the “Love Spinning,” reminiscent of the old-time New England quilting-bee, the hiring fair, with those waiting to be hired each carrying a sign of his trade.

The bull-baiting, the romance of the traveling weaver – all of these combine in a rich tapestry of sound and color, which sets us in the very core and center of remote rural Shropshire in the first quarter of the n ineteenth century.

The book fairly demands quotation, for every page is spangled with shrewd pithy sayings, descriptions of a breath-taking beauty, and quaint expressions which come to the reader with a sense of curious sub-conscious familiarity, seeming to link him with the past in which he shared.

There is the expressive work – “tuthree,” ­– “there’s a tuthree people know you, Prue,” says Kester Woodseaves the gallant weaver; and again, Prue writing of Beguildy’s house, notes that –“all was dimmery in the room.”

Precious Bane comes naturally and simply to a “happy ending,” for which one is glad; it is a book which arouses a sense of reverence, a book brimming with beauty, plain-spoken tender, a book for which to be devoutly grateful.

More about Precious Bane by Mary Webb

Precious Bane – a review Precious Bane full textPrecious Bane (1989) movie

The post Precious Bane by Mary Webb, the 1926 novel appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.

Precious Bane by Mary Webb (1926)

Precious Bane, the 1926 novel by English author Mary Webb, is a coming–of–age novel set in the English countryside. Our heroine, Prue Sarn, is a sharply observant young woman of Shropshire during the Napoleonic Era who has been born with a disfigured lip.

Her harelip leads the others in her superstitious village to treat her as an outsider due to the association it shares with witchcraft. Despite the hardships of rural life, her disfiguration and its resulting perceptions Prue endearingly finds beauty and compassion for all around her. 

 The colorful cast of Precious Bane includes Prue’s brother Gideon, whose temperament is the of polar opposite of hers. Gideon, the inheritor of the family farm, cannot see anything in his environment outside of its potential to be exploited for personal monetary gain.

In contrast Prue’s romantic interest Kester Woodseaves, a skilled weaver, shares a profound empathy for his world and sees this same beauty in.

English traditions and folklore fill out the world around Prue as her disfigurement encourages the suspicion of her community and ultimately the false accusation of murder and witchcraft to which Prue must defend. Ultimately Mary gifts her audience with a happy ending deserved by such a kind hearted and empathetic protagonist.

. . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . .

A 1929 review of Precious Bane by Mary Webb

From an original review in The Hartford Courant, April 7, 1929. Mary Webb’s Precious Bane is a Charming Novel with Shropshire Background

 Perhaps the first dominant thought of any sensitive reader as he lays down these two books after perusal, is that of rebellion and protest against the baffling cruelty of a fate which sends such a writer as Mary Webb to her untimely death and permits the continued existence of the myriad literary pigmies who supply their futile grist to the vast mill of contemporary fiction.

A portrait of Mrs. Webb faces the title page of Armour Wherein He Trusted. Like the fabled Lady of Shalott, who worked her spells so close to the scenes of Precious Bane Mary Webb had a lovely face – intellectual, thoughtful, and sweet. Not bearing any actual likeness to the face of Anne Douglas Sedgwick, but of the same type-sensitive, delicate, and fine.

Of mixed Welsh and Scottish ancestry, Mrs. Webb (Mary Meredith) spend the greater part of her life in her native Shropshire, at one time working with her husband as a market gardener, and with him selling their produce at their own stall in Shrewsbury market. In 1921, however, the Webbs came to London, making their home at Hamstead.

As all the reading worlds knows now, the grand vogue for Mrs. Webb’s novels was started when Mr. Stanley Baldwin, himself of Shropshire descent, became so impressed with Precious Bane that he wrote a warmly appreciative letter to its author. Precious Bane had, however, already won the Femina Vie Heureuse Prize for 1924-5, this prize being given annually, for “the best work of imagination in prose or verse descriptive of English life by and author who had not attained sufficient recognition.”

A Sweet Character

Like Mrs. Webb’s other novels, Gone to Earth, Seven for a Secret, and the rest, Precious Bane is a tale of remote country life, and it is a story so beautiful in spirit, so exquisitely told, so instinct with a sort of spiritual exaltation, that the sense aches at it. There is a quality of high nobility in all of Mrs. Webb’s novels, uneven as they are in point of literary excellence, but her whole splendid gift crystalizes in Precious Bane which stands like a tall tower among its fellows.

Precious Bane is the story, related in the first person of a farmer’s daughter, Prudence Sarn, who was born with a disfigured lip, the result, so the neighbors believe, of a crossing of her mother’s path by a hare; the child is always looked at askance in the little community, and is even suspected of witchcraft.

Very skillfully and beautifully does Mrs. Webb contrive to convey, through Prudence’s own narrative, the impression of the girl’s lovely nature; of her innate loving kindness toward all creation, her loyalty, her sweet, sound, trustworthiness.

And, interwoven inextricably with the tale of Prue’s personal experience, are the threads of strange superstitions, folk lore, weather wisdom, homely philosophy, ingrained custom, stark brutalities, and the sounds, sights and scents of the farmstead and the woods and fields at all seasons of the revolving year.

 

Sympathetic Introduction

Mr. Baldwin has written a deeply sympathetic and a really penetrating introduction to Precious Bane, in which he truly notes that the strength of the book lies “in the fusion of the elements of a nature and man, observed in this remote countryside by a woman even more alive to the changing moods of nature than of man.”

And again, Mr. Baldwin writes – “Her sensibility is so acute and her power of words so sure and swift that one who reads some passages in Whitehall has almost the physical sense of being in Shropshire cornfields.”

There is something in Prue Sarn’s telling of her own story which will remind certain readers of Geoffrey Dennis’s splendid and unappreciated novel, of a poignant childhood. Mary Lee, a book which one hopes may someday come into its rightful heritage of fame; and there are country folk in Precious Bane who will inevitably suggest their Wessex prototypes – the uncanny figure of the local wizard, Beguildy, for example and many of the farm people.

The strange burial customs, the games, such as “The  Game of the Costly Colors,” in playing which the village women indulge their love for gambling, the “Love Spinning,” reminiscent of the old-time New England quilting-bee, the hiring fair, with those waiting to be hired each carrying a sign of his trade.

The bull-baiting, the romance of the traveling weaver – all of these combine in a rich tapestry of sound and color, which sets us in the very core and center of remote rural Shropshire in the first quarter of the n ineteenth century.

The book fairly demands quotation, for every page is spangled with shrewd pithy sayings, descriptions of a breath-taking beauty, and quaint expressions which come to the reader with a sense of curious sub-conscious familiarity, seeming to link him with the past in which he shared.

There is the expressive work – “tuthree,” ­– “there’s a tuthree people know you, Prue,” says Kester Woodseaves the gallant weaver; and again, Prue writing of Beguildy’s house, notes that –“all was dimmery in the room.”

