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A Strange Journey: Tove Jansson and The Moomins

The Moomins (Mumintroll in Swedish) were the most famous creation of Finnish-Swedish author and artist Tove Jannson. Though this beloved creator wrote and illustrated many other works for both children and adults, the names of Tove Jansson and The Moomins will be forever linked.

The family of round, white fairytale creatures — which resemble hippopotamuses — first appeared in 1946, and were the central characters in a total of nine novels, four picture books, and a comic strip that ran for more than twenty years.

Although Tove was a prolific illustrator, painter, and writer for adults, the Moomins are her enduring legacy, beloved across Finland and the world, and still hugely popular today.

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Learn more about Tove Jansson
Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
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The origin of Moomintroll

The Moomins had their origins in the grey, dreary days of World War II, when Tove was struggling to paint, longing for an escape, and was “feeling depressed and scared of the bombing and wanted to get away from my gloomy thoughts to something else entirely …”

She turned to writing and drawing, and what emerged during the Winter War of 1939 – 1940 was the first story of Moomintroll, Moominmamma, and Moominpappa — a story of adventure, loss, and longing for safety.

Moomintroll and his mother are looking for a home for the winter, as well as for Moominpappa, who has disappeared. Along the way they find a friend, the animal “sniff,” and a new little family is formed.

The theme of displacement, the anxiety and danger inherent in the story, and the hope of change for the better all came out of Tove’s experiences of war, but her inclinations still lay towards happiness, towards a brighter future. She referred to this in her letters to her friend Eva Konikoff:

“For a whole year, Eva, I’ve not been able to paint. The war finally destroyed my pleasure in my painting … It took time to realize that what matters is a path, not a goal. Now I want my painting to be something that springs naturally from myself, preferably from my happiness. And I am determined to be happy…”

In the new world that she created, Moomintroll’s journey ends in such a place of happiness: a beautiful valley laden with fruit and flowers and sunshine, which Tove named Moominvalley. The book was a creation story of sorts, explaining the habits of Moomintrolls (such as hibernating from November to April).

It also establishes Moominpappa as an “unusual Moomintroll” because of his restlessness and longing for adventure, and Moominmamma as a central character of strength who holds the family together.

The original title of this first Moomin story was Moomintroll’s Strange Journey, but it is not mentioned in letters or notes until 1944, when Tove’s brother Per Olav was home on leave from the eastern front.

Tove then wrote in her diary, “I felt I wanted to write a fair copy of Moomintroll’s Strange Journey and change it.”

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Tove Jansson with 3-dimensional Moomins in 1956
Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
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The Moomins emerge: First publication

In a fit of joyous enthusiasm, she finished the new version in a few days and handed it in at Söderströms Publishers in May 1944. She celebrated by buying a new hat for spring, blue and flowery, “my first really feminine and idiotic one.”

However, it was a year later, in June 1945, that she noted in her diary, “Received the proofs of The Moomins and the Great Flood [the new working title for Moomintroll’s Strange Journey] and made a sort of start on the next Moomin book.”

The book, ultimately published under the title The Little Trolls and the Great Flood, rather than went largely unnoticed. There was just one review, by Gudrun Mörne in Arbetarbladet in January 1946, which was largely positive, but the book sold just 246 copies in that year.

The name Moomintroll itself came from her Swedish maternal uncle, Einar. In an interview in 1947, Tove explained:

“… When I was a small child I used to steal food from the larder. And then my uncle said, ‘Watch out for the cold Moomintrolls. They rush out of their hideyholes the moment a larder thief shows herself and begin to rub their snouts against her legs and then she begins to freeze so that everyone can see that there goes someone who’s been stealing jam and liver pâté.’”

 

A new passion

Tove herself became enthralled with the Moomins, and often had to force herself to stop working on them in order to do other things. The second book, Comet in Moominland, was written in the summer of 1945 and accepted for publication in spring of 1946.

This was quickly followed by The Hobgoblin’s Hat, which she wrote in summer 1946. These first three Moomin books established Tove’s reputation as a “double artist,” one who worked with both images and words.

She took a lot of inspiration for the natural world of Moominvalley (and the other landscapes of the Moomin books) from her summers spent on the Pellinge archipelago.

From the time she was born, Tove had spent weeks each year at the family’s various summer houses, where wild weather and the power of the sea were forces that couldn’t be escaped. Her father had a passion for the wildness of the archipelago and its seascapes, and this passion would later be shared by Moominpappa.

Storms and bad weather also feature heavily in the various catastrophes and disasters that the Moomin family face throughout the books, and some of the descriptions of the natural world that surrounds the Moomins read like prescient warnings of climate change:

“… the great gap that had been the sea in front of them, the dark red sky overhead, and behind, the forest panting in the heat.”

Söderströms also published Comet in Moominland, with a glowing blurb on the back cover which spoke of Tove as a “talented and imaginative woman who knows just what children like to hear.”

Commercially, it was no more of a success than the first book, but Finland-Swedish reviews were generally positive. Already, the Moomin books were talked about as books that held appeal for both children and adults, and were compared to Winnie-the-Pooh.

 

First Moomin success: The Hobgoblin’s Hat

The Hobgoblin’s Hat, the third book in the Moomin series, was published by Schildts and was the first commercial success. While writing it, Tove fell violently in love with Vivica Bandler, a theatre director, and this new Moomin story left behind the anxiety and tension of the first two war-time books.

Instead, Tove explored love, friendship, and the affinity between two creatures — Thingumy and Bob, also the pet names that she and Vivica had for each other — who wander into Moominvalley one summer’s day bearing a mysterious suitcase. In 1947, Tove wrote to Vivica:

“The Moomin book’s finished. Thingumy and Bob had now run riot at the end and definitely overcome the Groke [the name Tove and Vivica gave to the “enemy of love,” the laws and social conventions that outlawed homosexuality]. They are inseparable and sleep together in a desk drawer. No one understands their language, but that doesn’t matter so long as they themselves know what it’s all about…”

Tove also continued to be inspired by her love for the islands of the archipelago on which she spent so many summers; by the landscape and the seas and the wild weather. The Hobgoblin’s Hat features storms that turn the sky yellow, thunder and lightning and rain, and crashing waves that keep the character Snufkin awake.

At the same time Tove also made far more use of color in her illustrations: in contrast to the gloomy Indian ink that she used to illustrate the first two books, the Moomin summer of The Hobgoblin’s Hat is as “gaudy as an engagement bouquet.”

The book was published in 1948 and received several good reviews. In a survey of children’s books for Christmas 1948, Solveig von Schoultz devoted a large amount of space to The Hobgoblin’s Hat, writing that, “Pictures and text belong organically together and have the same qualities; one can’t talk about illustrations in the normal sense, but rather of an artist with two native languages.”

It was also the first Moomin book to be translated into English: in spring of 1950, The Hobgoblin’s Hat was published in the UK as Finn Family Moomintroll.

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Hell’s growl-jumps: a theatrical triumph

On 29th December 1949, the first Moomin theatre play was performed. Moomintroll and the Comet drew on Comet in Moominland, The Hobgoblin’s Hat, and also the fourth book in the series, The Exploits of Moominpappa (a kind of biography of Moominpappa’s early life, which was a great success with the critics).

It was directed by Vivica Bandler, and Tove worked on the script as well as the costumes and scenery. She was determined to experience every aspect of working in the theatre, and after the dress rehearsal wrote to Eva: “It was so appallingly awful that there must be a good chance the first night will go well. Snufkin overslept after a party and didn’t turn up at all…”

Her prediction was right. The opening performance received generally good reviews although some parents complained of the play’s “strong language.”

Expressions such as “begrowled” and “hell’s growl-jumps” had largely passed over the children’s heads, but caused consternation among the adults. One father wrote, “…in its present form, with its boozing prophets and strong expletives, I cannot recommend it.”

This theatrical experience would later be turned into the book Moominsummer Madness, published in 1954, in which the dress rehearsal of Moominpappa’s tragic play is full of errors and poor performances.

 

“Moomin duties” and international fame

Even before The Exploits of Moominpappa, the Moomins had begun to expand beyond the books. Various “Moomin duties” were beginning to take up Tove’s time. She wrote to Eva in the spring of 1950:

“These Moomin duties seem to be swamping me….there are constant interviews and arrangements to do with the books … Moomin ceramics and Moomin slides you look at through special viewers and whatnot. And then the Moomin opposition, help! — all those aggressive people who scold me about the poor troll …”

Moomin illustrations were appearing outside of the books. Two short Moomin stories appeared in newspapers, while Tove was invited to exhibit Moomin illustrations in Norway.

The Moomins even advanced into academic circles: there were invitations from Helsinki University, the Helsinki School of Economics, and the universities of Lund, Oslo, and Gothenburg to discuss “the new children’s literature.”

The Moomins, it seemed, were everywhere, but Tove remained protective of her creation and famously turned down the advances of the Walt Disney company to make Moomin cartoons.

The Book About Moomin, Mymble and Little My was the first full Moomin picture book. It used cut-out methods and startling combinations of colors to great effect. It won Tove her first award, the Nils Holgersson Plaque awarded by the General Association of Swedish Libraries.

This was followed, after Moominland Midwinter in 1957, by the Elsa Beskow Plaque, the Rudolf Koivu Prize, and the Swedish Literature Association’s Prize.

The Moomins traveled even further with the introduction of a comic strip in the London Evening News. After several months of back and forth over contracts, the first strip was published in September 1954, and within two years was running in twenty countries.

It was both exciting and draining for Tove. Having regular income was a huge improvement to her previous ever-desperate finances, but the amount of work involved was overwhelming.

“This is no bit of fun on the side,” she wrote. Each week she would send off six “daily episodes” to London, for a strip that overall would last three months. Her contract was for seven years.

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The end of a love affair

After several years, the pleasure and excitement of the comic strips, and the opportunities they gave Tove to develop the characters, were far outweighed by the stress of constantly having to find new ideas.

She noted sarcastically, “It’s going so well I can’t help getting rich even if they keep cheating me.” But she often spoke of how creating the strips had become constraining, turning the pleasure of creating art into the stress of a deadline and the encumbrance of duty.

She had financial freedom, but the associated contracts, correspondence, appearances, and interviews drained her time and energy and left her with little desire to work. She began to feel ambivalent towards the Moomins, and increasingly frustrated and angry with what felt like a living creature beyond her control that also prevented her from painting.

As early as 1955, she was complaining: “I can’t recall exactly when I became hostile to my work, or how it happened and what I should do to recapture my natural pleasure in it …” She felt hidden behind the Moomins and her identity as “troll-mother.”

By 1957 Tove was in negotiations over contracts and rights to see if she could end the arrangement early. Eventually, it was agreed that Tove would continue for two more years, up to the end date of the original contract. However, the newspapers were keen to continue the strips beyond that time, and it was agreed that a successor would have to be found.

For Tove, this was no problem: she had already collaborated with her brother Lars (also a writer and artist) on several other books, and he was the natural choice. In 1960, Lars officially took over the Moomin strip series, along with the financial side of the “Moomin business.” The strip ran under his direction until 1975.

A company was also founded, Moomin Characters, to look after rights and production of merchandise (which by this time included wallpaper, cards, puzzles, crockery, ties, mugs, bookmarks, calendars, dolls, and braces and suspenders).

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Moomin Shop in Itis Mall, Helskinki
Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
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The last of the Moomins for Tove

After leaving behind the Moomin strips, she made as much of a clean break as she could. In letters to friends, she was almost brutally dismissive of the characters and the world she had created, saying that she had “forced her brain to work with trivial ideas which made real ideas disappear,” and that working on the comic strips had been like a “threadbare marriage.”

Almost with relief, she noted her belief that the demand for the Moomins was at last abating: “It won’t be long before no one will ever again want trolls made of marzipan or soap, or wear them pinned to their bosoms.”

In January 1961 she wrote that she would never again “be able to write about those happy idiots who forgive one another and never realize they’re being fooled.”

However, separating herself from the desire to tell stories was not so easy. She spoke of Tales from Moominvalley as her last Moomin book, published in 1962, but two more would follow: Moominpappa at Sea (1965) and Moominvalley in November (1970), in which the family has left Moominvalley. This final book had no Moomins in it at all. 

 

Legacy of The Moomins 

Tove would never be entirely free of the Moomins. Her belief that all the hype over the Moomins was waning was perhaps wishful thinking, and over the following decades there would be more plays, television adaptations, and hundreds of different items of merchandise.

Although Tove developed an equally strong reputation as an author of books for adults, any interviews that she granted would inevitably come around to the Moomins, and considerable correspondence — to which she diligently replied right up until her death in 2001 — was also largely from Moomin fans.

The Moomin books have been translated into some fifty languages. New stories continue to be written using original drawings and materials from Tove’s vast archive, control of which is managed by her niece Sophia.

There have been three feature films: Moomin and Midsummer Madness (2008), Moomins and the Comet Chase (2010), and Moomins on the Riviera (2014).

In addition, there is a Moomin theme park — Moomin World in Naantali, Finland — and a comprehensive, interactive Moomin website, where readers can explore Moominvalley, delve into the history of the books, find out all about the characters, and take the quiz to see which Moomin character they are (this reader is a proud Moominmamma).

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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. 

 

Further reading and sourcesThe Moomins (available separately and in various collected editions)Tove Jansson: Life, Art, Words by Boel Westin (Sort of Books, 2018)Tove Jansson: Work and Love by Dr Tuula Karjalainen (Penguin, 2016)Letters from Tove, edited by Boel Westin and Helen Svensson (Sort Of Books, 2020) Moomins websiteTove Jansson website

The post A Strange Journey: Tove Jansson and The Moomins appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.

The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall (1928)

Since its first appearance in 1928, The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall (1880 – 1943) has spurred much discussion and controversy. The semi-autobiographical novel about a young woman’s coming to terms with her lesbian identity caused a furor when first published in England.

Once denounced as immoral, it has also been praised as a courageous work of literature. It shocked some members “proper” society and served as an awakening to others who felt isolated by repressive social mores. 

The Well of Loneliness is a semiautobiographical story of Radclyffe Hall’s own life. Shockingly candid for its time, this novel was the very first to condemn homophobic society.

A book ahead of its time

At the time it was published, the story of same-sex love between women was a topic that was rarely written about outside of scientific textbooks.

Banned outright in 1928 when first published in Britain, the novel went to trial for obscenity. Its publication marked an act of great courage by the publisher, which almost ruined Hall’s literary career. Although many decades have passed since its initial publication, the issued of prejudice and persecution that Radclyffe Hall addresses remain relevant today.

Receiving pushback from critics for her “sexually deviant” novel, Hall was swept into legal battles. Despite its early banning, the novel’s notoriety helped push narratives of lesbians in Western literature to the forefront. Hall made it clear to her publisher that she wanted the original text published, declaring:

“I have put my pen at the service of some of the most persecuted and misunderstood people in the world … So far as I know nothing of the kind has ever been attempted before in fiction.”

