Nava Atlas's Blog, page 22
November 23, 2022
Love in a Cold Climate by Nancy Mitford (1949)
Love in a Cold Climate (1949) was the follow-up novel to The Pursuit of Love (1945) by British novelist, biographer, and journalist Nancy Mitford (1904 – 1973). Not a sequel but a companion volume of sorts to its predecessor, like Mitford’s other novels, it satirized upper-class life in England.
The Pursuit of Love was Mitford’s fifth novel but her first breakaway success, selling two hundred thousand copies within the first year. It set the stage for Love in a Cold Climate, which proved to be equally successful.
The two novels established Mitford as a bestselling author, and both have both been reprinted and adapted for television multiple times, among others the miniseries Love in a Cold Climate (2001) and The Pursuit of Love (2021).
Though published a few years later, Love in a Cold Climate isn’t considered a sequel of The Pursuit of Love, due to its fairly concurrent timeframe. Frances “Fanny” Wincham is the narrator of both. She is the cousin and close friend of Linda, the protagonist of The Pursuit of Love, and a distant cousin of Polly, the main character of Love in a Cold Climate.
Fanny appears once again in Don’t Tell Alfred (1960), which focuses more on herself and her marriage. Together, the three books form a loose trilogy.
A brief synopsis of Love in a Cold Climate
From the 2010 Vintage books edition (2010):
“A sparkling romantic comedy that vividly evokes the lost glamour of aristocratic life in England between the wars.
Polly Hampton has long been prepared for the perfect marriage by her mother, the fearsome and ambitious Lady Montdore. But Polly, with her stunning good looks and impeccable connections, is bored by the monotony of her glittering debut season in London.
Having just come from India, where her father served as Viceroy, she claims to have hoped that society in a colder climate would be less obsessed with love affairs.
The apparently aloof and indifferent Polly has a long-held secret, however, one that leads to the shattering of her mother’s dreams and her own disinheritance.
When an elderly duke begins pursuing the disgraced Polly and a callow potential heir curries favor with her parents, nothing goes as expected, but in the end all find happiness in their own unconventional ways.”
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See also: The Pursuit of Love by Nancy Mitford
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In the teeth of grim headlines about economic collapse and further austerities … Nancy Mitford’s characters, desperately happy and utterly conscienceless, inhabit that cloud land of eight-course dinners, enormous balls, countless servants, and nonstop weekends that the English country gentry hold sacred.
Love is the only social problem that looms on the horizon of Hampton, where Polly Hampton, heiress of a very rich and grand old family has reached the marriageable age and to the horror of her mother, Lady Mountdore, a tremendous snob, shows no interest in men.
Polly confides to her friend, Fanny Logan, who tells the story, that she had noticed in India, where her father was viceroy, a great preoccupation with love affairs, but she had thought perhaps in a cold climate … She is, of course, utterly wrong.
Polly, beautiful as the morning and bright as an English mist, unaccountably fixes her choice on her newly widowed uncle, Boy Dougdale, an aging and lecherous lecturer whose custom it is to dispense “great sexy pinches” among the girls of the countryside.
Polly’s marriage leaves a frightful gloom at Hampton, which is dispelled, for Lady Mountdore at least, by the arrival of a family heir from Nova Scotia, a “dragonfly of a man” who subscribes to Vogue, decks himself in jewels, and induces Lady Mountdore to paint, powder, reduce, and wear terribly smart clothes.
Fanny, the storyteller, is in to way taken back by these strange proceedings. She is well conditioned to eccentricity. Here mother was called “the Bolter” for her habit of leaving husbands and lovers.
Her Uncle Matthew writes the names of his enemies (“sewers,” he calls them) on pieces of paper which he puts in drawers in the hope it will bring on their deaths within a year.
Miss Mitford’s account of decadent diversions with with wicked repartee is marked by a charmingly witty and literate style. Love in a Cold Climate is amusing, if slightly anachronistic. But English readers evidently welcome the escape into an unchanged world where there is no message and little meaning.
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1980 BBC miniseries adaptation
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“Remember that love cannot last; it never, never does; but if you marry all this it’s for your life. One day, don’t forget, you’ll be middle-aged and think what that must be like for a woman who can’t have, say, a pair of diamond earrings. A woman of my age needs diamonds near her face, to give a sparkle.”
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“And I might offer you a little advice, Fanny, it would be to read fewer books, dear, and make your house slightly more comfortable. That is what a man appreciates in the long run.”