Precious Bane comes naturally and simply to a “happy ending,” for which one is glad; it is a book which arouses a sense of reverence, a book brimming with beauty, plain-spoken tender, a book for which to be devoutly grateful.

More about Precious Bane by Mary Webb

Precious Bane – a review Precious Bane full textPrecious Bane (1989) movie

The post Precious Bane by Mary Webb (1926) appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.

Catherine and Heathcliff: A Study of Extreme Love in Wuthering Heights

Catherine and Heathcliff in the story of Wuthering Heights (1847) by Emily Brontë are unhesitatingly certain of their soul connection.

I’d venture to guess that some people who say they have identified their twin flame are experiencing some kind of unhealthy, obsessive, and delusional form of love.

However, some of them may be experiencing something closer to amigeist — an intense, perhaps spiritual, bond which tends towards the exaltation of all. There is an undecidability here which gives love both its healing touch and jagged edge.

This analysis is excerpted from Essence of Extreme Love by Evan Atlas. Reprinted by permission.

 

Limerence, amigeist, and twin flames

Catherine: “Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.”

What do we say about it from the outside? Such cases inspire or forewarn us, depending who you ask. Other characters in the novel express their own concerns.

Nelly: “The two, to a cool spectator, made a strange and fearful picture.”

Emily Brontë’s depiction of Catherine and Heathcliff has much in common with the themes of limerence, amigeist, twin flames, and extreme love in general.

It might be up to the reader to decide for themselves which of these phenomena best describes these lovers. And, as we’ve done so far, we should look at this story and the twin flame idea as opportunities for reflections on the metaphysics of love.

The juxtaposed relationships which Catherine has with Edgar and Heathcliff creates insights about how extreme love might differ from romantic love in general. In one scene, for example, Catherine asks Nelly who she should marry, and they consider the diverging paths her life might take.

      ‘First and foremost, do you love Mr. Edgar?’
      ‘Who can help it? Of course I do,’ she answered.
      ‘Why do you love him, Miss Cathy?’
      ‘Nonsense, I do — that’s sufficient.’
      ‘By no means; you must say why?’
      ‘Well, because he is handsome, and pleasant to be with.’
      ‘Bad!’ was my commentary.
       And because he is young and cheerful.’
      ‘Bad, still.’
     ‘And because he loves me.’
     ‘Indifferent, coming there.’
     ‘And he will be rich, and I shall like to be the greatest woman of the neighbourhood, and I shall be proud of having such a husband.’
     ‘Worst of all … And now, let us hear what you are unhappy about. Your brother will be pleased; the old lady and gentleman will not object, I think; you will escape from a disorderly, comfortless home into a wealthy, respectable one; and you love Edgar, and Edgar loves you. All seems smooth and easy: where is the obstacle?’
     ‘HERE! and HERE!’ replied Catherine, striking one hand on her forehead, and the other on her breast: ‘in whichever place the soul lives. In my soul and in my heart, I’m convinced I’m wrong!’”

 

Catherine and Edgar

Catherine marries Edgar, even though she is convinced that on some level it is wrong. Practically, there are many things we could say about this—many in defense of Catherine’s choice.

Metaphysically, the choice embodies disharmony and incompleteness; it might even be called a revolt. It also highlights how we choose some relationships, and are given others. From  “Representations of Lovesickness in Victorian Literature” by  Hatice Övgü Tüzün:

“For Catherine, the enduring love she feels for Heathcliff cannot be reduced to what one may call romantic infatuation as it is rooted in her own being. The everlastingness of this kind of intense soul-to-soul connection can be effectively contrasted with the ephemeral quality of the ‘love’ she has for her husband Edgar.

It is also important to note that Catherine’s love for Heathcliff is a source of ecstatic transcendence which annihilates ego boundaries and takes her to the realm of non-dualistic awareness.

Such a heightened cognitive/emotional state makes the thought of a life without Heathcliff utterly unbearable and brings her to the brink of complete breakdown. For Catherine, letting go of Heathcliff completely is not only unbearable but also impossible since she believes that the bond that unites them is impervious to worldly conditions or interventions.”

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The 1939 film adaptation of Wuthering Heights
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Is Heathcliff mad? Is he a devil?

For Heathcliff’s part in all of this, there is no doubt that he is the most disliked person within the world of the book. Even Isabella, his wife, wonders: “Is Mr. Heathcliff a man? If so, is he mad? And if not, is he a devil?” And he ends up committing heinous, cruel acts throughout the book.

This orientation is at least understandable—not to say it justifies his actions—if we apply the often misattributed quote that “the opposite of love is not hate, it is indifference.” Perhaps there is a warm glowing kernel of love within hate—a lingering heat which is not extinguished by animosity or even death.

Heathcliff and Catherine never fully connect. And love denied is not nothing; Heathcliff is incapable of indifference, but capable of having his love twisted into something inwardly tortuous and outwardly destructive.

If we are reading Wuthering Heights as philosophical fiction, then I think it is telling us that the twin flame connection is real in some sense. What is it exactly? We are still trying to figure that out. But, subjectively, it manifests in Catherine and Heathcliff as being inseparable (even though they are separate in many practical and physical ways for much of their lives).

 

Catherine and Heathcliff, inseparable even in death

Inseparability should be taken quite seriously as a feature of extreme love. Brontë’s “love realism” is evident in the book’s narrative structure: Catherine dies halfway through, and yet there is no doubt that her love story with Heathcliff continues. He seems to make absolutely sure of this with his parting words to her.

Heathcliff: “And I pray one prayer—I repeat it till my tongue stiffens—Catherine Earnshaw, may you not rest as long as I am living; you said I killed you—haunt me, then! The murdered do haunt their murderers, I believe. I know that ghosts have wandered on earth. Be with me always—take any form—drive me mad! Only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you! Oh, God! it is unutterable! I cannot live without my life! I cannot live without my soul!”

If these two lived today, would they be taken in by some cult which promises divinely-sanctioned, soul-unifying love? This is a possibility—the abuse of power always is. But I also have the intuition that, whatever the outward story may be (such as having a soulmate, twin flame, astrological alignment, etc.), we are giving imperfect names to real experiences.

These concepts should neither be entirely dismissed nor uncritically accepted. Personally, I also lean towards naturalistic explanations of phenomena. So I choose to see the reality and value in ideas like twin flames rather than focus on the question of whether or not I may literally have a soul which is connected to another soul.

Likewise, Catherine and Heathcliff did not need science or philosophy to know they were in anguish. A pragmatic approach to extreme love can get us quite far while we find our way through a labyrinth of unanswered questions.