Surprisingly, The Well of Loneliness received more liberal treatment in American courts than it did in England. Justices dismissed charges of violation of Section 1141 of the Penal Law against Covici-Freide, Inc., American publishers of the book. The Court said:

“The book in question deals with a delicate social problem, which in itself cannot be said to be in violation of the law unless it is written in such a manner as to make it obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, or indecent, and tends to deprave and corrupt minds open to immoral influences.”

After Hall’s death in 1943, the ban on The Well of Loneliness was eventually overturned on appeal. Although she was vindicated by the American verdict, she steered clear of equal controversy in her subsequent literary works. 

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Learn more about Radclyffe Hall 
Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
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Hall described herself as a “congenital invert,” referring to an innate characteristic. The term comes from early 20th-century sexologist Richard von Krafft-Ebing and refers to a type of inborn gender reversal where women could be born with a masculine soul and vice versa.

Though at the time the term referred more to homosexuality, the concept seems more akin to what today is referred to as transgender or nonbinary.

Brief synopses of The Well of Loneliness

What has remained Radclyffe Hall’s most famous work, The Well of Loneliness (1928), features a lesbian from an upper class family in England. Though born a daughter, her father bestows upon her the masculine name of Stephen.

The father is the epitome of kindness and understanding; Stephen’s mother Anna is more of the delicate society type, but though she doesn’t have the same understanding of her unusual daughter, is never unkind or uncaring.

After going through two intense, failed relationships, Stephen winds up with her partner, Mary Llewellyn. Their journey through a lesbian relationship during an era that rejected this expression of sexuality poses the setting and plot of the novel.

According to an introduction to an earlier edition of the book:

“The Well of Loneliness presents the life story of Stephen Gordon, the only child of Sir Philip and Lady Anna Gordon, who ardently desired a son in her place.

How this circumstance influenced a natural tendency towards masculinity in Stephen, her tortured adolescence, and her gradual development into maturity in this direction, with all its tragic implications, is the theme that is explored. Radclyffe Hall has treated this subject with delicacy and deep psychological insight, combined with frankness and sincerity.”

And more from a later edition of The Well of Loneliness  (1990, Anchor Books/Doubleday):  

“Originally published in 1928, Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness is the timeless story of a lesbian couple’s struggle to be accepted by ‘polite’ society. When an unconventional woman named Stephen Gordon falls in love with an ingenue named Mary, their love affair gives Stephen her first taste of happiness.

However, the pleasure the lovers find in each other is quickly tarnished by the disapproval of friends and family who refuse to welcome the scandalous couple into their homes. But the most difficult test of the women’s love for each other comes when a young man offers to give Mary the respectability that Stephen can not.”

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Quotes by Radclyffe Hall, author of The Well of Loneliness.
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Concern over censorship

Though considered bold and provocative for its time, many mainstream newspapers recoiled at the banning and censorship of this landmark book. Certainly, this echoes today’s emboldened attempts (often, alas, successful) to ban books with queer subject matter in libraries and schools.

Here is one of a number of such commentaries, expressing alarm over the censorship of The Well of Loneliness:

From the Daily Herald (London), August 24, 1928:

The question of literary censorship is brought to the forefront by the announcement that Miss Radclyffe Hall’s novel, The Well of Loneliness, has been withdrawn from publication at the request of the Home Secretary.

As the publishers had sent the book to Sir William Joynson-Hicks for judgment, they cannot very well ignore his request, but all who have at heart the interests of literature will be anxious that further light should be should be thrown on the subject.

The question is one which cannot be considered only as affecting the sale of a particular book. What the public is entitled to know is, on what grounds and by whose judgment are books banned or not banned? If the control of English literature is to be left to Sir Joynson-Hicks, authors and readers may well demand to know what qualifications he possessess as a judge of literature.

This is not by any means the first occasion on which a book or play dealing seriously with a grave social issue has been suppressed, while books and plays which are deliberately provocative in their sensual appeal pass unchallenged.

This question of censorship is one which calls for very grave consideration, and we hope that a full explanation will be forthcoming from the Home Office.

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More about The Well of Loneliness Wikipedia Reader discussion on Goodreads Full text of The Well of Loneliness on Project Gutenberg Australia Banned Books Week: The Well of Loneliness   (NY Public Library)

The post The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall (1928) appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.

Body of this Death: Poems by Louise Bogan (1923) – full text

Louise Bogan (1897 – 1970) has largely fallen off the radar when it comes to American poetry of the 20th century, yet in her time she was one of the most lauded poets of her generation. Presented here is the full text of her first published book of poems, Body of this Death (1923).

The title is derived from the quote, “Who shall deliver me from the body of this death?” from the King James Bible.

Bogan’s poetry was praised by her contemporaries for its spare, restrained style. Much of her expression and subject matter was derived from her personal life (which wasn’t an easy one), yet her subtlety prevented her poems from becoming confessional.

Bogan was the fourth Poetry Laureate by the Library of Congress in 1945, the first woman to hold this position. She was also a poetry reviewer for the New Yorker for nearly four decades, much respected for her writings as a literary critic.

This collection contains one of Bogan’s most anthologized poems, “Medusa.” Body of this Death (which the poet dedicated to her mother, Mathilde Alexander) is in the public domain.

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Learn more about Louise Bogan

 

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Body of this Death by Louise Bogan

CONTENTS
A Tale
Decoration
Medusa
Sub Contra
A Letter
The Frightened Man
Betrothed
Words for Departure
Ad Casitatem
Knowledge
Portrait
The Romantic
May Voice Not Being Proud
Statue and Birds
Epitaph for a Romantic Woman
The Alchemist
Men Loved Wholly Beyond Wisdom
The Crows
Memory
Women
Last Hill in a Vista
Song
Stanza
The Changed Woman
Chanson un Peu Naïve
Fifteenth Farewell
Sonnet

 

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A TALE
This youth too long has heard the break
Of waters in a land of change.
He goes to see what suns can make
From soil more indurate and strange.

He cuts what holds his days together
And shuts him in, as lock on lock:
The arrowed vane announcing weather,
The tripping racket of a clock;

Seeking, I think, a light that waits
Still as a lamp upon a shelf, —
A land with hills like rocky gates
Where no sea leaps upon itself.

But he will find that nothing dares
To be enduring, save where, south
Of hidden deserts, torn fire glares
On beauty with a rusted mouth, —

Where something dreadful and another
Look quietly upon each other.

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DECORATION
A macaw preens upon a branch outspread
With jewelry of seed. He’s deaf and mute.
The sky behind him splits like gorgeous fruit
And claw-like leaves clutch light till it has bled.
The raw diagonal bounty of his wings
Scrapes on the eye color too chafed. He beats
A flattered tail out against gauzy heats;
He has the frustrate look of cheated kings.
And all the simple evening passes by:
A gillyflower spans its little height
And lovers with their mouths press out their grief.
The bird fans wide his striped regality
Prismatic, while against a sky breath-white
A crystal tree lets fall a crystal leaf.

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MEDUSA
I had come to the house, in a cave of trees,
Facing a sheer sky.
Everything moved, — a bell hung ready to strike,
Sun and reflection wheeled by.

When the bare eyes were before me
And the hissing hair,
Held up at a window, seen through a door.
The stiff bald eyes, the serpents on the forehead
Formed in the air.

This is a dead scene forever now.
Nothing will ever stir.
The end will never brighten it more than this,
Nor the rain blur.

The water will always fall, and will not fall,
And the tipped bell make no sound.
The grass will always be growing for hay
Deep on the ground.

And I shall stand here like a shadow
Under the great balanced day,
My eyes on the yellow dust, that was lifting in the wind,
And does not drift away.

 

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SUB CONTRA
Notes on the tuned frame of strings
Plucked or silenced under the hand
Whimper lightly to the ear,
Delicate and involute,
Like the mockery in a shell.
Lest the brain forget the thunder
The roused heart once made it hear, —
Rising as that clamor fell, —
Let there sound from music’s root
One note rage can understand,
A fine noise of riven things.
Build there some thick chord of wonder;
Then, for every passion’s sake,
Beat upon it till it break.

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A LETTER
I came here, being stricken, stumbling out
At last from streets; the sun, decreasing, took me
For days, the time being the last of autumn,
The thickets not yet stark, but quivering
With tiny colors, like some brush strokes in
The manner of the pointillists; small yellows
Dart shaped, little reds in different pattern,
Clicks and notches of color on threaded bushes,
A cracked and fluent heaven, and a brown earth.
I had these, and my food and sleep — enough.

This is a countryside of roofless houses, —
Taverns to rain, — doorsteps of millstones, lintels
Leaning and delicate, foundations sprung to lilacs,
Orchards where boughs like roots strike into the sky.
Here I could well devise the journey to nothing,
At night getting down from the wagon by the black barns,
The zenith a point of darkness, breaking to bits,
Showering motionless stars over the houses.
Scenes relentless — the black and white grooves of a woodcut.

But why the journey to nothing or any desire?
Why the heart taken by even senseless adventure,
The goal a coffer of dust? Give my mouth to the air,
Let arrogant pain lick my flesh with a tongue
Rough as a cat’s; remember the smell of cold mornings,
The dried beauty of women, the exquisite skin
Under the chins of young girls, young men’s rough beards, —
The cringing promise of this one, that one’s apology
For the knife struck down to the bone, gladioli in sick rooms,
Asters and dahlias, flowers like ruches, rosettes. . .

Forever enough to part grass over the stones
By some brook or well, the lovely seed-shedding stalks;
To hear in the single wind diverse branches
Repeating their sounds to the sky — that sky like scaled mackerel,
Fleeing the fields — to be defended from silence,
To feel my body as arid, as safe as a twig
Broken away from whatever growth could snare it
Up to a spring, or hold it softly in summer
Or beat it under in snow.
                                                                  I must get well.
Walk on strong legs, leap the hurdles of sense,
Reason again, come back to my old patchwork logic,
Addition, subtraction, money, clothes, clocks,
Memories (freesias, smelling slightly of snow and of flesh
In a room with blue curtains) ambition, despair.
I must feel again who had given feeling over,
Challenge laughter, take tears, play the piano,
Form judgments, blame a crude world for disaster.

To escape is nothing. Not to escape is nothing.
The farmer’s wife stands with a halo of darkness
Rounding her head. Water drips in the kitchen
Tapping the sink. To-day the maples have split
Limb from the trunk with the ice, a fresh wooden wound.
The vines are distorted with ice, ice burdens the breaking
Roofs I have told you of.
                                                  Shall I play the pavanne
For a dead child or the scene where that girl
Lets fall her hair, and the loud chords descend
As though her hair were metal, clashing along
Over the tower, and a dumb chord receives it?
This may be wisdom: abstinence, beauty is nothing,
That you regret me, that I feign defiance.
And now I have written you this, it is nothing.

 

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THE FRIGHTENED MAN
In fear of the rich mouth
I kissed the thin, —
Even that was a trap
To snare me in.

Even she, so long
The frail, the scentless,
Is become strong
And proves relentless.

O, forget her praise,
And how I sought her
Through a hazardous maze
By shafted water.

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BETROTHED
You have put your two hands upon me, and your mouth,
You have said my name as a prayer.
Here where trees are planted by the water
I have watched your eyes, cleansed from regret,
And your lips, closed over all that love cannot say.

My mother remembers the agony of her womb
And long years that seemed to promise more than this.
She says, “You do not love me,
You do not want me,
You will go away.”

In the country whereto I go
I shall not see the face of my friend
Nor her hair the color of sunburnt grasses;
Together we shall not find
The land on whose hills bends the new moon

In air traversed of birds.
What have I thought of love?
I have said, “It is beauty and sorrow.”
I have thought that it would bring me lost delights, and splendor
As a wind out of old time  . . .

But there is only the evening here,
And the sound of willows
Now and again dipping their long oval leaves in the water.

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WORDS FOR DEPARTURE
Nothing was remembered, nothing forgotten.
When we awoke, wagons were passing on the warm summer
                    pavements,
The window-sills were wet from rain in the night,
Birds scattered and settled over chimneypots
As among grotesque trees.

Nothing was accepted, nothing looked beyond.
Slight-voiced bells separated hour from hour.
The afternoon sifted coolness
And people drew together in streets becoming deserted.
There was a moon, and light in a shop-front,
And dusk falling like precipitous water.

Hand clasped hand,
Forehead still bowed to forehead —
Nothing was lost, nothing possessed,
There was no gift nor denial.

2.
I have remembered you.
You were not the town visited once,
Nor the road falling behind running feet.

You were as awkward as flesh
And lighter than frost or ashes.

You were the rind,
And the white-juiced apple,
The song, and the words waiting for music.

3.
You have learned the beginning;
Go from mine to the other.

Be together; eat, dance, despair,
Sleep, be threatened, endure.
You will know the way of that.

But at the end, be insolent;
Be absurd — strike the thing short off;
Be mad — only do not let talk
Wear the bloom from silence.

And go away without fire or lantern.
Let there be some uncertainty about your departure.

 

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AD CASTITATEM
I make the old sign.
I invoke you,
Chastity.
Life moves no more
A breeze of flame.
Alike upon the ground
Struck by the same withering
Lie the fruitful and the barren branch.
Alike over them
Closes the mould.
I call upon you,
Who have not known you;
I invoke you,
Stranger though I be.
Against this blackened heart
I hold your offerings —
Water, and a stone.

In this ravaged country,
In this season not yours,
You having no season,
I call upon you without echo.
Hear me, infertile,
Beautiful futility.

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KNOWLEDGE
Now that I know
How passion warms little
Of flesh in the mould,
And treasure is brittle, —

I’ll lie here and learn
How, over their ground,
Trees make a long shadow
And a light sound.

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PORTRAIT
She has no need to fear the fall
Of harvest from the laddered reach
Of orchards, nor the tide gone ebbing
               From the steep beach.

Nor hold to pain’s effrontery
Her body’s bulwark, stern and savage,
Nor be a glass, where to forsee
              Another’s ravage.

What she has gathered, and what lost,
She will not find to lose again.
She is possessed by time, who once
              Was loved by men.

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THE ROMANTIC
Admit the ruse to fix and name her chaste
With those who sleep the spring through, one and one,
Cool nights, when laurel builds up, without haste,
Its precise flower, like a pentagon.

In her obedient breast, all that ran free
You thought to bind, like echoes in a shell.
At the year’s end, you promised, it would be
The unstrung leaves, and not her heart, that fell.

So the year broke and vanished on the screen
You cast about her; summer went to haws.
This, by your leave, is what she should have been, —
Another man will tell you what she was.

 

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MY VOICE NOT BEING PROUD
My voice, not being proud
Like a strong woman’s, that cries
Imperiously aloud
That death disarm her, lull her —
Screams for no mourning color
Laid menacingly, like fire,
Over my long desire.
It will end, and leave no print.
As you lie, I shall lie:
Separate, eased, and cured.
Whatever is wasted or wanted
In this country of glass and flint
Some garden will use, once planted.
As you lie alone, I shall lie,
O, in singleness assured,
Deafened by mire and lime.
I remember, while there is time.

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STATUE AND BIRDS
Here, in the withered arbor, like the arrested wind,
Straight sides, carven knees,
Stands the statue, with hands flung out in alarm
Or remonstrances.