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“She had all the sentimentality of her generation, and this sentimentality, growing like a green moss over her spirit, helped to conceal its texture of stone, if not from others, at any rate from herself. She was convinced that she was a woman of profound sensibility.”
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“But beauty is more, after all, than bones, for, while bones belong to death and endure after decay, beauty is a living thing.”
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“There was a movement among the women. They turned their heads like dogs who think they hear somebody unwrapping a piece of chocolate.”
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“They were respected by their neighbours for their conformity to the fashion of the day, for their morals, for their wealth, and for their excellence at all kinds of sport.”
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“I tried to cheer her up by telling her, what, in fact, proved to be the case, that in a very short time the fields would be covered with sheep, the trees with birds, and the barrows with fruit just as usual. But though the future did not disturb me I found the present most disagreeable, that winter should set in again so late in the spring, at a time when it would not be unreasonable to expect delicious weather, almost summer-like, warm enough to sit out of doors for an hour or two.”
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More about Love in a Cold Climate Wikipedia Reader discussion on Goodreads Still Sparkling, Despite its Age (The Guardian) Kirkus ReviewsThe post Love in a Cold Climate by Nancy Mitford (1949) appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.
November 17, 2022
The Pursuit of Love by Nancy Mitford (1945)
The Pursuit of Love (1945) was British author Nancy Mitford’s fifth novel, and her first breakout success. The first of what was to become a trilogy, it was followed by Love in a Cold Climate (1949; arguably the best known of her many works) and Don’t Tell Alfred (1960).
The Pursuit of Love sold two hundred thousand copies within the first year, making Nancy Mitford financially independent for the first time in her life.
Adapted as a television miniseries in 2021, The Pursuit of Love marked the directorial debut of Emily Mortimer (who also had the role of Fanny’s mother, “the Bolter”). This well-received three-part series revitalized interest in Mitford’s work, much as earlier adaptations of Love in a Cold Climate had done.
The 2010 Alfred A. Knopf edition of The Pursuit of Love summed it up as follows:
“ … A classic comedy about growing up and falling in love among the privileged and eccentric.
Mitford modeled her characters on her own famously unconventional family. We are introduced to the Radletts through the eyes of their cousin Fanny, who stays with them at Alconleigh, their Gloucestershire estate.
Uncle Matthew is the blustering patriarch, known to hunt his children when foxes are scarce; Aunt Sadie is the vague but doting mother; and the seven Radlett children, despite the delights of their unusual childhood, are recklessly eager to grow up.
The first of three novels featuring these characters, The Pursuit of Love follows the travails of Linda, the most beautiful and wayward Radlett daughter, who falls first for a stuffy Tory politician, then an ardent Communist, and finally a French duke named Fabrice.”
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Learn more about Nancy Mitford
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From the original review in The Gazette (Montreal, Quebec, Canada) by Elizabeth Norrie, April 20, 1946:
The Radlett women and their kin pursued love with as wholehearted abandon as ever a bloodhound tracked down his quarry. It was not always what they wanted when they got it, but this did not dishearten them. Philosophically, they paused for a second wind and then started off on the trail once more.
There was Fanny’s mother known as the “Bolter” because of her frequent excursions into and out of marriage and the other thing; there was Fanny herself, teller of the tale, for whom one venture was enough, because it was the right one.
There was Emily, the Bolter’s sister, who found what wanted in Davey, the hypochondriac; there was Louisa, who was inclined to suspect that she had been short-changed but who did nothing about it except bring children into the world; and there was Linda.
Fanny makes clear that this is really Linda’s tale with the rest of the family thrown in for background. Linda’s heart was so tender that she wept over the death of Fanny’s smelly pet mouse.
It was Linda also who carried her love of animals over into marriage and shocked her conventional German-English in-laws by producing a dormouse from her pocket whenever conversation became boring. Of course, this first marriage didn’t last long. which undoubtedly saved the in-laws from dying of apoplexy or shock.
The next venture, however, had its problems. As the successor to Tony, the solid citizen, Linda chose Christian, the Communist, who expected her to be able to do housework.
“How dreadful it is, cooking, I mean,” says Linda to Fanny. She continues:
“That oven—Christian puts things in and says, “Now you take it out in about half an hour.” I don’t dare him how terrified I am, and at the end of half an hour I summon up all my courage and open the oven and there is that awful hot blast hitting one in the face …
“Oh dear, and I wish you could have seen the Hoover running away with me, it suddenly took the bit between its teeth and made for the lift shaft. How I shrieked—Christian only just rescued me in time.