All I really need to know is that people have a capacity for love, extremism, and extreme love; I should take into account that if one “looks in” on relationships like the one between Catherine and Heathcliff, many aspects of it can appear insane and, accordingly, experiencing what I subjectively identify as extreme love should be connected with mentally updating the likelihood that I could be experiencing something insidiously detrimental — something which wears a mask and convinces me of its benevolence.

But if I reason that I am experiencing something like the twin flame connection or amigeist, rather than some kind of self-incendiary obsessional fantasy, then I may reasonably pursue that extreme love as both a personally coherent goal and an experience of unity with every other act of love which is pulling us towards perfection.

. . . . . . . . .

Contributed by Evan Atlas. Evan is a writer and political philosopher from New York’s Hudson Valley. His work confronts our most significant challenges, and develops a theory of change for the 21st century that is unlike anything you’ve heard before. He believes that the future of humanity can be more loving, more free, and more beautiful, but that this future is in danger. Join him at evanatlas.com and help create a more beautiful planet. 

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See also:
Virginia Woolf’s Analysis of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights
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The post Catherine and Heathcliff: A Study of Extreme Love in Wuthering Heights appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.

10 Facts About Harper Lee, Author of To Kill a Mockingbird

Presented here are 10 facts about Harper Lee (1926 – 2015), Southern author known for the novel To Kill a Mockingbird (1960). Considered one of the Great American Novels, To Kill a Mockingbird is the story of a small southern town embroiled in a racially charged trial, told from the perspective of a precocious young girl, Scout. 

The novel drew inspiration from Lee’s upbringing in Monroeville, Alabama. The novel has sold tens of millions of copies and is still widely taught in American classrooms for its moral teachings.  

“You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view… Until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it.” (Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird)   

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Learn more about Harper Lee
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Truman Capote and Harper Lee were childhood friends

Author of Breakfast at Tiffany’s and In Cold Blood, Truman Capote grew up with Lee in the depression era South. The two were well-matched friends; Capote was a small picked-on boy and Lee a protective tomboy. Lee said in a 1965 interview: 

“We didn’t have much money. We didn’t have toys, nothing was done for us, so the result was that we lived in our imagination most of the time. We devised things; we were readers, and we would transfer everything we had seen on the printed page to the backyard in the form of high drama.”  

They bonded not only over their love of reading and writing but also the hardships in their home life. Lee, who had long since stopped giving interviews made an exception for her friend. In 1976, she joined Capote for an interview with People, during which she said, “We were bound by common anguish.”  

Lee and Capote are both featured as characterizing each other’s books. Capote as Dill in Mockingbird and Lee as Idabel Tompkins in Other Voices, Other Rooms. 

After Lee sent out the manuscript of To Kill a Mockingbird out for publication, she assisted Capote in researching for an article about the Kansas Clutter Murders. Capote later turned this research into the best-selling true-crime book In Cold Blood.  

 

She worked on a true crime novel

Like her friend Capote, Lee also had a proclivity for true crime. Rev. Willie Maxwell, a preacher in Alexander City, Alabama, allegedly murdered five family members and in a strange twist of events, was himself murdered publicly at the funeral of one of the family members.  

Nearly two decades had passed since the release of To Kill a Mockingbird, and Lee had yet to publish another novel.  

Lee saw the murder trial of Rev. Maxell as an opportunity to prove she was not a one-hit wonder. She dedicated years to researching the piece she called The Reverend. Despite all this, Lee struggled to put it down on the page.  

An Alexander City attorney is quoted as saying, “She’s fighting a battle between the book and a bottle of scotch. And the scotch is winning.”  

Decades later, Casey Cep picked up the project and used Lee’s notes and research to publish Furious Hours: Murder Fraud and the Last Trial of Harper Lee. Cep not only writes about the murders in the book but also provides insights into Lee’s life.   

 

She won the Presidential Medal of Freedom

In 2007, President George W. Bush awarded Harper Lee the Medal of Freedom for the social contributions she made by writing To Kill a Mockingbird. The medal was established in 1963 by President John F. Kennedy for those who have made “an especially meritorious contribution to the security or national interests of the United States, world peace, cultural or other significant public or private endeavors.”  

To Kill a Mockingbird had become a staple of the curriculum in American classrooms by this time because it provided a valuable framework for addressing issues of social injustice, racism, and prejudice. President Bush explained, “To Kill a Mockingbird has influenced the character of our country for the better. It’s been a gift to the entire world. As a model of good writing and humane sensibility, this book will be read and studied forever.”   

In addition to the Medal of Freedom, Lee won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.  

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She is one of many authors with a banned book

To Kill a Mockingbird was first banned in 1966 by a school board in Hanover County, Virginia, because of claims that it was “immoral literature.” The school board revoked their decision after residents wrote into local newspapers complaining.  

Lee even wrote to a newspaper to express her thoughts about the decision. In a letter to the editor of the Richmond News Leader she said, “To hear that the novel is ‘immoral’ has made me count the years between now and 1984, for I have yet to come across a better example of doublethink… I feel, however, that the problem is one of illiteracy, not Marxism.”   

The book continues to be banned by school boards today due to claims regarding racist and inappropriate language. The American Library Association’s top 10 list of most challenged books featured To Kill a Mockingbird in 2009, 2011, 2017, and 2020.  

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Her second and final published book, Go Set a Watchman, caused controversy

Published in 2015, Go Set a Watchman sold an astonishing 1.1 million copies in its first week. Promoted as a sequel of To Kill a Mockingbird, Watchman follows a 26-year-old Scout’s return home to Alabama to visit her father, Atticus. The book centers around desegregation in the 1950s South.  

Watchman upset readers who were displeased to find the once heroic and beloved lawyer Atticus was actually reactionary and bigoted, taking up a case against the NAACP.  

The shocking plot twist wasn’t the only controversy. At the time of publication, claims circulated that Lee was being taken advantage of by publishers. Lee was 88 years old and known for staying out of the public eye. These rumors were laid to rest when Lee made a statement through her attorney saying, “I’m alive and kicking and happy as hell with the reactions to Watchman.”  

In addition, controversy was sparked because the book was promoted as the long-lost sequel to Mockingbird, but in fact it was the original manuscript of Mockingbird. When Lee submitted her original manuscript, her editor urged her to rewrite it from the perspective of a younger Scout.  

 

Her work received criticism from Flannery O’Connor

While criticism is expected no matter how well loved a book is, it does come as a surprise that Lee received it from her contemporary and fellow Southern author, Flannery O’Connor.  

In The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O’Connor, her feelings about Mockingbird are revealed. She writes, “I think I see what it really is — a child’s book. When I was fifteen, I would have loved it … I think for a child’s book it does all right. It’s interesting that all the folks that are buying it don’t know they’re reading a child’s book. Somebody ought to say what it is …”    

While O’Connor never claimed Mockingbird wasn’t good, she had a bone to pick with its reception. This criticism has sparked discussion surrounding highbrow and middlebrow literature. While O’Connor may be considered more highbrow and commonly taught in college English classes, Mockingbird is more approachable to a high school-age audience.