Over the lintel sway the woven bracts of the vine
In a pattern of angles.
The quill of the fountain falters, woods rake on the sky
Their brusque tangles.

The birds walk by slowly, circling the marble girl,
The golden quails,
The pheasants closed up in their arrowy wings.
Dragging their sharp tails.

The inquietudes of the sap and of the blood are spent.
What is forsaken will rest.
But her heel is lifted, — she would flee, — the whistle of the birds
Fails on her breast.

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EPITAPH FOR A ROMANTIC WOMAN
She has attained the permanence
She dreamed of, where old stones lie sunning.
Untended stalks blow over her
Even and swift, like young men running.

Always in the heart she loved
Others had lived, — she heard their laughter.
She lies where none has lain before,
Where certainly none will follow after.

 

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THE ALCHEMIST
I burned my life, that I might find
A passion wholly of the mind,
Thought divorced from eye and bone,
Ecstasy come to breath alone.
I broke my life, to seek relief
From the flawed light of love and grief.

With mounting beat the utter fire
Charred existence and desire.
It died low, ceased its sudden thresh.
I had found unmysterious flesh —
Not the mind’s avid substance — still
Passionate beyond the will.

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MEN LOVED WHOLLY BEYOND WISDOM
Men loved wholly beyond wisdom
Have the staff without the banner.
Like a fire in a dry thicket
Rising within women’s eyes
Is the love men must return.
Heart, so subtle now, and trembling,
What a marvel to be wise,
To love never in this manner !
To be quiet in the fern
Like a thing gone dead and still,
Listening to the prisoned cricket
Shake its terrible, dissembling
Music in the granite hill.

 

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THE CROWS
The woman who has grown old
And knows desire must die,
Yet turns to love again,
Hears the crows’ cry.

She is a stem long hardened,
A weed that no scythe mows.
The heart’s laughter will be to her
The crying of the crows.

Who slide in the air with the same voice
Over what yields not, and what yields,
Alike in spring, and when there is only bitter
Winter-burning in the fields.

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MEMORY
Do not guard this as rich stuff without mark
Closed in a cedarn dark,
Nor lay it down with tragic masks and greaves,
Licked by the tongues of leaves.

Nor let it be as eggs under the wings
Of helpless, startled things,
Nor encompassed by song, nor any glory
Perverse and transitory.

Rather, like shards and straw upon coarse ground,
Of little worth when found, —
Rubble in gardens, it and stones alike.
That any spade may strike.

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WOMEN
Women have no wilderness in them,
They are provident instead,
Content in the tight hot cell of their hearts
To eat dusty bread.

They do not see cattle cropping red winter grass,
They do not hear
Snow water going down under culverts
Shallow and clear.

They wait, when they should turn to journeys,
They stiffen, when they should bend.
They use against themselves that benevolence
To which no man is friend.

They cannot think of so many crops to a field
Or of clean wood cleft by an axe.
Their love is an eager meaninglessness
Too tense, or too lax.

They hear in every whisper that speaks to them
A shout and a cry.
As like as not, when they take life over their door-sills
They should let it go by.

 

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LAST HILL IN AVISTA
Come, let us tell the weeds in ditches
How we are poor, who once had riches,
And lie out in the sparse and sodden
Pastures that the cows have trodden,
The while an autumn night seals down
The comforts of the wooden town.

Come, let us counsel some cold stranger
How we sought safety, but loved danger.
So, with stiff walls about us, we
Chose this more fragile boundary:
Hills, where light poplars, the firm oak,
Loosen into a little smoke.

. . . . . . . . . .

SONG
Love me because I am lost;
Love me that I am undone.
That is brave, — no man has wished it.
Not one.

Be strong, to look on my heart
As others look on my face.
Love me, — I tell you that it is a ravaged
Terrible place.

. . . . . . . . . .

STANZA
No longer burn the hands that seized
Small wreaths from branches scarcely green.
Wearily sleeps the hardy, lean
Hunger that could not be appeased.
The eyes that opened to white day
Watch cloud that men may look upon:
Leda forgets the wings of the swan;
Danae has swept the gold away.

 

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THE CHANGED WOMAN
The light flower leaves its little core
Begun upon the waiting bough.
Again she bears what she once bore
And what she knew she re-learns now.

The cracked glass fuses at a touch.
The wound heals over, and is set
In the whole flesh, and is not much
Quite to remember or forget.

Rocket and tree, and dome and bubble
Again behind her freshened eyes
Are treacherous. She need not trouble.
Her lids will know them when she dies.

And while she lives, the unwise, heady
Dream, ever denied and driven,
Will one day find her bosom ready, —
That never thought to be forgiven.

. . . . . . . . . .

CHANSON UN PEU NAïVE
What body can be ploughed,
Sown, and broken yearly?
She would not die, she vowed,
But she has, nearly.
                 Sing, heart sing;
                 Call and carol clearly.

And, since she could not die,
Care would be a feather,
A film over the eye
Of two that lie together.
                 Fly, song, fly,
                 Break your little tether.

So from strength concealed
She makes her pretty boast:
Plain is a furrow healed
And she may love you most.
               Cry, song, cry,
               And hear your crying lost.

. . . . . . . . . .

FIFTEENTH FAREWELL
I
You may have all things from me, save my breath.
The slight life in my throat will not give pause
For your love, nor your loss, nor any cause.
Shall I be made a panderer to death,
Dig the green ground for darkness underneath,
Let the dust serve me, covering all that was
With all that will be? Better, from time’s claws,
The hardened face under the subtle wreath.

Cooler than stones in wells, sweeter, more kind
Than hot, perfidious words, my breathing moves
Close to my plunging blood. Be strong, and hang
Unriven mist over my breast and mind.
My breath! We shall forget the heart that loves,
Though in my body beat its blade, and its fang.

II
I erred, when I thought loneliness the wide
Scent of mown grass over forsaken fields,
Or any shadow isolation yields.
Loneliness was the heart within your side.
Your thought, beyond my touch, was tilted air
Ringed with as many borders as the wind.
How could I judge you gentle or unkind
When all bright flying space was in your care?

Now that I leave you, I shall be made lonely
By simple empty days, — never that chill
Resonant heart to strike between my arms
Again, as though distraught for distance, — only
Levels of evening, now, behind a hill,
Or a late cock-crow from the darkening farms.

 

. . . . . . . . . .

SONNET
Since you would claim the sources of my thought
Recall the meshes whence it sprang unlimed,
The reedy traps which other hands have timed
To close upon it. Conjure up the hot
Blaze that it cleared so cleanly, or the snow
Devised to strike it down. It will be free.
Whatever nets draw in to prison me
At length your eyes must turn to watch it go.

My mouth, perhaps, may learn one thing too well,
My body hear no echo save its own,
Yet will the desperate mind, maddened and proud,
Seek out the storm, escape the bitter spell
That we obey, strain to the wind, be thrown
Straight to its freedom in the thunderous cloud.

 

f

The post Body of this Death: Poems by Louise Bogan (1923) – full text appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.

Louise Bogan, Award-Winning 20th-Century Poet

Louise Bogan (August 11, 1897 – February 4, 1970) was a multi-award-winning American poet, essayist, and literary critic. Born in Livermore Falls, Maine, and educated in Boston, Massachusetts, she overcame numerous challenges throughout her life.

Her poetry is acclaimed for its subtlety, restraint, masterful use of crossed rhythms, economy of words, and use of lyrical forms. Many of her works explore the contradictions of the heart and mind.

Rising above childhood difficulties, divorce, and depression, she went on be selected as the fourth Poetry Laureate by the Library of Congress in 1945, the first woman to hold this position.

She received the Bollingen Prize from Yale University, a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts,’s and two fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation.

Early life and education

Born in Maine in 1897, Louise’s father was a mill worker. Her mother struggled with mental health issues. Throughout Louise’s childhood, her family moved around to many small towns around New England.

Her mother had extramarital affairs, frequently disappearing for long periods of time. This greatly troubled Louise and led to feelings of mistrust, betrayal, and grief, which became prominent themes in her poems.

After attending Mount St. Mary’s Academy, Louise entered Girls’ Latin School in Boston. Having written fantasies in her earlier years, she transitioned to writing poetry in her mid-teens.

These early works were modeled after the poems of Christina Rossetti, W.H. Auden, Rainer Maria Rilke, and William Butler Yeats. Several selections were published in the school journal and the Boston Evening Transcript.

University studies and marriage

Louise attended Boston University from 1915 through 1916. Declining a scholarship to Radcliffe, she fell in love and married Curt Alexander. The couple lived in New York and Panama, and their daughter, Mathilde (called Maidie), was born there.

Sadly, the marriage deteriorated after Louise’s older brother died in combat. In another tragic turn of events, after suffering complications from surgery, Curt passed away in 1920. Louise used some of her widow’s pension to study piano in Austria.

Upon her return to New York, she met Edmund Wilson, one of her first mentors. With his encouragement, Louise began earning money by writing literature reviews that were published in various periodicals. In addition, she was employed at a public library and a bookstore.

Louise struggled with raising her daughter on a low income. Eventually, Mathilde was sent to live with Louise’s parents.

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First publications; productive years

In 1923, Louise’s first book of poetry was published. Titled Body of This Death, it was notable for its short, formal lyrics about love, betrayal, and grief.

“Medusa,” which became one of the best-known poems from this collection, speaks of a traumatic event in Louise’s life that has become frozen in time. While writing this poem, Louise was receiving psychiatric treatment for depression, an illness that she continued to cope with for the rest of her life.

In addition to her writing, Louise served as the associate editor of The Measure: A Journal of Poetry from 1924 to 1925.

In 1925, Louise married Raymond Holden, a fellow writer and poet. As with her first marriage, this one was troubled, and Louise and Raymond divorced in 1937.

However, these years were some of Louise’s most productive ones, and she published two volumes of poetry. Dark Summer was published in 1929 and The Sleeping Fury followed in 1937.

The Sleeping Fury helped cement Louise’s status as a master of poetry. Writing in Books, a reviewer praised the collection’s “mastery of form” and “creative architecture,” lauding her for her talent as a sculptor of words.

Louise triumphed over many setbacks on the journey to publishing these works, including a 1929 fire that destroyed her manuscripts, the loss of Raymond’s inheritance, and hospitalization for depression.

Awards and new positions

Louise continued to gain critical recognition in the 1930s. She won fellowships for creative writing and poetry from the Guggenheim Foundation in 1933. She was hired as a poetry editor at the New Yorker, a job she held for 38 years.

Her reviews were celebrated by many in her field. W.H. Auden, a poet she greatly admired, declared that Louise was the finest poetry critic in the United States.

Throughout the 1940s, as Louise progressed with her writing, she earned more accolades. Poems and New Poems was published in 1941. William Rose Benét, a Saturday Review critic, wrote that this volume showed that Louise “has inherited the Celtic magic of language, but has blended it somehow with the tartness of New England.”

As further recognition of her immense talent, Louise was chosen as the Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1945. She was the first woman to hold this prestigious post, now known as U.S. Poet Laureate.

As the 1940s unfolded, writing poetry became more difficult for Louise. Although she still worked as a reviewer, her focus shifted to education. She took occasional teaching jobs and was a mentor to many younger poets.

Over the years, she served as a visiting professor at the University of Washington, Brandeis University, the University of Chicago, and the University of Arkansas.

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Later life; the legacy of Louise Bogan

In the 1950s and 1960s, Louise was honored for her achievements in her field. She won the Bollingen Prize in 1954 and earned an award from the Academy of American Poets in 1959.

She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters and received an award from the National Endowment for the Arts. Her final collection of poetry, The Blue Estuaries: Poems 1923–1968, was published in 1968.

After suffering a heart attack at her home, she passed away on February 4, 1970.

As Wendy Hirsch notes in American National Biography, while Louise Bogan felt invisible for most of her life, she stands today as “a poet’s poet.” Her works are rich sources of beauty and inspiration for those who are open to them.

While she lived at a time when other poets were experimenting with looser structures, Louise boldly breathed new life into traditional forms. Choosing and sculpting each line with precision, her poems were compact, every word imbued with the weight of raw emotion.

Although she faced challenges and tragedies in her life, she used each experience to grow, finding meaning in misfortune and creating beauty from sorro. That beauty lives on in each of the masterful works she crafted, waiting for new generations of readers to discover it.

More about Louise Bogan

Major works

Body of This Death (1923)Dark Summer (1929)Collected Poems (1923–1952)The Blue Estuaries (1968)

Nonfiction and autobiography

The Poet’s Alphabet: Reflections on the Literary Art and Vocation by Louise Bogan (1970)A Poet’s Prose: Selected Writings of Louise Bogan (2005)Journey Around My Room: The Autobiography of Louise Bogan (1980)

Letters, Biography, and Criticism

Louise Bogan: A Woman’s Words by William Jay Smith (1971)What the Woman Lived: Selected Letters of Louise Bogan, 1920–1970 (1973)Louise Bogan: A Portrait by Elizabeth Frank (1985)Louise Bogan’s Aesthetics of Limitation by Gloria Bowles (1987)

More information and sources

Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Poetry Foundation All Poetry Poet Seers Poetry Archive Poets.org My Poetic Side Library of Congress

The post Louise Bogan, Award-Winning 20th-Century Poet appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.

Lynch Law in All its Phases, 1892 Speech by Ida B. Wells (excerpt)

This portion of “Lynch Law in All its Phases,” Ida B. Wells’ 1892 speech given in Boston, is excerpted from Speaking While Female: 75 Extraordinary Speeches by American Women by Dana Rubin. Amplify Publishing Group, 2023.

From the publisher:

“This monumental collection of speeches charts the story of America as it unfolded through the decades, showing that at every critical juncture, women were speaking. It’s a long-needed corrective to the story we have always told ourselves about whose ideas and voices shaped the nation—a search for long-buried truths, a celebration, and an inspiration.”

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Available now from Amplify Publishing
and for pre-order on Bookshop.org* and Amazon.* 
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Ida B Wells’ 1892 lynch law speech—an introduction

Born into slavery, journalist Ida B. Wells grew up in the South and intended to stay there, believing that with rising wealth and education, thrift, and economy — the doctrine of self-help — Blacks would be accepted into the wider American culture.

But everything changed for her in March 1892, when a fight outside a store in a Memphis neighborhood known as “the Curve” led to the wounding of two White police officers.

Three Black men were arrested, including her close friend, Tom Moss. While in police custody, the men were tortured, and as Wells put it, “found in an old field horribly shot to pieces.”

In an 1893 speech at Boston’s Tremont Temple, Wells did not spare her audience the wrenching details. Moss, she said, had “begged for his life, for the sake of his wife, his little daughter and his unborn infant.” His last word to his tormenters were: “If you will kill us, turn our faces to the West.”

As Wells put it: “I have no power to describe the feeling of horror that possessed every member of the race in Memphis when the truth dawned upon us that the protection of the law which we had so long enjoyed was no longer ours; all had been destroyed in a night.”