Despite her almost pejorative tone, O’Connor pointed out what makes To Kill a Mockingbird a such an important novel — it is accessible to a younger audience! 

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Quotes from To Kill a Mockingbird
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She was gifted a year’s salary for Christmas, a miracle that allowed her to write To Kill a Mockingbird

After moving to New York City in 1949, Lee worked various jobs to make ends meet while pursuing writing. Things moved quickly for her in 1956 when she met her editor Maurice Crain in November, then met Michael and Joy Brown in December. Lee was introduced to the couple by Truman Capote. Michael was a Texas-born composer and writer, and Joy Williams Brown was a former ballet dancer.  

 The couple gave her financial support for one year. This allowed her the financial freedom to focus on her writing. Lee wrote an essay called “Christmas to Me” in McCall in 1961 about this once-in-a-lifetime gift or as she puts it, “a full, fair chance at a new life.”   

 

Studying law ran in her family

While it is widely known that Lee’s lawyer father Amasa Coleman Lee, the inspiration for the character Atticus Finch. Some may not know both Lee and her sister Alice studied law. Harper studied law at the University of Alabama but to her father’s disappointment, withdrew shortly before graduation.   

Alice Lee attended the Birmingham School of Law. She passed. the bar exam in 1943 at the age of 32, making her one of Alabama’s first female lawyers. She lived to age 103 and practiced law until she was 100 years old, making her one of Alabama’s oldest practicing lawyers.  

Not only did the three of them study law, but they were also all writers. Amasa Lee was a journalist as well as a lawyer and purchased The Monroe Journal. Alice worked for her father’s newspaper for seven years.  

 

Despite popular belief, she was not a recluse

Harper Lee was known for staying out of the public eye, which gained her a reputation as a recluse. This wasn’t true, according to those who knew her best. She preferred to live a private and average life, rather than one of a famous author, so she refrained from public appearances and interviews.   

She made select public appearances, one of which attending the Honors College at the University of Alabama an annual award ceremony for To Kill a Mockingbird essay contest 

 

She published cornbread recipe!

Featured in the 1961 Artists’ & Writers’ Cookbook by Barbra Turner, this traditional southern side dish recipe displayed Lee’s rarely-seen humorous side.  

The post 10 Facts About Harper Lee, Author of To Kill a Mockingbird appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.

The Long Journey of Poppie Nongena by Elsa Joubert

The Long Journey of Poppie Nongena by Elsa Joubert has been called one of the most important novels to emerge from the African continent. Published in 1979, the book has been translated into thirteen languages and was adapted to screen for the film Poppie Nongena (2009). 

Author Elsa Joubert was known for her travelogues, poetry, news features, and groundbreaking novels. She is considered part of the Sixtiers literary movement, which also included authors Ingrid Jonker, Breyten Breytenbach, and André Brink. 

Here’s more about the author, and why The Long Journey of Poppie Nongena is a story about struggle more readers should know. 

 

About Elsa Joubert 

Elsa Joubert (October 19, 1922) was born in Paarl, Cape Town, South Africa. She first studied for a Bachelor of Arts (BA) degree, working as a teacher in Cradock. After this, she achieved her Master’s in Dutch-Afrikaans Literature.  

From 1946 to 1948, she worked as an editor for the lifestyle magazine Huisgenoot. 

Her first travelogue is born from a trip to the Egyptian Nile with her husband (1948). The results of her trip were published in 1957. Joubert mentions during an interview that her initial research at the African Library in Johannesburg brought her closer to Africa and its people. 

We’re Waiting on the Captain (1963) is Joubert’s debut novel, inspired by the story of a murder trial she had read about in The Transvaler. Joubert’s husband translates her next book The Die at Sunset (1964/1982) from Afrikaans into English. 

The 1964 travelogue The Staff of Monomotapa explored Mozambique the book was cited as an inspiration to Nelson Mandela (2002). During a phone call to the author, Mandela would say the book was the first time he had seen an Afrikaner “who considered the possibility of a partially black-and-white government in South Africa.” Reportedly when Mandela met Graça Machel, he knew only of her homeland Mozambique from what he had read about in Joubert’s book. 

Joubert continued writing full-time, becoming known for her travel stories documenting more trips, often via ocean, to Uganda, Cairo, Angola, and Indonesia. 

A South African government tribute praises Joubert for “lifting the veil” of Apartheid’s difficulties and injustices with her writing. She begins the Afrikaans Writers Guild, chairing it during the mid-eighties. 

Collected short stories (Milk, 1980) appeared the same year as The Long Journey of Poppie Nongena’s translation. In 1995, she published The Long Journey of Isobelle: this time, telling the 100-year story of an Afrikaans family and their own struggles. A Lion on the Landing: Memories of a South African Youth explores Jourert’s childhood. 

Joubert’s last work of fiction Twee vroue (Two women) published in 2002, with two books contained in one volume. The first tale, Pampas, explores the remnants of Boer-colonies in Argentina seen during her travels with her husband in the eighties.   

Elsa Joubert passed away in June 2020 from COVID-related complications. Before her passing, she wrote a letter asking the government to relax lockdown restrictions: “Humanely speaking, we are in the last weeks and days of our lifetimes. Us living in homes or institutions, however wonderful, are totally cut off from our family members.” 

A New York Times obituary  remembers Joubert as an “Afrikaans writer who explored black reality.” 

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The Long Journey of Poppie Nongena 

The Long Journey of Poppie Nongena was first published in 1979. Since publication, it has been translated into thirteen languages, with the author translating it into English herself. From 1982 to 1984, the story was performed as a stage play (co-written with Sandra Kotzé). 

The Long Journey of Poppie Nongena tells the story of Poppie, who is considered an illegal citizen once her husband, Stone, becomes too ill for his job. The journey was a rare look at the circumstances and often difficulties associated with township life – including the harsh consequences of Pass Laws. 

Unusually, the novel explored themes that had hardly been touched upon by other Afrikaans, white authors of the time – much more typical of the Sixtiers-movement which Joubert was considered part of. 

 

The Longer Story of Ntombizodumo 

Poppie’s story was inspired by Joubert’s domestic assistant, Ntombizodumo Eunice Msutwana-Ntsata. Joubert wrote that she started the story after, one evening, Ntombizodumo told her of “a night of terror in the townships.”(Interview, Red Roses/Rooi Rose) The real Poppie’s identity stayed hidden and was only revealed in 2009. The same year, the tale was adapted to screen for Poppie Nongena. 

Elements of Ntombizodumo and her life story were intertwined through The Long Journey of Poppie Nongena. Both were isiXhosa and spoke Afrikaans, with Ntombizodumo having learned the language as a child – but was reportedly discouraged from speaking it by her own elders. 

As part of Joubert’s research, she would have lengthy conversations with Ntombizodumo. She would also, according to LitNet, travel to the townships herself – and sat in during legal proceedings investigating the 1976 Soweto uprising. 

According to The Citizen, surviving family members raised concerns that Ntombizodumo was not adequately compensated for the use of her life story. Her daughter Roto said, that her mother was “an unsung hero who had been humiliated by the apartheid government.” 

A LitNet biography says, “Elsa gave half of her writing royalties from the sales of The Long Journey of Poppie Nongena to the woman who she heard the story from, with which the lady bought herself a home in the Transkei and gave her two children an education.” 

An IOL article says that the author and publisher “lost touch” with Ntombizodumo after her death in the nineties. The story concludes by saying the movie’s producers have set up a meeting with family members to discuss the adaptation and its consequences. 

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Poppie Nongena, the 2009 film

The 2009 film Poppie Nongena stars Clementine Mosimane in the titular role, with Anna-Mart van der Merwe and Chris Gxalaba in supporting roles. When Stone (Chris Gxalaba) is unable to work, Poppie becomes an illegal citizen of South Africa who must maintain her family life with much difficulty.

It has become one of the most acclaimed Afrikaans-language films to date, winning a total of twelve awards at the Silwerskerm Festival. Watch the trailer with English subtitles for Poppie Nongena here. 

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Classic Uncanny Stories by British Women Writers

Asked to name uncanny authors, most readers would come up with names like Edgar Allan Poe, M.R. James, H.P. Lovecraft, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu – all male. But a surprising number of women authors, some of whom may be better known for writing more homelike novels, also wrote very “unhomelike” short stories.  

Sigmund Freud’s famous essay about weird literature is usually translated as The Uncanny. But the German word “unheimlich” literally means “unhomelike.”

No Direction Home: The Uncanny in Literature by Francis Booth (©2023, from which this essay is excerpted by permission) traces how uncanny literature takes us from the familiar, the reassuring, the homelike, into a world of the unfamiliar, the unsettling, and the unhomelike.

The American author Edith Wharton understood that before leading us into the world of the tense and unsettling, the author first has to make us feel calm and settled; she says that this can be done by starting with a modern clean, electric-lit environment at least as well as with a gloomy old castle. This will be discussed further in Two Uncanny Stories by Edith Wharton.

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No Direction Home by Francis Booth
is available on Amazon U.S*. and Amazon U.K.
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The Shadow by Edith Nesbit (1905)

This contrast between the bright, modern, recognizably homelike and the strange unhomelike encroaching on it is also perfectly encapsulated in a story by another Edith: Edith Nesbit, an English political activist and co-founder of the Fabian Society, best known for her children’s books as E. Nesbit, including most famously The Railway Children.

Nesbit was also the author of several collections of uncanny stories, including Grim Stories, Something Wrong and Fear.  

I told him I thought the house was very pretty, and fresh, and homelike — only a little too new — but that fault would mend with time. He said:
      “It is new: that’s just it. We’re the first people who’ve ever lived in it. If it were an old house, Margaret, I should think it was haunted.”
       I asked if he had seen anything. “No,” he said, “not yet.”
    “Heard then?” said I.
     “No — not heard either,” he said, “but there’s a sort of feeling: I can’t describe it — I’ve seen nothing and I’ve heard nothing, but I’ve been so near to seeing and hearing, just near, that’s all. And something follows me about — only when I turn round, there’s never anything, only my shadow. And I always feel that I shall see the thing next minute — but I never do — not quite — it’s always just not visible. (Edith Nesbit, The Shadow, 1905)

The new, fresh, homelike home has been made unhomelike by the mysterious shadow, which the narrator also sees. “It was crouching there; it sank, and the black fluidness of it seemed to be sucked under the door of Mabel’s room.”

When the narrator goes in, Mabel is dead but her baby is alive. At the funeral, another shadow appears.

“Between us and the coffin, first grey, then black, it crouched an instant, then sank and liquefied—and was gathered together and drawn till it ran into the nearest shadow. And the nearest shadow was the shadow of Mabel’s coffin.” Then Mabel’s daughter dies too. “I had never been able to forget the look on her dead face.”

At the start of her story The Shadow, Edith Nesbit had warned us, as many uncanny authors do at the start, that it will make no sense; it will have no easy, rational explanation.

This is not an artistically rounded off ghost story, and nothing is explained in it, and there seems to be no reason why any of it should have happened. But that is no reason why it should not be told. You must have noticed that all the real ghost stories you have ever come close to, are like this in these respects — no explanation, no logical coherence.

Another Nesbit story, from the collection Grim Tales, also begins with a similar disclaimer: the narrator is presenting the reader a version of events which they will not believe, but washing her hands of it, fending off the skeptics, disarming any doubters in the first paragraph:

Although every word of this story is as true as despair, I do not expect people to believe it. Nowadays a “rational explanation” is required before belief is possible. Let me then, at once, offer the “rational explanation” which finds most favour among those who have heard the tale of my life’s tragedy. It is held that we were “under a delusion,” Laura and I, on that 31st of October; and that this supposition places the whole matter on a satisfactory and believable basis. The reader can judge, when he, too, has heard my story, how far this is an “explanation,” and in what sense it is “rational.”  (Edith Nesbit, Man-Size in Marble, 1893)

 

Reality or Delusion? by Ellen Wood (1868)

Following are a couple more examples of openings of stories that start with disclaimers that the reader will not believe what is to come, even though it is all true. The first is from the British novelist Ellen Wood, better known at the time as Mrs. Henry Wood, most famous for the novel East Lynne, which is best remembered for the phrase, “dead and never called me mother.”

“This is a ghost story. Every word of it is true. And I don’t mind confessing that for ages afterwards some of us did not care to pass the spot alone at night. Some people do not care to pass it by.” (Ellen Wood, Reality or Delusion? )

In fact, as the title hints, it may well have been a mass delusion, and may be explicable without recourse to supernatural explanations. “If I say that I believe in it too, I shall be called a muff and a double muff. But there is no stumbling-block too difficult to be got over.”

 

The Open Door by Charlotte Riddell (1882)

Another example of this kind of opening disclaimer comes from the Irish novelist Charlotte Riddell, known at the time as Mrs. J. H. Riddell. As in the previous case, and as with many stories by female authors of uncanny stories, the narrator is male.

Some people do not believe in ghosts. For that matter, some people do not believe in anything. . . That is the manner in which this story, hitherto unpublished, has been greeted by my acquaintances. How it will be received by strangers is quite another matter. I am going to tell what happened to me exactly as it happened, and readers can credit or scoff at the tale as it pleases them. It is not necessary for me to find faith and comprehension in addition to a ghost story, for the world at large. If such were the case, I should lay down my pen. (The Open Door, 1882)

And again, as with the previous story, the mystery, of a “haunted” and unhomelike house in which there is a door that will not stay closed – those pesky doors again – turns out not to be a haunting at all but merely someone continually opening the door to scare away the superstitious in order to claim the house for themselves.