Death threats in the wake of those events drove Wells to Chicago, where she made her life’s mission the campaign against lynching – essentially, mob-driven murder of individuals with no due process of law. She investigated dozens of abhorrent cases, conducted countless interviews, collected data, and used her own insubstantial funds to publish her findings.

She also wrote and spoke bluntly about “that old threadbare lie that Negro men rape White women” as a would-be justification for lynching.

An impassioned speaker, she made her case at large conferences, in meeting halls, and in modest churches, helping turn the tide against the atrocity of lynching with her words. It was an uphill battle. She endured harassment and financial hardship. Most of her editorials and articles were published in the Black-owned press, and only occasionally picked up by mainstream publications.

In 1898, she went to the White House to plead with President William McKinley for federal response to a lynching in South Carolina, and for compensation for the victim’s widow and children. She told him that in the previous twenty years, some ten thousand Black citizens had been lynched in America.

Ida B. Wells passed away in 1931. At the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, DC, one of her most enduring lines is emblazoned on the wall:

“The way to right wrongs its to turn the light of truth on them.”

Contributed by Dana Rubin, is a consultant, speechwriter, and speaker focused on expanding diverse voices and viewpoints in the public discourse. She works with organizations to develop their talent and support underrepresented voices in becoming recognized experts, brand ambassadors, rainmakers, and role models for the next generation.

An award-winning journalist, she lives in New York, where she writes and speaks about the history of women’s speech and voice. She created the Speaking While Female Speech Bank to broaden our understanding of who actually spoke in history. Visit SpeakingWhileFemale.co to find more speeches by women.

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Learn more about Ida B. Wells
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Ida B. Wells: “Lynch Law in All its Phases”

February 13, 1893 — Boston Monday Lectureship, Tremont Temple, Boston MA

I am before the American people today through no inclination of my own, but because of a deep seated conviction that the country at large does not know the extent to which lynch law prevails in parts of the Republic nor the conditions which force into exile those who speak the truth. I cannot believe that the apathy and indifference which so largely obtains regarding mob rule is other than the result of ignorance of the true situation.

And yet, the observing and thoughtful must know that in one section, at least, of our common country, a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, means a government by the mob; where the land of the free and home of the brave means a land of lawlessness, murder and outrage; and where liberty of speech means the license of might to destroy the business and drive from home those who exercise this privilege contrary to the will of the mob.

Repeated attacks on the life, liberty and happiness of any citizen or class of citizens are attacks on distinctive American institutions; such attacks imperiling as they do the foundation of government, law and order, merit the thoughtful consideration of far sighted Americans; not from a standpoint of sentiment, not even so much from a standpoint of justice to a weak race, as from a desire to preserve our institutions. 

The race problem or negro question, as it has been called, has been omnipresent and all pervading since long before the Afro-American was raised from the degradation of the slave to the dignity of the citizen. It has never been settled because the right methods have not been employed in the solution.

It is the Banquo’s ghost of politics, religion, and sociology which will not down at the bidding of those who are tormented with its ubiquitous appearance on every occasion.

Times without number, since invested with citizenship, the race has been indicted for ignorance, immorality and general worthlessness declared guilty and executed by its self constituted judges. The operations of law do not dispose of negroes fast enough, and lynching bees have become the favorite pastime of the South.

As excuse for the same, a new cry, as false as it is foul, is raised in an effort to blast race character, a cry which has proclaimed to the world that virtue and innocence are violated by Afro-Americans who must be killed like wild beasts to protect womanhood and childhood.

Born and reared in the South, I had never expected to live elsewhere. Until this past year I was one among those who believed the condition of masses gave large excuse for the humiliations and proscriptions under which we labored; that when wealth, education and character became more general among us, the cause being removed the effect would cease, and justice being accorded to all alike.

I shared the general belief that good newspapers entering regularly the homes of our people in every state could do more to bring about this result than any agency. Preaching the doctrine of self help, thrift and economy every week, they would be the teachers to those who had been deprived of school advantages, yet were making history every day and train to think for themselves our mental children of a larger growth.

And so, three years ago last June, I became editor and part owner of the Memphis Free Speech. As editor, I had occasion to criticize the city School Board’s employment of inefficient teachers and poor school buildings for Afro-American children. I was in the employ of that board at the time, and at the close of that school term one year ago, was not re elected to a position I had held in the city schools for seven years.

Accepting the decision of the Board of Education, I set out to make a race newspaper pay a thing which older and wiser heads said could not be done. But there were enough of our people in Memphis and surrounding territory to support a paper, and I believed they would do so.

With nine months hard work the circulation increased from 1,500 to 3,500; in twelve months it was on a good paying basis. Throughout the Mississippi Valley in Arkansas, Tennessee and Mississippi on plantations and in towns, the demand for and interest in the paper increased among the masses. The newsboys who would not sell it on the trains, voluntarily testified that they had never known colored people to demand a paper so eagerly.

To make the paper a paying business I became advertising agent, solicitor, as well as editor, and was continually on the go. Wherever I went among the people, I gave them in church, school, public gatherings, and home, the benefit of my honest conviction that maintenance of character, money getting and education would finally solve our problem and that it depended us to say how soon this would be brought about.

This sentiment bore good fruit in Memphis. We had nice homes, representatives in almost every branch of business and profession, and refined society. We had learned helping each other helped all, and every well conducted business by Afro-Americans prospered.

With all our proscription in theatres, hotels and railroads, we had never had a lynching and did not believe we could have one. There had been lynchings and brutal outrages of all sorts in our state and those adjoining us, but we had confidence and pride in our city and the majesty of its laws. So far in advance of other Southern cities was ours, we were content to endure the evils we had, to labor and to wait.

But there was a rude awakening. On the morning of March 9, the bodies of three of our best young men were found in an old field horribly shot to pieces. These young men had owned and operated the “People’s Grocery,” situated at what was known as the Curve, a suburb made up almost entirely of colored people about a mile from city limits.

Thomas Moss, one of the oldest letter carriers in the city, was president of the company, Cal McDowell was manager and Will Stewart was a clerk. There were about ten other stockholders, all colored men.

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The young men were well known and popular and their business flourished, and that of Barrett, a white grocer who kept store there before the “People’s Grocery” was established, went down. One day an officer came to the “People’s Grocery” and inquired for a colored man who lived in the neighborhood, and for whom the officer had a warrant.

Barrett was with him and when McDowell said he knew nothing as to the whereabouts of the man for whom they were searching, Barrett, not the officer, then accused McDowell of harboring the man, and McDowell gave the lie. 

Barrett drew his pistol and struck McDowell with it; thereupon McDowell who was a tall, fine looking six footer, took Barrett’s pistol from him, knocked him down and gave him a good thrashing, while Will Stewart, the clerk, kept the special officer at bay. Barrett went to town, swore out a warrant for their arrest on a charge of assault and battery.

McDowell went before the Criminal Court, immediately gave bond and returned to his store. Barrett then threatened (to use his own words) that he was going to clean out the whole store.

Knowing how anxious he was to destroy their business, these young men consulted a lawyer who told them they were justified in defending themselves if attacked, as they were a mile beyond city limits and police protection. They accordingly armed several of their friends not to assail, but to resist the threatened Saturday night attack. 

When they saw Barrett enter the front door and a half dozen men at the rear door at 11 o’clock that night, they supposed the attack was on and immediately fired into the crowd, wounding three men.

These men, dressed in citizen’s clothes, turned out to be deputies who claimed to be hunting for another man for whom they had a warrant, and whom any one of them could have arrested without trouble. When these men found they had fired upon officer of the law, they threw away their firearms and submitted to arrest, confident they should establish their innocence of intent to fire upon officers of the law.

The daily papers in flaming headlines roused the evil passions of whites, denounced these poor boys in unmeasured terms, nor permitted a word in their own defense. 

The neighborhood of the Curve was searched next day, and about thirty persons were thrown into jail, charged with conspiracy. No communication was to be had with friends any of the three days these men were in jail; bail was refused and Thomas Moss was not allowed to eat the food his wife prepared for him.

The judge is reported to have said, “Any one can see them after three days.” They were seen after three days, but they were no longer able to respond to the greetings of friends. On Tuesday following the shootings at the grocery, the papers which had made much of the sufferings of the wounded deputies, and promised it would go hard with those who did the shooting, if they died, announced that the officers were all out of danger, and would recover.

Read the rest of this speech at Speaking While Female.

 Sources

Our Day: A Record and Review of Current Reform 11 (January-June), 1893, pp. 333-347Our Day, ed. Joseph Cook, May 1893Ida B. Wells-Barnett: An Exploratory Study of an American Black Woman, 1893-1930, by Mildred Thompson (New York: Carlson), 1990, p. 177

More about Ida B. Wells

Wikipedia National Women’s History Museum Works by Ida B. Wells-Barnett at Project Gutenberg

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Tove Jansson, creator of the Moomins

Tove Jansson (August 9, 1914 – June 27, 2001) was a Swedish-speaking Finnish author, illustrator, and painter, active as a writer and artist for more than seventy years.

Her most famous creations, The Moomins, first appeared in 1945. The adventures and philosophical musings of Moomintroll and his family are still popular today.

She also produced paintings, short stories, novels, other children’s books, political cartoons, magazine covers, theatre sets, public murals, and much more.

 

Early years; a creative family

Tove Marika Jansson was born Helsinki, into an artistic family. Her father, Viktor Jansson (known in the family as Faffan), was a sculptor from Helsinki; her mother, Signe Hammarsten (known as Ham), was an illustrator from Stockholm. Both had broken free of their more conventional backgrounds in order to devote their lives to art.

Signe was a clergyman’s daughter, while Viktor was the son of a haberdashery business owner. They passed this devotion first to Tove and later to her two brothers, Per Olav (born in 1920, who became a photographer) and Lars (born in 1926, who became a painter and sculptor).

From the start, Tove was drawn, painted, sculpted, and photographed. The day after she was born, her mother began creating a book of “our Sunday child.” She drew Tove for the first time, and wrote “She was born on Sunday 9th August at five minutes to twelve. It’s nice she was a girl. But she was so ugly, awful! Like a little wrinkled old woman…”

The family lived and worked on Lotsgaten Street in Helsinki, with a country summer house on Blidö island in the Pellinge archipelago, and maintained no distinction between work and family life. The home and studio were one, and Tove spent her early years crawling, toddling, and sleeping among illustrations, drawings, sculptures, and all the various art materials that were left lying around.

When Viktor left home to fight in the Finnish Civil War on the White (anti-Bolshevik) side, his letters home are full of his artistic dreams and ambitions for his daughter: “Maybe we’ll have a great artist in Tove one day. A really great one!”

Money was often tight. Signe was the main breadwinner of the family, with a steady job at the Bank of Finland as well as regular illustration commissions. Viktor’s income was more precarious, being almost totally reliant on artists’ grants.

Tove was always close to her mother, and the pressure that their finances placed on Signe was apparent to her from an early age. She often expressed the desire to be able to help her mother, and art was the natural way for her to do that.

From the age of seven she was writing, illustrating, and binding her own stories to make little books, which she would then give away or sell in the playground at school, and her first “proper” story was accepted for publication when she was just fourteen, in 1928.

That same year, she contributed fairytale illustrations to Julen (the Christmas publication of the Finland-Swedish Office-worker’s Association), and was able to take over an illustration commission for her mother when Signe had to return to Stockholm to care for her sick mother.

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Art school and travel

In autumn 1930 Tove attended the Stockholm Technical School, and lived with her maternal uncle Einar in Stockholm. She did well, winning prizes and scholarships, and specialized in illustration and design for advertising.

Throughout her time there, she was torn between her longing to complete her education and even go on to university, and her desire to return home and help her mother financially. During her first year in Stockholm, she wrote that she had “to become an artist for the sake of the family.”

But when it came to her desire to go on to the College of Industrial Art, she recognized that, “Mamma hopes I won’t go on. And of course I want to go home and help Mamma. But I also want to go on to higher…”

Her sense of responsibility and duty, and her love for her family, meant that she chose to return home after Technical School. In May 1933, just before her graduation, she wrote to Signe:

“I am a part of you, more than the boys are — it makes no difference how I am, you sadness is mine — how can I care a damn for the whole of Sweden when you aren’t here? I’m coming home, soon … It may be that I’ll be better able to understand you now, and to help you and understand how lucky I am to have you.”

Back in Helsinki, she started as a student at the Drawing Class at the Finnish Society of Art, known as the Ateneum. She lived with her family, now in the newly established Lallukka Artist’s Home in the Töölö district of Helsinki, but longed for a studio and space of her own.

She traveled extensively in the 1930s, enjoying the independence it gave her and the opportunities to further her studies. In 1934 she travelled through Germany, noting the hostility of Nuremberg and the widespread nationalism.

Munich in particular horrified her, and she captured some of her feelings in a short story titled Brevet (“The Letter”), in which the desperately poor character Mr Vöpel has sunk under a “grey cloak of meaninglessness,” and spends his time, jealous and bitter, at the train station watching those who are fortunate enough to travel elsewhere.

In the spring of 1938 she traveled to Paris, settling at the Hôtel des Terrasses on Boulevard St. Jacques in Montparnasse. It was popular with other Scandinavian artists, but Tove felt as if she was living “in a buzzing wasps’ nest,” and moved from there to a hotel on the rue Monsieur Le Prince.

She tried several art schools: the École des Beaux-Arts on the Left Bank, a place she disliked for its snobbery and bullying and the irrelevance of the assignments (she left after two weeks, and wrote to her mother that “Beaux Arts was a place for having fun or hoping for the prix de Rome, and possibly one gleaned some superficial technique to use in disguising one’s mediocre talents”); the Academy on the rue de la Grande Chaumière; and finally the Atelier d’Adrien Holy, on the rue Broca.

She settled there for the rest of the spring, and many of her paintings from Holy’s received critical acclaim.

 

The signature Tove rising to renown

Meanwhile, in Helsinki, the signature Tove was beginning to become well known. She contributed seven oil paintings, three aquarelles, and a charcoal drawing to the Young Artists’ Exhibition of 1939.

She was also busy as an illustrator, contributing to short stories, fairy tales, poetry, reportage, children’s stories, and newspaper columns. She illustrated Swedish translations of classics such as The Hobbit, The Hunting of the Snark, and Alice in Wonderland, and over the next two decades created several public murals from commissions.

The newspaper that she contributed to most frequently was Garm, a satirical left-wing publication founded in 1923 by editor Henry Rein. It folded in 1953 with his death, but for twenty years Tove provided some six hundred illustrations and covers.

Her caricatures, particularly those that clearly conveyed her disdain for the Finnish policy of rapprochement with Germany, caused anger in pro-Fascist circles. She was censored several times, and in 1938 both she and Rein narrowly escaped prosecution. Later, Tove would say, “I enjoyed working for Garm, and what I liked best was being beastly to Hitler and Stalin.”

 

Personal life, and the impact of war

World War II had a major impact on Tove. Political differences within the family became painfully clear, as Tove’s father held fast to his anti-Bolshevik and pro-German inclinations that stemmed from his experiences in the Finnish Civil War, while Tove in particular was horrified at the Fascists.

Her brother, Per Olav, was fighting on the eastern front, and Signe was frantic with worry. “The days are short and grey,” Tove wrote, “Everyone goes round in their own little space, waiting for peace and delivering monologues on the war.”

In the early 1940s, she tried to depict the strain within the family in art with a large oil painting (“Family 1942”) of her brothers playing chess, her mother and father looking on from opposite sides of the canvas with worried expressions, and Tove herself in the middle, gazing angrily into the distance.

But the painting, when exhibited, received mediocre reviews, like many of her other paintings from this period, and months later Tove wrote unhappily about her work: “My greatest asset should be painting, but either it is failing or I am failing.”

She was torn between illustration, which paid the bills, and painting, which was her passion. It was part of a lifelong sense that her commercial work — packaging designs, fabric prints, commissioned public murals — was belittled, and that only as a painter could she be truly creative.

Tove was always a prolific letter writer, but strains of war, family conflict, and creative depression made this outlet even more important. One of her most regular correspondents was her friend Eva Konikoff, a Russian-Jewish photographer whom she’d met in Helsinki while in her twenties, and who emigrated to the US just before the outbreak of war.

Tove wrote hundreds of letters to Eva, despite knowing that many of them would be censored or simply never arrive, in which she reflected on art, philosophy, and the war, and — when letters arrived from America — was always delighted to receive the small gifts Eva sent. These included fruit, face cream, and art materials.

Her personal life was also unsettled. She had had an affair with the artist Samuel Beprosvanni, known as Sam Vanni, in the 1930s. He was both her mentor and her lover, but by the time the war started this had ended and she was in love with the left-wing artist Tapio Tapiovaara. Marriage was mentioned, but Tove was ambivalent: “When men stop killing, then I’ll bear a child — but I know they never will stop.”

Writing once again to Eva:

“Because when all is said and done I have in me all those inherited female instincts for solace, admiration, submission, self-sacrifice. Either a bad painter or a bad wife. And if I become a “good” wife, then his work will be more important than mine, my intellect be subordinate to his …”

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The Moomins

Desperate for an escape, and longing to simply be left in peace away from the war, Tove turned to writing and drawing. She began to work on the fantasy story of a family living in a valley: Moomintroll, his loving and practical Moominmamma, the adventure-seeking Moominpappa, and Moomintroll’s pretty and vain friend Snork Maiden.

Later, Tove wrote that the characters had come to life “when I was feeling depressed and scared of the bombing and wanted to get away from my gloomy thoughts to something else entirely…”

This first story became The Moomins and the Great Flood, published in 1945 and illustrated with Tove’s own line drawings and sepia prints. The little family would go on to be a huge success both in Finland and abroad, with a total of nine books (translated into more than thirty languages) and a daily comic strip that ran for twenty years, beginning in the London Evening News and spreading to over a hundred newspapers around the world.

Eventually, there was a Swedish television show, an anime series in Japan, and all kinds of merchandise ranging from notebooks to oven gloves.

Tove was both proud and relieved: “Permanent employment — the first time in my life.” And, despite being deluged with correspondence, she diligently replied to every letter.

Awards soon followed, including the Stockholm Award for best children’s book in 1952, the Selma Lagerlöf medal in 1953, and the International Hans Christian Andersen Medal in 1966.

 

Going “over to the ghost side”

After the war, Tove was finally able to move into her own studio, a turret on Ullanlinnankatu that was icy cold and bomb-damaged, but at least was her own.

“The first time I came into the new studio there was an alarm and the artillery gave me a salute of welcome. I just stood and looked, and was happy. The wind was coming in through the broken windows and chimneys, and big piles of rubble were lying under the cracks in the walls….I planted my easel in the middle of the floor, I was utterly happy.”

She had ended her relationship with Tapio and was seeing Atos Wirtanen, a liberal politician and philosopher, and felt as if she was entering a new phase of life.

In 1946, Tove met theatre director Vivica Bandler. Although she was married and Tove was still with Atos, the two began an affair. It was a revelation for Tove, who wrote that she was “finally experiencing myself as a woman where love is concerned, it’s bringing me peace and ecstasy for the first time.”

The two remained friends after the affair ended (later collaborating on Moomin-themed plays for children), but Tove was never able to settle back into her relationship with Atos.

Tove wrote to Eva that “the happiest and most genuine course for me would be to go over to the ghost side” — a reference to the secrecy and discretion that same-sex relationships demanded, at a time when they were illegal.

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The loves of Tove’s life: Tooti and Klovharun

In 1956 Tove met Tuulikki Pieitilä (known as Tooti), a graphic designer and art professor who became Tove’s lifelong partner and most trusted critic. Both valued their independence, with separate apartments in Helsinki joined by an attic corridor, and Tove maintained her studio where a “veil of tobacco smoke” hung over the room, and where she “couldn’t be bothered to sweep up.”

In the summers, they went to the Gulf of Finland just as Tove had done every year as a child, taking refuge in a series of remote, rustic houses.

In 1964 they took the opportunity to build a cabin of their own there, on a bare island of Klovharun on the outer edges of the archipelago. It was “a rock in the middle of nowhere,” according to Tove’s niece Sophia:

“They weren’t very young when they moved out there, they were almost 50. Many people raised their eyebrows to the idea of building a house on this deserted island in the outer archipelago. There was no electricity or running water on the island and it was difficult to get there. Since they were women, people thought they would never make it.”

But Tove had always loved the practicality and the challenge of construction and craftsmanship. The cabin, when it was built, had a single room with windows in all four directions, and Tove describes it in Notes from an Island (a book with notes from Klovharun illustrated with Tooti’s graphics and with covers drawn by Tove’s mother):

“We dreamt of what the cottage would look like. It would have four windows, one in each wall. In the south east we made room for the great storms that rage in across the island, in the east the moon would be able to reflect itself in the lagoon, and in the west there would be a rocky wall with moss and polyps. To the north one had to be able to keep a lookout for anything that might come along, and have time to get used to it.”

In one letter, Tove describes the idyll of time alone on Klovharun with Tooti: waking up at the same time, listening to the radio, letting out the cat, making coffee, reading novels, walking along the beach, collecting firewood. Tove would write, while Tooti drew or filmed with her 8mm camera.

The cabin never had running water or electricity and the food was basic — hard bread, cheese, butter, fish that they caught themselves, all other provisions canned. For several years they would go as soon as the ice broke in April, not returning to Helsinki until the October.

“We rarely clean the house and only have the occasional wash, with much brouhaha and pans of hot water on the ground outside. Then we do our own private thing until dinner, which we eat sometime in the middle of the day, our noses in our books. We get on with our work…And so the days pass in blessed tranquility.”

 

Writing for adults

The 1960s was also a time for experiments in creativity. Tove had been feeling increasingly uncertain about her direction as an artist: life had been taken over by the Moomins and her reputation as a children’s author. In 1959, after having made more than ten thousand drawings, she handed control of the Moomins over to her brother Lars.

“I never spare them a thought now it’s over,” she said, “I’ve completely drawn a line under all that. Just as you wouldn’t want to think back on a time you had toothache.”

Instead, she turned to abstract art and to writing for adults. She experimented with different genres, different styles, different formats, all very slowly and mostly for herself. In a 1977 interview she said, “I rewrote a new version; there are four, five, six versions of the same thing…the meaning of words became so important to me.”

She believed that “nothing must be superfluous…one must hold the story enclosed within one’s hand.”

Her first published book for adults was Sculptor’s Daughter (1967). Written ten years after her father’s death, and just before her mother’s passing in 1970, it depicted scenes she remembered from her childhood. It was followed by a short story collection, The Listener. Both received good reviews.

In 1971, after a period spent traveling, she finished what would become possibly her most famous book for adults, a novel called The Summer Book. 

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Later years

Tove continued to write, producing four more novels: Sun City (1974), The True Deceiver (1982), The Field of Stones (1984), and Fair Play (1989).

There were also three short story collections: Art in Nature (1978), Traveling Light (1987), and Letters from Klara (1991). All are full of the complexities of human relationships, which fascinated Tove, but also with the dry humor that became part of her style.

(Another short story collection, A Winter Book, was compiled and published in 2006, after her death.)

Tove and Tooti continued to live and work between Helsinki and Klovharun until the 1980s. By then, the atmosphere of the island had changed: getting older meant that they could no longer do as much, and the precarity of island life no longer felt exciting but anxious. In addition, they suffered a series of break-ins, and the defense forces had started using the archipelago as a base for shooting exercises.

The isolation, for Tove, was becoming not inspirational but monotonous; she no longer felt as if she was in tune with the landscape that had provided her with so much over the years. “You must beware of desert islands if your work isn’t going as it should,” she wrote. “Because then the horizon can turn into a hoop of iron and the monotony of the days become merely a relentless confirmation of the fact that you can’t get started…”

The decision to leave was a hard one, made over several years, but their final night came on 30 September 1991, when Tove signed a gift deed of the cabin over to the Pellinge District Resident’s Association. In July 1992, she wrote:

“Tooti and I are fine. Being in town in the summer doesn’t feel as strange as we expected, more peaceful at all events. And we don’t have to throw our rubbish into the sea – and we have running water and TV and so on.”

During the 1990s, Tove became seriously ill with both lung and breast cancer. There were exhibitions and a three-day international symposium in Tampere to celebrate her 80th birthday in August 1994, which she was present at throughout, but the strain was enormous and it was her last official appearance. In the summer of 2000 she suffered a massive stroke, and died on 27th  June 2001. She is buried with her parents and brother Lars in Sandudd Cemetery in Helsinki.

 

Tove Jansson’s Legacy

Tove’s friend, the actress Birgitta Ulfsson, said of hers writing, “Complexity — that is Tove’s trademark…[but] her sense of humor is her greatest quality for me … Her humor is immense, it permeates everything.”

Tove’s most famous legacy is, of course, The Moomins. All of the Moomin books are still in print, and there is a Moomin website where you can explore the history of the Moomins, buy Moomin merchandise, and even discover which Moomin character you are.

The Moomin Museum is in Tampere, Finland. It displays much of Tove’s work on the Moomins, and there is also a Moomin theme park (Moomin World) in Naantali. Since 1988, Finland’s Post has also released several postage stamps with Moomin motifs.

Several retrospectives of her art have ben held, and in 2020 a biopic, simply titled Tove, was released. The film was directed by Zaida Bergroth and starred Alma Pöysti, and follows Tove’s life from the end of World War II through to the mid-1950s.

Beyond the Moomins, Tove Jansson is still celebrated all over the world. Her books have been translated into some forty-five languages, and she is the only person, other than former Finnish president Urho Kekkonen, to have featured twice on a commemorative coin minted by the Bank of Finland.

Jansson died from Cancer on June 27, 2001 at the age of 86. She is buried with her parents and younger brother Lars at Hietaniemi Cemetery in Helsinki

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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 Tove Jansson

Major works

The Moomins (available separately and in various collected editions)The Summer Book A Winter Book Fair Play The True Deceiver Traveling Light Art in Nature The Listener Sculptor’s Daughter: A Childhood Memoir Notes from an Island 

Biographies and Letters

Tove Jansson: Life, Art, Words by Boel Westin (2018)Tove Jansson: Work and Love by Dr Tuula Karjalainen (2016)Letters from Tove, edited by Boel Westin and Helen Svensson (2020)

More information

Official website More about Tove on Moomin.com Reader discussion of Tove Jansson’s books on Goodreads Vintage Wisdom from The Moomins

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The Transgressive Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle

Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle (1623 – 1673) was a British poet, philosopher, scientist, and fiction writer. Like some of her predecessors, the eccentric Lady Margaret Lucas Cavendish wrote for an exclusively female audience and was angry at men:

Men are so Unconscionable and Cruel against us, as they Endeavour to Bar us of all Sorts or Kinds of Liberty, as not to Suffer us Freely to Associate amongst our Own Sex, but would fain Bury us in their Houses or Beds, as in a Grave; the truth is, we Live like Bats or Owls, Labour like Beasts, and Die like Worms. (To All Noble and Worthy Ladies)

This essay is excerpted from Killing the Angel: Early British Transgressive Women Writers ©2021 by Francis Booth. Reprinted by permission.

Virginia Woolf called Cavendish a “giant cucumber” which “had spread itself over all the roses and carnations in the garden and choked them to death.”

Cavendish’s Poems and Fancies of 1653 begins:

Noble, Worthy Ladies, Condemn me not as a dishonour of your Sex, for setting forth this Work; for it is harmless and free from all dishonesty; I will not say from Vanity: for that is so natural to our Sex, as it were unnatural, not to be so. Besides, Poetry, which is built upon Fancy, Women may claim, as a work belonging most properly to themselves.

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Killing the Angel on Amazon US*
Killing the Angel on Amazon UK*

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The Blazing World

Cavendish asserts here that poetry is the natural realm of women’s imagination. In the introduction to her proto-science fiction novel The Blazing World, she also addresses a female audience and asserts her right to write whatever she pleases; if the present world is not to her taste she has the right to invent one that is and to be the mistress of it.

And if (Noble Ladies) you should chance to take pleasure in reading these Fancies, I shall account myself a Happy Creatoress: If not, I must be content to live a Melancholy Life in my own World …

I am not Covetous, but as Ambitious as ever any of my Sex was, is, or can be; which is the cause, That though I cannot be Henry the Fifth, or Charles the Second; yet, I will endeavour to be, Margaret the First: and, though I have neither Power, Time nor Occasion, to be a great Conqueror, like Alexander, or Cesar; yet, rather than not be Mistress of a World, since Fortune and the Fates would give me none, I have made One of my own.

Cavendish transgressively published under her own name not only fiction, which is ‘built upon fancy,’ and may ‘belong properly to women,’ but ventured into the male preserve of scientific and philosophical works, including many short pieces on the natural sciences, and especially about the atom, written in verse …

“… because I thought errors might better pass there than in prose – since poets write most fiction, and fiction is not given for truth, but pastime – and I fear my atoms will be as small pastime as themselves, for nothing can be less than an atom.”

 

“The Contract”

Cavendish’s short prose work The Contract, 1656, is about a young woman Deletia who is brought up by her older uncle; he has very similar ideas on the education of girls to his author.

When she was seven years of age, he chose her such books to read in as might make her wise, not amorous, for he never suffered her to read in romancies, nor such light books; but moral philosophy was the first of her studies, to lay a ground and foundation of virtue, and to teach her to moderate her passions, and to rule her affections.

The next, her study was in history, to learn her experience by the second hand, reading the good fortunes and misfortunes of former times, the errors that were committed, the advantages that were lost, the humour and dispositions of men, the laws and customs of nations, their rise, and their fallings, of their wars and agreements, and the like.

The next study was in the best of poets, to delight in their fancies, and to recreate in their wit; and this she did not only read, but repeat what she had read every evening before she went to bed.

Cavendish personally knew philosophers and scientists like Rene Descartes and Thomas Hobbes and in 1667, she was the first woman to attend a meeting of the Royal Society, which did not admit women until 1945.