 

The Nature of the Evidence by May Sinclair (1923)

The frame story is a very common device in uncanny stories, where sometimes the tale is presented by the “author” as having been found in a diary or in letters by someone who is now dead and cannot explain further. Or perhaps the story has been told to the narrator by a friend; this allows the first-person narrator to present the story as “true” without having to vouch for it.

And sometimes the “friend” may be presented as an unimpeachable source, as in one of the stories in May Sinclair’s collection Uncanny Stories. Like the other female authors we have looked at, Sinclair was a “serious” novelist as well as a writer of uncanny stories and was also a political activist, being an active suffragist and member of the Woman Writers’ Suffrage League.

This is the story Marston told me. He didn’t want to tell it. I had to tear it from him bit by bit. I’ve pieced the bits together in their time order, and explained things here and there, but the facts are the facts he gave me. There’s nothing that I didn’t get out of him somehow.

Out of him—you’ll admit my source is unimpeachable. Edward Marston, the great K.C., and the author of an admirable work on “The Logic of Evidence.” (The Nature of the Evidence, 1923)

 

Lady Farquhar’s Old Lady: A True Ghost Story by Mrs. Molesworth (1873)

As well as presenting a story as coming from a scientific, rational source, the provenance of the uncanny tale may be presented as unimpeachable by virtue of the “facts” being from the upper classes, in the days when the aristocracy were seen to be trustworthy, as in the following opening paragraphs from a story by a British writer best known for her children’s books, published under the name Mrs. Molesworth, and her adult novels published under the gender-neutral name Ennis Graham.

I myself have never seen a ghost (I am by no means sure that I wish ever to do so), but I have a friend whose experience in this respect has been less limited than mine. Till lately, however, I had never heard the details of Lady Farquhar’s adventure, though the fact of there being a ghost story which she could, if she chose, relate with the authority of an eye-witness, had been more than once alluded to before me.

Living at extreme ends of the country, it is but seldom my friend and I are able to meet; but a few months ago I had the good fortune to spend some days in her house, and one evening our conversation happening to fall on the subject of the possibility of so-called “supernatural” visitations or communications, suddenly what I had heard returned to my memory.

“By the bye,” I exclaimed, “we need not go far for an authority on the question. You have seen a ghost yourself, Margaret. I remember once hearing it alluded to before you, and you did not contradict it. I have so often meant to ask you for the whole story. Do tell it to us now.”

Lady Farquhar hesitated for a moment, and her usually bright expression grew somewhat graver. When she spoke, it seemed to be with a slight effort. “You mean what they all call the story of ‘my old lady,’ I suppose,” she said at last.

“Oh yes, if you care to hear it, I will tell it you. But there is not much to tell, remember.”

“There seldom is in true stories of the kind,” I replied. “Genuine ghost stories are generally abrupt and inconsequent in the extreme, but on this very account all the more impressive. Don’t you think so?”

“I don’t know that I am a fair judge,” she answered. “Indeed,” she went on rather gravely, “my own opinion is that what you call true ghost stories are very seldom told at all.”

“How do you mean? I don’t quite understand you,” I said, a little perplexed by her words and tone.

“I mean,” she replied, “that people who really believe they have come in contact with—with anything of that kind, seldom care to speak about it.”

What Victorian reader could question the veracity of a woman called Lady Farquhar? Lords in Victorian literature may be rogues and roués but Ladies are always beyond reproach.

 

The Old Nurse’s Story by Elizabeth Gaskell (1852)

A nice twist on the first-person narration is provided in a ghost story by Elizabeth Gaskell, another female writer of uncanny tales who is best known for “serious” novels including Mary Barton, North and South and Wives and Daughters that tackled the social issues of her time. Mrs. Gaskell, as she was known, also wrote a biography of Charlotte Brontë.

Gaskell also regularly published uncanny stories in collaboration with Charles Dickens for his Household Words. Here the tale purports to be told to children by their mother’s former nurse and is about the ghost of a child that their mother saw when she was herself a child. It seems that this tale has been told to them before and has become a favorite.

You know, my dears, that your mother was an orphan, and an only child; and I dare say you have heard that your grandfather was a clergyman up in Westmoreland, where I come from. I was just a girl in the village school, when, one day, your grandmother came in to ask the mistress if there was any scholar there who would do for a nurse-maid; and mighty proud I was, I can tell ye, when the mistress called me up, and spoke to my being a good girl at my needle, and a steady, honest girl, and one whose parents were very respectable, though they might be poor.

I thought I should like nothing better than to serve the pretty young lady, who was blushing as deep as I was, as she spoke of the coming baby, and what I should have to do with it. However, I see you don’t care so much for this part of my story, as for what you think is to come, so I’ll tell you at once. (Elizabeth Gaskell, The Old Nurse’s Story, 1852)

The story is about a young orphan with no direction home. Miss Rosamond, the mother of the children to whom the story is being told, had been sent as a child, with her nurse, the narrator, to live in a big house with distant relatives. The enormous house has no homelike qualities, “and the hall, which had no fire lighted in it, looked dark and gloomy.”

It is so large that the nurse never even sees all of it and is so grand it has:

“… an organ built into the wall, and so large that it filled up the best part of that end. Beyond it, on the same side, was a door; and opposite, on each side of the fire-place, were also doors leading to the east front; but those I never went through as long as I stayed in the house, so I can’t tell you what lay beyond.”

As a child, lonely young Rosamond had found an imaginary friend outside the unhomelike big house who she insists is a real girl, though the nurse has seen Rosamond’s footprints in the snow and knows she has been alone. But the other “child” may not be imaginary and may be a ghost with bad intentions; one of the servants tells the nurse, “keep her from that child! It will lure her to her death! That evil child! Tell her it is a wicked, naughty child.”

But the ghost child is not evil, she has had evil done to her, by her father, watched by her sister, who is still alive and now an old woman. Reminded of this years later she sees, as does the nurse, an apparition of the scene where the ghost girl was killed all those years ago, while she watched on. So, this story does have a resolution and an explanation, though the rational explanation is that the ghost was real.

 

Hauntings by Vernon Lee (1890)

We were talking last evening—as the blue moon-mist poured in through the old-fashioned grated window, and mingled with our yellow lamplight at table—we were talking of a certain castle whose heir is initiated (as folk tell) on his twenty-first birthday to the knowledge of a secret so terrible as to overshadow his subsequent life. It struck us, discussing idly the various mysteries and terrors that may lie behind this fact or this fable, that no doom or horror conceivable and to be defined in words could ever adequately solve this riddle; that no reality of dreadfulness could seem caught but paltry, bearable, and easy to face in comparison with this vague we know not what. 

Vernon Lee is most famous now for her story collection Hauntings, though, like May Sinclair a generation later, she was a feminist campaigner. Lee also played the harpsichord and wrote several influential essays and books on art and aesthetics, especially concerning Renaissance Italy.

Lee herself was the epitome of the unhomelike: born to British parents in France, she lived most of her life in Italy, changed her name from the feminine Violet to the gender-neutral Vernon, dressed à la garçonne – as a boy – and may have had affairs with women at a time when women weren’t supposed to.

Lee continues the above thought, from the introduction to Hauntings, agreeing with writers of the genre that a supernatural story should not contain too much explanation:

And this leads me to say, that it seems to me that the supernatural, in order to call forth those sensations, terrible to our ancestors and terrible but delicious to ourselves, sceptical posterity, must necessarily, and with but a few exceptions, remain enwrapped in mystery.

Indeed, ‘tis the mystery that touches us, the vague shroud of moonbeams that hangs about the haunting lady, the glint on the warrior’s breastplate, the click of his unseen spurs, while the figure itself wanders forth, scarcely outlined, scarcely separated from the surrounding trees; or walks, and sucked back, ever and anon, into the flickering shadows.

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Contributed by Francis Booth, the author of several books on twentieth-century culture: Amongst Those Left: The British Experimental Novel 1940-1960 (published by Dalkey Archive); Everybody I Can Think of Ever: Meetings That Made the Avant-Garde; Girls in Bloom: Coming of Age in the Mid-Twentieth Century Woman’s Novel; Text Acts: Twentieth-Century Literary Eroticism; Comrades in Art: Revolutionary Art in America 1926-1938; High Collars & Monocles: 1920s Novels by British Female Couples; and A Girl Named Vera Can Never Tell a Lie: The Fiction of Vera Caspary.

Francis has also published several novels: The Code 17 series, set in the Swinging London of the 1960s and featuring aristocratic spy Lady Laura Summers; Young adult fantasy series The Watchers; and Young Adult fantasy novel Mirror Mirror. Francis lives on the South Coast of England. 

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The Shadow in the Corner by Mary Elizabeth Braddon (1879)

A fairly common trope in uncanny stories is that of a shadow. An example of this is the short story “The Shadow in the Corner” by Mary Elizabeth Braddon (1879), a serious, if rather sensationalist, female novelist who wrote ghost stories. Braddon is most famous for the 1862 novel, Lady Audley’s Secret.

As in other such stories, one of the characters is an educated, responsible man, in this case a scientist, who seeks to disprove what he sees as local superstition. This time we start with a spooky and unhomelike old house, which is believed to be haunted by the restless spirit of a previous owner who had hanged himself in one of the top floor servants’ rooms.

This discussion is excerpted from No Direction Home: The Uncanny in Literature by Francis Booth (©2023, by permission). Read “The Shadow in the Corner” in full.

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No Direction Home by Francis Booth
is available on Amazon U.S*. and Amazon U.K.
. . . . . . . . .

Wildheath Grange stood a little way back from the road, with a barren stretch of heath behind it, and a few tall fir-trees, with straggling wind-tossed heads, for its only shelter. It was a lonely house on a lonely road, little better than a lane, leading across a desolate waste of sandy fields to the sea-shore; and it was a house that bore a bad name among the natives of the village of Holcroft, which was the nearest place where humanity might be found.

It was a good old house, nevertheless, substantially built in the days when there was no stint of stone and timber — a good old grey stone house with many gables, deep window-seats, and a wide staircase, long dark passages, hidden doors in queer corners, closets as large as some modern rooms, and cellars in which a company of soldiers might have lain perdu.

This large, dilapidated house is occupied only by three elderly people: two old retainers in the form of the butler and his wife, and the rational, detached, scientist owner Michael, whose family home it has always been and who now lives there in peaceful solitude; “it would not have been difficult to have traced a certain affinity between the dull grey building and the man who lived in it.

Both seemed alike remote from the common cares and interests of humanity; both had an air of settled melancholy, engendered by perpetual solitude; both had the same faded complexion, the same look of slow decay.”

The butler has recently insisted that his wife must have a maid to help her in her old age; the owner has agreed though the butler complains that they will not be able to engage anyone local because of the house’s gloomy reputation.

They do find a young woman, recently orphaned (as we will discuss at length later, orphans have no home; everywhere is unhomelike) and gone to live with a distant relative, like many other literary orphans. She has been “educated above her station” by her late father but seems happy to find a “place,” literally and metaphorically.

Maria is innocent and attractive, as even the unworldly owner can see. Ostensibly because all the other rooms on the servant’s floor are damp, though probably because of his natural curmudgeonliness, the butler puts Maria in the room where the suicide of the present owner’s great uncle had taken place. Even the shy Maria has to say something to her new, skeptical master.

“I felt weighed down in my sleep as if there were some heavy burden laid upon my chest. It was not a bad dream, but it was a sense of trouble that followed me all through my sleep; and just at daybreak — it begins to be light a little after six — I woke suddenly, with the cold perspiration pouring down my face, and knew that there was something dreadful in the room.”
      “What do you mean by something dreadful. Did you see anything?”
      “Not much, sir; but it froze the blood in my veins, and I knew it was this that had been following me and weighing upon me all through my sleep. In the corner, between the fireplace and the wardrobe, I saw a shadow — a dim, shapeless shadow —” “Produced by an angle of the wardrobe, I daresay.” “No, sir; I could see the shadow of the wardrobe, distinct and sharp, as if it had been painted on the wall. This shadow was in the corner — a strange, shapeless mass; or, if it had any shape at all, it seemed —”
      “What?” asked Michael eagerly.
      “The shape of a dead body hanging against the wall!”

Michael looks for a rational explanation, even if it is a psychological one. He examines the room and spends the night there.

“Yes; there was the shadow: not the shadow of the wardrobe only—that was clear enough, but a vague and shapeless something which darkened the dull brown wall; so faint, so shadow, that he could form no conjecture as to its nature, or the thing it represented.”

Then he finds a hook high up in the wall that he cannot explain; he does not know that his great uncle had hanged himself from it, though the butler probably does. Michael tells the butler to move Maria to a room on a lower floor, but he ignores the instruction and tells Maria she must go back.

The next morning Maria does not come downstairs, and her room is locked. Breaking down the door, “Maria was hanging from the hook in the wall.”

Although Braddon’s sensational Lady Audley’s Secret is by no means either Gothic or uncanny, it does contain the dichotomy we have been looking at between the homelike and the unhomelike.

As Elaine Showalter summarized it, “Braddon’s bigamous heroine deserts her child, pushes husband number one down a well, thinks about poisoning husband number two and sets fire to a hotel in which her other male acquaintances are residing.”