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5 Early English Women Writers to Discover
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Subject to harsher criticism than male writers

Like several other early transgressive writers, Cavendish assumes that as a woman she will be subjected to harsher criticism than a male writer, not just by men but by women too. Her short apologia To All Noble and Worthy Ladies ends:

I imagine I shall be censured by my own sex, and men will cast a smile of scorn upon my book, because they think thereby women encroach too much upon men’s prerogatives. For they hold books as their crown and the sword as their sceptre by which they rule and govern.

… Therefore pray strengthen my side in defending my book, for I know women’s tongues are as sharp as two-edged swords, and wound as much when they are angered. And in this battle may your wit be quick and your speech ready, and your arguments so strong as to beat them out of the field of dispute.

So shall I get honour and reputation by your favours, otherwise I may chance to be cast into the fire. But if I burn, I desire to die your martyr.

Unlike Joan of Arc and the thousands of European ‘witches,’ and unlike Anne Askew, Cavendish was not literally burned at the stake and unlike the French writer Olympe de Gouges she was not sent to the guillotine; she stayed out of politics and though she was hardly the “Angel of the House.” she mostly stayed out of trouble.

Cavendish was however accused by many of promoting vice, an accusation she countered in the preface to her 1664 Sociable Letters:

I have heard, that some do Censure me for speaking too Freely, and Patronizing Vice too much, but I would have them not to be too Rash in Judging, but to Consider, first, whether there be a sufficient Reason that may move them to give such a Censure, for truly I am as much an Enemy to Vice, as I am a Friend to Virtue, & do Persecute Vice with as perfect an Hatred, as I do Pursue Virtue, with an Entire, and Pure Love, which is Sufficiently Known to those that Know me; and therefore, it is not out of Love to Vice that I Plead for it, but only to Exercise my Fancy, for surely the Wisest, and Eloquentest Orators, have not been Ashamed to Defend Vices upon such Accounts, and why may not I do the like?

For my Orations for the most part are Declamations, wherein I speak Pro and Con, and Determine nothing; and as for that Part which contains several Pleadings, it is Fit and Lawful that both Parties should bring in their Arguments as well as they can, to make their Cases Good; but I matter not their Censure, for it would be an Endless Trouble to me, to Answer every ones Foolish Exception; an Horse of a Noble Spirit Slights the Bawling of a Petty Cur, and so do I.

 

“To All Writing Ladies”

Like several early women writers, although she did not encourage them to take up vice, Cavendish was keen to stir women to action, to make the best of themselves and ignore men’s efforts to keep them down. She published a piece called To All Writing Ladies, which ends (the word effeminate here means female):

There will be many Heroic Women in some Ages, in others very Prophetical; in some Ages very pious, and devout: For our Sex is wonderfully addicted to the spirits. But this Age hath produced many effeminate Writers, as well as Preachers, and many effeminate Rulers, as well as Actors.

And if it be an Age when the effeminate spirits rule, as most visible they do in every Kingdom, let us take the advantage, and make the best of our time, for fear their reign should not last long; whether it be in the Amazonian Government, or in the Politic Common-wealth, or in flourishing Monarchy, or in Schools of Divinity, or in Lectures of Philosophy, or in witty Poetry, or anything that may bring honour to our Sex: for they are poor, dejected spirits, that are not ambitious of Fame.

And though we be inferior to Men, let us shew ourselves a degree above Beasts; and not eat, and drink, and sleep away our time as they do; and live only to the sense, not to the reason; and so turn into forgotten dust. But let us strive to build us Tombs while we live, of Noble, Honourable, and good Actions.

Cavendish’s statement that “we be inferior to Men,” may be ironic, she was clearly not one for humility. Nevertheless, in the introduction to the 1622 edition of her plays, she did compare herself unfavorably in “reading, language, wit,” with earlier male playwrights but then slyly implied that this makes her – and by application other female writers – more original, not copying earlier models but writing from her “own poor brain” and building “upon my own Foundation.”

But Noble Readers, do not think my Plays,
Are such as have been writ in former days;
As Johnson, Shakespeare, Beaumont, Fletcher writ;
Mine want their Learning, Reading, Language, wit:
The Latin phrases I could never tell,
But Jonson could, which made him write so well.
Greek, Latin Poets, I could never read,
Nor their Historians, but our English Speed;
Nor could not steal their Wit, nor Plots out take;
All my Plays Plots, my own poor brain did make:
From Plutarch’s story I ne’er took Plot,
Nor from Romances, nor from Don Quixot,
As others have, for to assist their Wit,
But I upon my own Foundation writ.

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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; and Comrades in Art: Revolutionary Art in America 1926-1938; High Collars and Monocles: Interwar Novels by Female Couples.

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. 

More about Margaret Cavendish Poetry Foundation Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy The British Library English Heritage

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*These are Amazon Affiliate links. If a product is purchased by linking through, Literary Ladies Guide receives a modest commission, which helps maintain our site and helps it to continue growing!

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Paule Marshall, author of Brown Girl, Brownstones

Paule Marshall (April 9, 1929–August 12, 2019), born Valenza Pauline Burke, was a Brooklyn-born and raised writer of Barbadian heritage.

Best known for her first novel, Brown Girl, Brownstones (1959), her subsequent novels and stories touch on cultural and ancestral themes relating to the Caribbean.

Both of her parents came to the United States from Barbados, and she incorporated the experiences of West Indian immigrants as well as the social and political perspectives of college-educated Black Americans into her novels and short stories. 

The title of her memoir, Triangular Road (2009, adapted from a series of lectures she delivered at Harvard University in 2005), is appropriate. There were multiple triangles in Marshall’s life: the triangle trade that brought enslaved African people to the Caribbean islands and the North American mainland.

The triangle of Marshall’s identity, which included her Brooklyn, West Indian, and African roots; and finally, what she refers to in Reena and Other Stories (1983) as the “triple-headed hydra of racism, sexism, and class bias” that affected every aspect of her life.

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A fraught relationship with parents

Marshall had a fraught relationship with both of her parents. In her 1983 New York Times essay, “The Poets in the Kitchen,” Marshall describes her mother and her mother’s friends as suffering from “a triple invisibility, being black, female and foreigners.” 

And yet the exuberantly expressive language these women used to discuss and overcome the humiliations of their days as domestic workers inspired the future writer. 

These women gathered in the basement kitchen of Marshall’s brownstone to gossip and to discuss the politics and the economy of their immediate surroundings and the islands that had been their homes.  Marshall credits them with teaching her the narrative art and training her ear. 

Marshall says her mother Adriana “would recite almost daily the list of my physical flaws.”

Marshall’s mother told her that her face was the face “of a child that’s living its old days first!” Her mother also denounced her for her personality flaws: “Hard-ears!” “Willful!” and “Own-ways!”

Marshall says that her father, Sam Burke, was an illegal alien who presented himself as a man who had never been near the sugarcane fields where he worked before stowing away on a ship bound for New York or, for that matter, in the factories where he labored in New York City. 

He started numerous projects—courses in radio repair, accounting, and trumpet—in the hopes they would lead to something worthy of his talents. He finally abandoned his family to join a religious cult in Philadelphia, a loss that deeply affected young Marshall.

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The Barbadian influence

Marshall visited Barbados for the first time when she was nine. Adriana brought Marshall and her sister to Barbados so that Da-duh, as she was known, could meet her “American-born grands.” 

This meeting with her grandmother had a great impact on Marshall, who described Da-duh as “an ancestor figure, symbolic … of the long line of black women and men—African and New World—who made my being possible.” 

Marshall captures the power of that meeting with her grandmother in what she has termed her most autobiographical story, “To Da-Duh, In Memoriam.” 

In this story, Da-duh stares at the narrator as if she “were a creature from Mars, an emissary from some world she did not know but which intrigued her and whose power she both felt and feared” after the young girl sings and dances to some popular songs of the era. Da-duh appears, Marshall says, “in some form or another” in every book she has written.

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Brown Girl, Brownstones
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Diving into the literary scene; moving to Barbados

After Marshall finished high school, her mother urged her to apply for a position with the telephone company. Marshall, who had shortened her old name, Pauline, to Paule (the e is silent) at the age of thirteen as an homage to her first Black literary inspiration, Paul Laurence Dunbar, ignored her mother’s urging.

 New York City colleges were then free to any New York City resident who qualified; Marshall earned a bachelor’s degree in English from Brooklyn College and then a master’s from Hunter. 

When Marshall (who changed her surname after marrying Kenneth Marshall in 1950; the couple, who has one son, divorced in 1963) received an advance to cut the six-hundred-page manuscript for what became her first novel, Brown Girl, Brownstones to a reasonable length, she used the money to move to Barbados. 

There she encountered the people, experiences, and landscapes that would shape so much of her future writing. After ten months of revisions, she returned to New York and was astonished when Langston Hughes, the great man of African American letters, appeared at the party to launch the book. Publication of Brown Girl, Brownstones in 1959 (reissued 2006) brought Marshall a Guggenheim Award, partly as a result of Hughes’s letter of recommendation. 

Critic and noted scholar of African-American history Darwin T. Turner credited Brown Girl, Brownstones with paving the way for a series of bildungsromans by Black women. This now includes Toni Morrison’s Sula and Alice Walker’sThe Color Purple. 

He sees Marshall’s emphasis on the importance of ancestral history and cultural pride, at a time when many other Black writers focused on claiming their right to an American identity, as the source of a new awareness that culminated in Alex Haley’s Roots. 

 

Further writing sojourns in the Caribbean

Hughes remained a supporter, sending Marshall a postcard to congratulate her on the release of her second book, Soul Clap Hands and Sing (1961, reissued 1988), a collection of novellas featuring four aging men in Barbados, Brooklyn, British Guiana, and Brazil who try to reclaim love or regain a sense of purpose by reaching out to young women. 

Marshall undertook the project to see if she could “write convincingly of men.” More important, she says, she wanted to use “the relationships between the old men and the young women in the stories to suggest themes of a political nature.” 

Her short story “Reena” (the second e italicized), published in Harper’s magazine in 1962, was among the first pieces of fiction to “feature a college-educated, politically active Black woman as its protagonist” in its portrayal of a chance meeting between two old friends reflecting on their failures and the costs of their successes. 

Marshall used her Guggenheim money to rent a house on Granada, a Caribbean island with a landscape quite different from that of Barbados. 

With plenty of money, unlimited time to write, and stacks of research conducted in preparation for her writing retreat, Marshall ironically found herself suffering from writer’s block for the first time in her life. 

The logjam was finally broken after two women she had befriended in Granada insisted she make an overnight trip to Carriacou, an island some two hours away from Granada, to watch elderly women dance to the drumming of old men as they celebrated their numerous ancestral nations in the Big Drum/Nation Dance. The dance lasted into the wee hours; Marshall found it transformative.  

Returning to her writing desk the following day, Marshall gathered up her research notes and locked them away. “The paralysis broken,” she says, “I began to write nonstop.” 

As a fiction writer, she said, “my responsibility was first and foremost to the story, the story above all else: the old verities of people, plot and place; a story that if honestly told and well crafted would resonate with the historical truths contained in the steno pads.”

 

A European tour with Langston Hughes

Marshall was active in a variety of organizations pushing for radical change, including American Youth for Democracy (a front group of the Communist Party), the civil rights movement, and the anti-Vietnam War movement. 

She suspected that the FBI agents known to be collecting information on activists were well aware of her activities, so she assumed the worst when she received a thick envelope from the U.S. State Department in her mail one day in 1965. When she opened the envelope, however, she discovered an invitation to accompany Langston Hughes on a month-long cultural tour of Europe. 

Marshall let the State Department sponsors know that she would be critical of U.S. government policies and actions while making this tour. Her intentions clearly pleased the government officials: her outspoken criticism would emphasize the freedom of speech enjoyed by Americans, even Black Americans. In any case, the chance to travel with Hughes to Paris, London, Copenhagen, and other European cities was an opportunity not to be missed.

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A succession of successful novels

The novel Marshall began writing in Granada was published in 1969. The Chosen Place, the Timeless People was described by a New York Times reviewer as “the best novel to be written by an American Black woman.” 

It’s a novel that pits one of Marshall’s most memorable characters—Merle Kinbona, a powerful mystic and political leader—against a group of American social scientists who arrive to study and try to modernize Kinbona’s fictional Caribbean island and its people. 

Marshall’s next novel, Praisesong for the Widow (1983; reissued 2021), portrayed a middle-class Black American woman whose life is transformed by the all-night drumming and dancing ritual that ended Marshall’s writer’s block. 

Later novels include Daughters (1991), which portrays the life of a successful Black woman who leaves the United States behind to support the political career of her father in a fictional Caribbean nation. The Fisher King (2000) is the story of the grandson of a jazz musician who left Brooklyn for Paris, and who discovers his family’s history when returning to Brooklyn for a memorial concert.

 

Paule Marshall’s legacy and honors

Marshall had many admirers in addition to Langston Hughes. They included Haitian-American writer Edwidge Danticat and award-winning playwright Lynn Nottage. Nottage was Marshall’s goddaughter and said, “I wouldn’t be here without her,” on the occasion of Marshall’s death in 2019. 

She taught at several institutions, including UC Berkley, the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, and Yale University. Ultimately, she was the Helen Gould Sheppard Chair of Literature and Culture at New York University. Marshall received an honorary doctorate form Bates College.

Marshall received numerous honors, including the American Book Award (1984), the Langston Hughes Medallion Award (1986), the John Dos Passos Prize (1989), the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship (1992), and the Anisfield-Wolf Lifetime Achievement Award (2009) to recognize books that have contributed to our understanding of racism and the rich diversity of human cultures. 

Paule Marshall died in Richmond, Virginia, at the age of ninety.

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

You may also enjoy Lynne’s piece, Inspiration from Classic Caribbean Women Writers.

More about Paule Marshall

Major Works

Brown Girl, Brownstones (1981)Soul Clap Hands and Sing (four short novels; 1961)The Chosen Place, the Timeless People (1969)Reena and Other Stories (1983)Praisesong for the Widow (1983)Merle: A Novella, and Other Stories (Virago Press, 1985)Daughters (1991)The Fisher King (2001)Triangular Road: A Memoir (2009)

More information and sources

BlackPast Encyclopedia of African American History, 1896 to the Present From the Poets in the Kitchen (NY Times) NY Times obituary , 8/16/2019 Paule Marshall (Britannica) Ainsfield-Wolf Book Awards Reader discussion of Marshall’s works on Goodreads

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The Poetry of Elizabeth Barrett Browning: A 19th-Century Analysis

The following analysis and overview of the poetry of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–1861), the esteemed British poet, is excerpted from Essays by Arthur Christopher Benson.

Rich in insights and references to other poets of the period, this essay and the book (published in London by William Heinemann in 1896) from which it came are in the public domain.

She came from generations of slave owners

Elizabeth’s father changed the family name to Barrett when he inherited vast businesses, including a West Indies plantations, along with mills, and ships. Edward Barrett was a slave holder.

It is a curious fact that meets us at the very threshold of her life, that the author of “The Cry of the Children,” the passionate partisan of the Abolitionist cause in America and of freedom in Italy, came from generations of slave owners. 

In fact, the Jamaica Emancipation Act cost her the loss of her Herefordshire home, by resulting in a large decrease in her father’s fortune. 

It seems indeed typical of her sentiment, typical of the limitations and impersonality of her feelings that, among all her bitter reveries and passionate revolts against human tyrannies, it never (so far as we can judge from her correspondence) seems to have occurred to her that the wealth and comfort with which she was surrounded, the very dower of books that made life possible, was actually wrung from generations of slave-labour, the forced toil of hundreds of impotent lives. 

No one would ask for, or even hint at expecting, even from the most fantastic idealist, a renunciation of luxury thus acquired; but it is strange that the idea seems never to have entered her head.

 

“As serious a thing to me as life itself”

Elizabeth Barrett spent a happy, precocious childhood, but by the age of fifteen was already condemned to that bitter isolation of invalid life which, when it falls on a strong and vivid personality, has, fortunately for human nature, a purifying and ennobling effect. 

Intellectual effort became first the anodyne of physical evil, then the earnest aim of her life. She never seems to have doubted as to the form that her impulsive need for expression was to take. 

She writes to her father in the dedication of her second volume of poems:

“You are a witness how if this art of poetry had been a less earnest object to me, it must have fallen from exhausted hands before this day.” 

And again in the preface: 

“Poetry has been as serious a thing to me as life itself, and life has been a very serious thing; there has been no playing at skittles for me in either. I never mistook pleasure for the final cause of poetry, nor leisure for the hour of the poet. I have done my work, so far, as work—not as mere hand and head work, apart from the personal being—but as the completest expression of that being to which I could attain.”

There is something very impressive about the earnestness of this. Its fault is perhaps that it is a little too outspoken.

If she had mistaken pleasure a little more, not perhaps for the final cause, but for one of the primary causes of poetry, we cannot help feeling that she might have done, if not such earnest, at least more artistic work.

 

She revealed little about her process

One of the things that one expects to find in the biography of a poet is a detailed account of methods of composition. 

It is interesting to know whether morning or evening hours were devoted to writing; whether the act of composition was slow or quick; whether the poem was worked out in the mind before it was transmitted to paper; what proportion finished compositions bear to unfinished; whether incomplete work was ever resumed; whether the observation of language was systematized in any way. 

All these things one is particularly anxious to hear in the case of a poetess whose work bears at once traces of hasty and elaborate workmanship, whose vocabulary is so extraordinarily eclectic, whose rhymes are so peculiar, and often—may we say?—so unsatisfactory. 

We hear indeed incidentally that the solid morning hours were Mrs. Browning’s habitual hours of work; and a curious correspondence has been made public between herself and Horne, which shows that her rhymes, according to herself, were deliberately and painfully selected, principally in the case of dissyllabic rhymes (even, we fear, such pairs as Goethe and duty, Bettine and between ye). 

She held that English composers, though the language was rich in these rhythmical combinations, had been instinctively slow in applying them to serious poetry. 

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Sonnets from the Portuguese (full text)
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Sonnets from the Portuguese

Mrs. Browning’s best lyrical work was all done before her marriage; but the stirring of the truest depths of her emotional nature took voice in the collection of  Sonnets from the Portuguese — strung, in Omar’s words, like pearls upon the string of circumstance. 

In these sonnets she speaks the universal language; to her other graces had now been added that which she had somewhat lacked before, the grace of content; and for these probably she will be longest and most gratefully admired. 

Anyone who steps for the first time through the door into which he has seen so many enter, and finds that poets and lovers and married folk, in their well-worn commonplaces, have exaggerated nothing, will love these sonnets as one of the sweetest and most natural records of a thing which will never lose its absorbing fascination for humanity. 

To those that are without, except for the sustained melody of expression, the poetess almost seems to have passed on to a lower level, to have lost originality—like the celebrated lady whose friends said that till she wrote to announce her engagement she had never written a commonplace letter. 

Their fervor indeed rises from the resolute virginity of a heart to whom love had been scarcely a dream, never a hope. 

We must think of the isolation, sublime it may have been, but yet desolate, from which her marriage was to rescue her—coming not as only the satisfaction of imperious human needs, but to meet and crown her whole nature with a fulness of which few can dream. As she was afterwards to write in book five of Aurora Leigh:

How dreary ’tis for women to sit still
On winter nights by solitary fires
And hear the nations praising them far off.

 

Casa Guidi

The latter years of Mrs. Browning’s life have a certain shadowiness for English readers. The “Casa Guidi,” if we were not painfully haunted by the English in which interviewers have given their impressions of it, is a memory to linger over. 

The high dusty passage that gave access to the tall, gloomy house; the huge cool rooms, with little Pennini, so called in contrast to the colossal statue Apennino, “slender, fragile, spirit-like” flitting about from stair to stair: the faint sounds of music breathing about the huge corridors; the scent, the stillness,—such a home as only two poets could create, and two lovers inhabit.

Nathaniel Hawthorne gives, among some rather affected writing about a visit of his there, a few characteristic touches: 

“Mrs. Browning met us at the door of the drawing-room—a pale, small person, scarcely embodied at all; at any rate only substantial enough to put forth her slender fingers to be grasped, and to speak with a shrill yet sweet tenuity of voice. 

Really I do not see how Mr. Browning can suppose that he has an earthly wife any more than an earthly child; both are of the elfin race, and will flit away from him some day when he least thinks of it. 

She is a good and kind fairy, however, and sweetly disposed towards the human race, although only remotely akin to it. It is wonderful to see how small she is, how pale her cheek, how bright and dark her eyes. There is not such another figure in the world.”

“The boy,” he says elsewhere, “was born in Florence, and prides himself upon being a Florentine, and is indeed as un-English a production as if he were a native of another planet.”

This touch perhaps will explain why it is that we rather lose hold of Mrs. Browning after her marriage; England was connected in her mind with all the old trials of life which seemed to have fallen away with her new existence; ill-health, and mental struggle, bereavement and pain—even though it was pain triumphed over. With marriage and Italy a new life began. It became her adopted country—

And now I come, my Italy,
My own hills! Are you ‘ware of me, my hills,
How I burn to you?  Do you feel to-night
The urgency and yearning of my soul.

And there the English reader is at fault. He cannot call Italy his own in any genuine sense; much as his yearnings may go out towards her, in days when his own ungenial climate is wrapping the hedge-rows and hill-farms in mist and driving sleet, much as he may long for a moment after her sun and warmth, her transparent skies and sleepy seas, yet he knows his home is here. 

Even when he finds himself among her vines, when the lizards dart powdered with green jewels from stone to stone, and the dust puffs up white in the road beside the bay, he finds himself murmuring in his heart Mr. Browning’s own words.

Oh! to be in England now that April’s there,
And whoever wakes in England sees some morning unaware,
That the lowest boughs and the brushwood sheaf
Round the elm-tree bole are in tiny leaf,
While the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough—
In England now!

(from “Home-Thoughts, from Abroad” by Robert Browning)

That is what he really feels; and however much he loves to think as a picture of the poet and poetess transplanted into the warm lands, his heart does not go out to them, as it would have done had they stayed at home. 

And so it comes to pass that some of the lines into which Mrs. Browning threw her most passionate emphasis, “Casa Guidi Windows,” the words that burn with an alien patriotism — alien, but sunk so deep, that her disappointed hopes made havoc of her life — reach him like murmuring music over water, sweet but fantastic—touching the ear a little and the heart a little, but bringing neither glow nor tears.

They say that the Treaty of Villa Franca snapped the cord; that the bitter disappointment of what had become a passion rather than a dream broke the struggling spirit. 

It may be so — “With her golden verse linking Italy to England,” wrote the grateful Florentines upon her monument. But England to Italy? 

No — “Italy,” she wrote herself, “is one thing, England one.” We feel that she passed into a strange land, and in its sweetness somewhat forgot her own: the heart is more with her when she writes:

I saw
Fog only, the great tawny weltering fog
Involve the passive city, strangle it
Alive, and draw it off into the void,
Spires, bridges, streets, and squares, as if a sponge
Had wiped out London.

Or:

A ripple of land: such little hills, the sky
Can stoop to tenderly, and the wheatfields climb.
Such nooks of valleys lined by orchises,
Fed full of noises by invisible streams
And open pastures, where you scarcely tell
White daisies from white dew—at intervals
The mythic oaks and elm trees standing out
Self-poised upon their prodigy of shade;
I thought my father’s land was worthy too
Of being Shakespeare’s.

(from Aurora Leigh)

There is a well-known rhetorical device, upon which Mrs. Browning in her classical studies must have stumbled upon, called the Aposiopesis—in plain English, the art of breaking-off. 

Classical writers are often hastily accused by young learners of having framed their writings with a view to introducing perplexing forms and intolerable constructions, so as unnecessarily to obscure the sense. 

But it is a matter of regret that Mrs. Browning did not employ this particular construction with greater frequency—to use a colloquial expression—that she did not let you off a good deal. 

Many of her poems are weighted with a dragging moral; many of them fly with a broken wing, stopping and rising again, dispersing and returning with a kind of purposeless persistency, as if they were incapable of deciding where to have done. 

Poems with passage after passage of extraordinary depth of thought and amazing felicity of expression, every now and then droop and crawl like the rain on a November day, which will not fall in a drenching shower nor quite desist, but keeps dropping, dropping from the sky out of mere weakness or idleness.

To secure an audience a poet must be diplomatic; he must know whose ear he intends to catch. It is mere cant to say that the best poetry cannot be popular; that it should be read is its first requisite. 

If Mrs. Browning aimed at any particular class it was perhaps at intellectual sentimentalists. As the two characteristics are rarely found united, in fact are liable to exclude one another, it may perhaps be the reason why she is so little appreciated in her entirety: she is perhaps too learned for women and too emotional for men.

 

Influence of Greek and the Greek poets

Let us consider for a moment where her intellectual training came from. Roughly speaking, the basis of it was Greek from first to last; at nine years old she measured her life by the years of the siege of Troy, and carved a figure out of the turf in her garden to represent a recumbent warrior, naming it Hector. 

Then came her version of the “Prometheus Vinctus;” her long studious mornings over Plato and Theocritus with the blind scholar, Mr. Boyd, whom she commemorates in “Wine of Cyprus,” when she read, as she writes, “the Greek poets, with Plato, from end to end.” 

Her dolorous excursion with the Fathers; and at last, in the Casa Guidi, the little row of miniature classics, annotated in her own hand, standing within easy reach of her couch. 

Of course she was an omnivorous reader besides. She speaks of reading the Hebrew Bible, “from Genesis to Malachi — never stopped by the Chaldean — and the flood of all possible and impossible British and foreign novels and romances, with slices of metaphysics laid thick between the sorrows of the multitudinous Celestinas.”

But it was evidently in Greek, in the philosophical poetry of Euripides and the poetical philosophy of Plato, that she found her deepest satisfaction.

At the same time she was not in the true sense learned, though possessing learning far greater than commonly falls to a woman’s lot to possess, in her time.

Her education in Greek must have been unsystematic and unscholarly; her classical allusions, which fall so thick in letters and poems have seldom quite the genuine ring

We do not mean that she did not get nearer the heart of the Greek writers and appreciate their spirit more intimately than many a far more erudite scholar; that was to be expected, for she brought enthusiasm and insight and genius to the task.

Her characterization of the classical poets in “The Poet’s Vow” also illustrate this; now so extraordinarily felicitous and clear-sighted, as for instance in the case of Shakespeare and Ossian, and now so alien to the true spirit of the men described.

Sophocles
With that king’s-look which down the trees
Followed the dark effigies

Of the lost Theban. Hesiod old,
Who, somewhat blind and deaf and cold,
Cared most for gods and bulls.

(from “The Poet’s Vow”)

The fact was that she read the Greeks as a woman of genius was sure to do; she passed by their majestic grace, amazed at their solemn profundity, and yet unaware that she was projecting into them a feeling, a sentimental outlook which they did not possess, attributing directly to them a deliberate power which was merely the effect of their unconscious, antique, and limited vision upon the emotional child of a later age.

The strangest thing is that a woman of such complex and sensitive faculties should have given in her allegiance to such models. Never was there a writer in whom the best characteristics of the Greeks were more conspicuously absent. 

Their balance, their solidity, their calm, their gloomy acquiescence in the bitter side of life, have surely little in common with the passionate spirit that beat so wildly against the bars, and asked the stars and hills so eagerly for their secrets. 

The two poems which are the best instances of the classical mood, are the two of which Pan, the spirit of the solitary country, half beast, half god, is the hero. In these Mrs. Browning appears in her strength and in her weakness. 

In “The Dead Pan,” in spite of its solemn refrain, the lengthy disordered mode of thought is seen to the worst advantage: the progression of ideas is obscure, the workmanship is not hurried, but deliberately distressing; the rhymes, owing to that unfortunate fancy for double rhyming, being positively terrific; the brief fury of the lyric mood passing into the utterances of a digressive moralist. 

But when we turn to the other, “A Musical Instrument,” what a relief we experience. “What was he doing, the great god Pan, down in the reeds by the river?” The splendid shock of the rhythm, like the solid plunge of a cataract into a mountain-pool, captivates, for all its roughness, the metrical ear. 

There is not a word or a thought too much: the scene shapes itself, striking straight out into the thought; the waste and horror that encircle the birth of the poet in the man; the brutish elements out of which such divinity is compounded—these are flung down in simple, delicate outlines: such a lyric is an eternal possession of the English language.

 

Pure romantic writing

As a natural result of a certain discursiveness of mind, there is hardly any kind of writing unrepresented in Mrs. Browning’s poems. She had at one time a fancy for pure romantic writing, since developed to such perfection by Christina Rossetti. 

There is a peculiar charm about such composition. In such works we seem to breathe a freer air, separated as we are from special limitations of time and place; the play of passion is more simple and direct, and the passion itself is of a less complex and restrained character. 

Besides, there is a certain element of horror and mystery, which the modern spirit excludes, while it still hungers for it, but is not unnatural when mediævalized. 

Nothing in Mrs. Browning can bear comparison with “Sister Helen” or “The Beryl Stone;” but “The Romaunt of the Page” and the “Rhyme of the Duchess May” stand among her most successful pieces. The latter opens with a simple solemnity:

To the belfry, one by one, went the ringers from the sun,
            Toll slowly.
And the oldest ringer said, “Ours is music for the dead,
      When the rebecks are all done.”
Six abeles i’ the churchyard grow on the north side in a row,
             Toll slowly.
And the shadow of their tops rock across the little slopes
Of the grassy graves below.
On the south side and the west a small river runs in haste,
            Toll slowly.
And between the river flowing and the fair green trees agrowing,
      Do the dead lie at their rest.
On the east I sat that day, up against a willow grey:
             Toll slowly.
Through the rain of willow-branches I could see the low hill ranges,
      And the river on its way.

(from “Rhyme of the Duchess May”)

This is like the direct opening notes of the overture of a dirge. Whatever may be said about such writing we feel at once that it comes from a master’s hand. So the poem opens, but alas for the close! 

Some chord seems to snap; it is no longer the spirit of the ancient rhymer … The poem passes, still in the same metre, out of the definite materialism, the ghastly excitements of the story into a species of pious churchyard meditation; and the pity of it is that we cannot say that this is not characteristic.