“A glorious old place. A place that visitors fell in raptures with; feeling a yearning wish to have done with life, and to stay there forever, staring into the cool fish-ponds and counting the bubbles as the roach and carp rose to the surface of the water. A spot in which peace seemed to have taken up her abode, setting her soothing hand on every tree and flower, on the still ponds and quiet alleys, the shady corners of the old-fashioned rooms, the deep window-seats behind the painted glass, the low meadows and the stately avenue.” (Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Lady Audley’s Secret, 1862)

All these dark events are based around an idyllic, homelike, and peaceful country estate, which makes them seem even more uncanny.

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Contributed by Francis Booth, the author of several books on twentieth-century culture: Amongst Those Left: The British Experimental Novel 1940-1960 (published by Dalkey Archive); Everybody I Can Think of Ever: Meetings That Made the Avant-Garde; Girls in Bloom: Coming of Age in the Mid-Twentieth Century Woman’s Novel; Text Acts: Twentieth-Century Literary Eroticism; Comrades in Art: Revolutionary Art in America 1926-1938; High Collars & Monocles: 1920s Novels by British Female Couples; and A Girl Named Vera Can Never Tell a Lie: The Fiction of Vera Caspary.

Francis has also published several novels: The Code 17 series, set in the Swinging London of the 1960s and featuring aristocratic spy Lady Laura Summers; Young adult fantasy series The Watchers; and Young Adult fantasy novel Mirror Mirror. Francis lives on the South Coast of England. 

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All Souls’ & The Eyes: Two Uncanny Stories by Edith Wharton

A surprising number of women authors, some of whom may be better known for writing more homelike novels, also wrote very “unhomelike” short stories. One was Edith Wharton, who understood that before leading us into the world of the tense and unsettling, the author first has to make us feel calm and settled. 

Wharton said that this can be done by starting with a modern clean, electric-lit environment at least as well as with a gloomy old castle.

Sigmund Freud’s famous essay about weird literature is usually translated as The Uncanny. But the German word “unheimlich” literally means “unhomelike.”

No Direction Home by Francis Booth (©2023, from which this essay is excerpted, by permission) traces how uncanny literature takes us from the familiar, the reassuring, the homelike, into a world of the unfamiliar, the unsettling and the unhomelike.

Following is an introduction to Edith Wharton’s uncanny short stories, “All Souls’” and “The Eyes.”

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No Direction Home by Francis Booth
is available on Amazon U.S*. and Amazon U.K.
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All Souls’ by Edith Wharton (1937)

I read the other day in a book by a fashionable essayist that ghosts went out when electric light came in. What nonsense! The writer, though he is fond of dabbling in a literary way, in the supernatural, hasn’t even reached the threshold of his subject. As between turreted castles patrolled by headless victims with clanking chains, and the comfortable suburban house with a refrigerator and central heating where you feel, as soon as you’re in it, that there’s something wrong, give me the latter for sending a chill down the spine! 

Edith Wharton story “All Souls’” starts, as does Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Black Cat” and many other uncanny tales do, by claiming to contain just simple facts related by a friend or relative of the person to whom the uncanny experience happens.

Queer and inexplicable as the business was, on the surface it appeared fairly simple — at the time, at least; but with the passing of years, and owing to there not having been a single witness of what happened except Sara Clayburn herself, the stories about it have become so exaggerated, and often so ridiculously inaccurate, that it seems necessary that someone connected with the affair, though not actually present — I repeat that when it happened my cousin was (or thought she was) quite alone in her house — should record the few facts actually known. . . So I have written down, as clearly as I could, the gist of the various talks I had with cousin Sara, when she could be got to talk — it wasn’t often — about what occurred during that mysterious weekend. 

[“All Souls” is not yet in the public domain, so it’s difficult to find in full online. It’s part of several anthologies, and the lead story in Ghosts, a collection of her spooky stories collected by Wharton herself, not long before her death in 1937, the same year this story was written.]

 

“The Eyes” by Edith Wharton (1910)

In another, earlier Edith Wharton story, “The Eyes” is a tale presented as having been told by a member of a group of educated, rational friends sitting round a convivial but spooky fireplace in the dark, swapping ghost stories, which perhaps refers to the “dark and stormy night” when Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and John Polidori’sThe Vampyre were both conceived. Read “The Eyes” in full.

We had been put in the mood for ghosts, that evening, after an excellent dinner at our old friend Culwin’s, by a tale of Fred Murchard’s — the narrative of a strange personal visitation. Seen through the haze of our cigars, and by the drowsy gleam of a coal fire, Culwin’s library, with its oak walls and dark old bindings, made a good setting for such evocations; and ghostly experiences at first hand being, after Murchard’s brilliant opening, the only kind acceptable to us, we proceeded to take stock of our group and tax each member for a contribution. There were eight of us, and seven contrived, in a manner more or less adequate, to fulfill the condition imposed. It surprised us all to find that we could muster such a show of supernatural impressions.

 

The first person perspective in uncanny stories

Uncanny stories – including virtually all of Poe’s – are often told in the first person, rather than by an omniscient narrator, because no individual can ever know the whole truth and can never offer a complete, rationalised version of events seen from all points of view.

A Jane Austen-style omniscient, judgemental narrator would have to come down off the fence. This authorial judging is why her Northanger Abbey is not uncanny (nor is it meant to be: it is meant as a spoof of the uncanny).

“Alas!  If the heroine of one novel be not patronized by the heroine of another, from whom can she expect protection and regard? I cannot approve of it.”

Edith Wharton’s novels of manners, except for the rather uncanny Ethan Frome, with its frame narrative, are told in the third person with as stern a moral tone as Austen’s, whereas her uncanny short stories are mostly first-person. Uncanny stories are often told in the first person, because a single narrator cannot know everything as an omniscient narrator purports to.

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See also: Classic Uncanny Stories by British Women Writers

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Contributed by Francis Booth, the author of several books on twentieth-century culture: Amongst Those Left: The British Experimental Novel 1940-1960 (published by Dalkey Archive); Everybody I Can Think of Ever: Meetings That Made the Avant-Garde; Girls in Bloom: Coming of Age in the Mid-Twentieth Century Woman’s Novel; Text Acts: Twentieth-Century Literary Eroticism; Comrades in Art: Revolutionary Art in America 1926-1938; High Collars & Monocles: 1920s Novels by British Female Couples; and A Girl Named Vera Can Never Tell a Lie: The Fiction of Vera Caspary.

Francis has also published several novels: The Code 17 series, set in the Swinging London of the 1960s and featuring aristocratic spy Lady Laura Summers; Young adult fantasy series The Watchers; and Young Adult fantasy novel Mirror Mirror. Francis lives on the South Coast of England. 

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