Then closely connected with the last comes a class of poems, of so-called modern life, of which “Lady Geraldine’s Courtship” shall stand for an example. This is a poem of nineteenth-century adventure, which is as impossible in design and as fantastic in detail as a poem may well be. 

The reader does not know whether to be most amazed at the fire and glow of the whole story, or at the hopeless ignorance of the world betrayed by it. The impossible Earls with their immeasurable pride and intolerable pomposities; the fashionable ladies with their delicate exteriors and callous hearts.

These are like the creations of Charlotte Brontë, and recall Blanche and Baroness Ingram of Ingram Park. 

And at the same time, when we have said all this, we read the poem and we can forgive all or nearly all—the spirit is so high, the passion is so fierce and glowing, the poetry that bursts out, stanza after stanza, contrives to involve even these dolorous mistakes in such a glamour, that we can only admire the genius that could contend against such visionary errors.

But we must turn to what after all is Mrs. Browning’s most important and most characteristic work, Aurora Leigh. Unfortunately its length alone, were there not any other reasons, would prevent its ever being popular. [See the link just below to the full analysis of Aurora Leigh by this essay’s commentator, Arthur Christopher Benson].

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Aurora Leigh by Elizabeth Barrett Browning:
A 19th Century Analysis
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A selection of later poems

The longest of her poems are the work of her later years, whereas her strength did not lie so much in sustained narrative effort, in philosophical construction, or patriotic sentiment, as in the true lyrical gift. 

It seems more and more clear as time goes on that the poems by which she will be best remembered are some of her shortest—the expression of a single overruling mood—the parable without the explanation—the burst of irrepressible feeling.

I should be inclined, if I had to make a small selection out of the poems, to name seven lyrics as forming the truest and most characteristic work she ever produced—characteristic that is of her strength, and showing the fewest signs of her weakness. 

These are: “Loved Once,” “The Romance of the Swan’s Nest,” “Catarina to Camoens,” “Cowper’s Grave,” “The Cry of the Children,” “The Mask,” and lastly “Confessions.” 

The latter seems to me one of the stormiest and most pathetic poems in the language. A few words of critical examination may be given to each. The first fact that strikes a reader is that all of these, with one exception, depend to a certain extent upon the use of a refrain. 

Of course the refrain is a species of metrical trick; but there is no possibility of denying, that, if properly used, it gives a peculiar satisfaction to that special sense—whatever it be, for there is no defining it—to which metre and rhyme both appeal. 

At the same time there is one condition attached to this device, that it should not be prolonged into monotony. 

At what precise moment this lapse into monotony takes place, or by what other devices it may be modified, must be left to the sensitive taste of the writer, but if the writer does not discover when it becomes monotonous the reader will do so; and this is certainly the case in “The Dead Pan,” though the refrain is there varied.

To a certain extent too it must be confessed that this same monotony affects two of the poems which we have mentioned: “Loved Once,” and “Catarina to Camoens.”

“Loved Once” deals with the permanence of a worthy love; and the refrain is dismissed as being the mere treasonous utterance of those who have never understood what love is. The poem gains, too, a pathetic interest from the fact that it records the great estrangement of Mrs. Browning’s life.

“Catarina to Camoens” is the dying woman’s answer to her lover’s sonnet in which he recorded the wonder of her gaze. But alas! of these lines we may say with the author of Ionica, “I bless them for the good I feel; but yet I bless them with a sigh.” The poem is vitiated by the unusually large proportion of faulty and fantastic rhymes that it contains.

“The Swan’s Nest,” the story of a childish dream and its disappointment, is an admirable illustration of the artistic principle that the element of pathos depends upon minuteness of detail and triviality of situation rather than upon intensity of feeling.

“The Mask” is not a poem that appears to have been highly praised. But it will appeal to any one who has any knowledge of that most miserable of human experiences—the necessity of dissembling suffering:

I have a smiling face, she said,
I have a jest for all I meet,
I have a garland for my head,
And all its flowers are sweet—
And so you call me gay, she said.

Behind no prison-grate, she said,
Which slurs the sunshine half-a-mile,
Live captives so uncomforted
As souls behind a smile.
God’s pity let us pray, she said.

If I dared leave this smile, she said,
And take a moan upon my mouth,
And twine a cypress round my head,
And let my tears run smooth,
It were the happier way, she said.

And since that must not be, she said,
I fain your bitter world would leave.
How calmly, calmly, smile the dead,
Who do not, therefore, grieve!
The yea of Heaven is yea, she said.

(from “The Mask”)

It is not necessary to quote from either “Cowper’s Grave” or “The Cry of the Children.” The former is the true Elegiac; the latter — critics may say what they will — goes straight to the heart and brings tears to the eyes. 

We do not believe that any man or woman of moderate sensibility could read it aloud without breaking down. It has faults of language, structure, metre; but its emotional poignancy gives it an artistic value which it would be fastidious to deny, and which we may expect it to maintain.

 “Confessions” — the story of passionate love

“Confessions” is the story of passionate love, lavished by a soul so exclusively and so prodigally on men that it has, in the jealous priestly judgment, sucked away and sapped the natural love for the Father of men. 

The poor human soul under the weight of this accusation clings only to the thought of how utterly it has loved the brothers that it has seen. 

“And how,” comes the terrible question, “have they requited it? God’s love, you have rejected it—what have you got in its stead from man?”

“Go,” I cried, “thou hast chosen the Human, and left the Divine!
Then, at least, have the Human shared with thee their wild berry wine?
Have they loved back thy love, and when strangers approached thee with blame
Have they covered thy fault with their kisses, and loved thee the same?”
But she shrunk and said,
“God, over my head,
Must sweep in the wrath of His judgment-seas,
If He shall deal with me sinning, but only indeed the same
And no gentler than these.”

(from “Confessions”)

We have been dealing with a poet as a poet; but we must not forget that she was a woman too. From Sappho and Sulpicia (whose reputations must be allowed to rest upon somewhat negative proof) to Eliza Cook and Joanna Baillie, how Mrs. Browning distances them all! 

 

A new possibility for women poets?

There was something after all in the quaint proposal of the Athenæum, upon the death of Wordsworth, that the Laureateship should be offered to Mrs. Browning, as typical of the realization of a new possibility for women. 

That alone is something of an achievement, though in itself we do not rate it very high. But the truth is that we cannot do without our poets. 

The nation is even now pining for a new one, and every soul that comes among us bringing the divinæ particulam auræ, who finds his way to expression, is a possession to congratulate ourselves upon. 

If there is that shadowy something in a writer’s work, coming we know not whence and going we know not whither, unseen, intangible, but making its presence felt and heard, we must welcome it and guard it and give it room to move. “My own best poets,” writes Mrs. Browning, “am I one with you?”

Does all this smell of thyme about my feet
Conclude my visit to your holy hill
In personal presence, or but testify
The rustling of your vesture through my dreams
With influent odours?

We need not doubt it; she is worthy to be counted among these:

The only teachers who instruct mankind
From just a shadow on a charnel-wall
To find man’s veritable stature out
Erect, sublime—the measure of a man—
And that’s the measure of an angel, says
The apostle.

(from Aurora Leigh)

We must only touch upon two or three of the most salient points of Mrs. Browning’s biography. Her life was uneventful enough, as far as events go, and its outlines are sufficiently well known. The impression which it leaves upon a reader is strangely mixed. 

The intellect with which we are brought into contact is profoundly impressive; the spectacle of a life so vivid and untiring, so hopeful and ardent, lived under the pressure of constant physical suffering, and the still more marked presence of morbidity both of thought and feeling, is inspiring and moving. 

Mrs. Browning as a letter-writer is disappointing; again and again there is a touch of true feeling, a noble thought, but with all this there is a want of incisiveness, a wearisome seriousness, which of all qualities is the one that ought not to obtrude itself, a strange lack of humor, a certain strain … 

And this may, we think, be best expressed by the pathetic words that fall from her in the letter already quoted: her history was that of a bird in a cage. 

Not only from the physical fact that she was for many years of her life an invalid — but mentally and morally also she was caged, by imaginary social fictions, by certain ingrained habits of thought.

Last of all, as a passionate idealist, she saw with painful persistence and in horrible contrast the infinite possibilities of human nature and the limitations of low realities.

More poetry by Elizabeth Barrett Browning on this site:

10 Shorter Poems by Elizabeth Barrett Browning “Mother and Poet” “To Flush, My Dog” “A Dead Rose” “To George Sand, a Desire”

The post The Poetry of Elizabeth Barrett Browning: A 19th-Century Analysis appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.

Aurora Leigh by Elizabeth Barrett Browning: A 19th-Century Analysis

In 1856, Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh, a long narrative novel in verse, was published. It would become one of her best known works, and a true magnum opus with 11,000 lines. 

The story of a writer somewhat like herself, it’s set in a lush landscape and laced with Elizabeth’s wry observations on the position of women in her time and place.

As Kathleen Blake wrote in this contemporary view on Victorian Web: 

“Aurora Leigh is a ‘verse novel’ in blank verse and nine books, longer than Paradise Lost, and it offers a comprehensive treatment of E.B.B.’s complicated feelings about love … Aurora Leigh assumes a feminine instinct of love, from which it develops the woman artist’s dilemma: she cannot become a full artist unless she is a full woman, but she can hardly become an artist at all without resisting love as it consumes women, subsuming them to men.”

Read the rest of this excellent analysis, and find the full text of Aurora Leigh.

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Learn about Elizabeth Barrett Browning
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The following analysis of Aurora Leigh by Elizabeth Barrett Browning is excerpted from Essays by Arthur Christopher Benson, published by William Heinemann (London), 1896.

Rich in insights and references to other poets of the period, this essay and the book from which it came are in the public domain.

 

A 19th-century analysis of Aurora Leigh

We turn to  Mrs. Browning’s most important and most characteristic work, Aurora Leigh. Unfortunately its length alone, were there not any other reasons, would prevent its ever being popular.

Ten thousand lines of blank verse is a serious thing. The fact that the poem is to a great extent autobiographical, combined with the comparative mystery in which the authoress was shrouded and the romance belonging to a marriage of poets — these elements are enough to account for the general enthusiasm with which the poem was received. 

Walter Savage Landor said that it made him drunk with poetry — that was the kind of expression that its admirers allowed themselves to make use of with respect to it. And yet in spite of these credentials, the fact remains that it is a difficult volume to work through. 

A romance with an intricate plot

It is the kind of book that one begins to read for the first time with intense enjoyment, congratulating oneself after the first hundred pages that there are still three-hundred to come. 

Then the mood gradually changes; it becomes difficult to read without a marker; and at last it goes back to the shelf with the marker about three-fourths of the way through. As she herself wrote,

The prospects were too far and indistinct.
’Tis true my critics said “A fine view that.”
The public scarcely cared to climb my book
For even the finest;—and the public’s right.

Now what is the reason of this? In the first place it is a romance with a rather intricate plot, and a romance requires continuous reading and cannot be laid aside for a few days with impunity. 

Secondly, it requires hard and continuous study; there is hardly a page without two or three splendid thoughts, and several weighty expressions; it is a perfect mine of felicitous though somewhat lengthy quotations upon almost every question of art and life, yet it is sententious without being exactly epigrammatic. 

Thirdly, it is very digressive, distressingly so when you are once interested in the story. Lastly, it is not dramatic; whoever is speaking, Lord Howe, Aurora, Romney Leigh, Marian Earle, they all express themselves in a precisely similar way; it is even sometimes necessary to reckon back the speeches in a dialogue to see who has got the ball. 

In fact it is not they who speak, but Mrs. Browning. To sum up, it is the attempted union of the dramatic and meditative elements that is fatal to the work from an artistic point of view.

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You may also enjoy:
“A Dead Rose”: An Ecocritical Reading
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Attempting to disentangle the poem’s motive

Perhaps, if we are to try and disentangle the motive of the whole piece, to lay our finger on the main idea, we may say that it lies in the contrast between the solidity and unity of the artistic life, as opposed to the tinkering philanthropy of the Sociologist. 

Aurora Leigh is an attempt from an artistic point of view to realize in concrete form the truth that the way to attack the bewildering problem of the nineteenth century, the moral elevation of the democracy, is not by attempting to cure in detail the material evils, which are after all nothing but the symptoms of a huge moral disease expressing itself in concrete fact, but by infusing a spirit which shall raise them from within. 

To attack it from its material side is like picking off the outer covering of a bud to assist it to blow, rather than by watering the plant to increase its vitality and its own power of internal action.

In fact, as our clergy are so fond of saying, a spiritual solution is the only possible one, with this difference, that in Aurora Leigh this attempt is made not so much from the side of dogmatic religion as of pure and more general enthusiasms. 

The insoluble enigma is unfortunately, whether, under the pressure of the present material surroundings, there is any hope of eliciting such an instinct at all; whether it is not actually annihilated by want and woe and the diseased transmission of hereditary sin.

 The challenge of presenting quotations from the poem

It is of course totally impossible to give any idea of a poem of this kind by quotations, partly, too, because as with most meditative poetry, the extracts are often more impressive by themselves than in their context, owing to the fact that the run of the poem is interfered with rather than assisted by them. 

But we may give a few specimens of various kinds. “I,” she says,

Will write my story for my better self,
As when you paint your portrait for a friend
Who keeps it in a drawer, and looks at it
Long after he has ceased to love you, just
To hold together what he was and is.

This is one of those mysterious, sudden images that take the fancy; she is describing the high edge of a chalk down:

You might see
In apparition in the golden sky
… the sheep run
Along the fine clear outline, small as mice
That run along a witch’s scarlet thread.

And this is a wonderful rendering of the effect, which never fails to impress the thought, of the mountains of a strange land rising into sight over the sea’s rim:

I felt the wind soft from the land of souls;
The old miraculous mountain heaved in sight
One straining past another along the shore
The way of grand, tall Odyssean ghosts,
Athirst to drink the cool blue wine of seas
And stare on voyagers.

We may conclude with this enchanting picture of an Italian evening:

Fire-flies that suspire
In short soft lapses of transported flame
Across the tingling dark, while overhead
The constant and inviolable stars
Outrun those lights-of-love: melodious owls
(If music had but one note and was sad,
‘Twould sound just so): and all the silent swirl
Of bats that seem to follow in the air
Some grand circumference of a shadowy dome
To which we are blind; and then the nightingales
Which pluck our heart across a garden-wall,
(When walking in the town) and carry it
So high into the bowery almond-trees
We tremble and are afraid, and feel as if
The golden flood of moonlight unaware
Dissolved the pillars of the steady earth,
And made it less substantial.

It would seem in studying Mrs. Browning’s work as though either she herself or her advisers did not appreciate her special gift. 

 

More poetry by Elizabeth Barrett Browning on this site “To George Sand: A Desire” “To Flush, My Dog” “The Cry of the Children” “Mother and Poet” 10 Shorter Poems by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Poetic Genius

The post Aurora Leigh by Elizabeth Barrett Browning: A 19th-Century Analysis appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.