I think housework is far more tiring and frightening than hunting, no comparison, and yet after hunting, we had eggs for tea and were made to rest for hours, but after housework people expect one to go on just as if nothing special had happened …”
And so Christian faded out of the picture, giving the entrance cue to Fabrice. With Fabrice, Linda embarked on a series of highly improbable adventures.
When the call came for the sweet-tempered, gentle Linda herself to make an exit, she left in such a state of happiness that Fanny was prompted to say to the Bolter: “I think she would have been happy with Fabrice. He was the great love of her life, you know.”
But the Bolter. from the depth of her experience said sadly, “Oh, dulling, one always thinks that. Every, every time”
The Pursuit of Love is built upon tragedy, but Nancy Mitford has chosen to paint the canvas with the glowing colors of comedy. The result is irresistibly charming.
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The Pursuit of Love (2021 miniseries)
official trailer
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“The great advantage of living in a large family is that early lesson of life’s essential unfairness.”
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“I have often noticed that when women look at themselves in every reflection, and take furtive peeps into their looking-glasses, it is hardly ever, as is generally supposed, from vanity, but much more often from a feeling that all is not quite as it should be.”
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“Even if I take him out for three hours every day, and go and chat to him for another hour, that leaves twenty hours for him all alone with nothing to do. Oh, why can’t dogs read?”
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“… Always either on a peak of happiness or drowning in black waters of despair they loved or they loathed, they lived in a world of superlatives.”
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“Left-wing people are always sad because they mind dreadfully about their causes, and the causes are always going so badly.”
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“One’s emotions are intensified in Paris—one can be more happy and also more unhappy here than in any other place. But it is always a positive source of joy to live here, and there is nobody so miserable as a Parisian in exile from his town.”
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“The really important thing, if a marriage is to go well, without much love, is very very great niceness—gentillesse—and very good manners.”
The post The Pursuit of Love by Nancy Mitford (1945) appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.
November 16, 2022
Nancy Mitford, author of Love in a Cold Climate
Nancy Mitford (November 28, 1904 – June 30, 1973) was a British novelist, journalist, and biographer. She was best known for her novels depicting upper-class life in England, often with satirical and provocative humor.
She also wrote historical biographies, magazine articles, and essays.
Nancy was the eldest of the six Mitford sisters, most of whom courted controversy in one way or another, and was considered one of the “Bright Young Things” on the London scene of the 1920s and 1930s.
Early lifeNancy Mitford was born in London in 1904. Her father, David Bertram Ogilvy Freeman-Mitford, the second Baron Redesdale, worked at The Lady magazine. In 1914, he and his wife, Sydney Bowles, moved their growing family to Asthall Manor near Swinbrook in Oxfordshire.
Nancy would eventually have five sisters — Pamela, Diana, Unity, Jessica, and Deborah — and one brother, Tom. He was largely overshadowed by his sister’s exploits and would later be killed in action in Burma in 1945.
Nancy and her siblings had an eccentric childhood, which revolved around the somewhat arbitrary rules their mother imposed on them: they were banned from eating certain foods; they had to be rinsed in cold water after their baths; windows were to be left open all year round, no medicines of any kind were allowed.
They were educated at home by governesses, leading Nancy to later joke that she “grew up ignorant as an owl,” and from the time her sister Pamela was born (when Nancy was three), sibling rivalries and jealousies dominated.
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The Mitford family in 1928. Nancy is in the back, left.
Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
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Nancy’s own brand of teasing humor formed the insular vocabulary that has since become known as “Mitfordian,” which included elaborate nicknames for the family and their friends. The index of nicknames in Charlotte Mosley’s The Mitfords: Letters Between Six Sisters is incomplete, but is still two pages long.
Their mother and father were known as Marv and Farv, Diana was Bodley (because of her supposedly large skull, taken from the name of the publisher Bodley Head), Jessica was Decca, Unity was Bobo and Heart of Stone, Deborah was Debo, Nine, or Stubby, and Pamela was known simply as Woman.
Nancy, known as Koko, was known among her sisters for being honest, loyal, witty, and cunning, sometimes to the point of being cruel. Jessica once described her as “sharp-tongued and sarcastic,” and remembered that Nancy had once told her she looked like “the eldest and ugliest of the Brontë sisters.” Some of the worst insults were reserved for Deborah, and Nancy would often tell her that “everyone cried when you were born.”
As well as Farv, Nancy had her own nickname for her father: “Old Subhuman,” partly for his habit of eating calf brains for breakfast and partly for one of his favorite games called “child hunt.”
He would give Nancy and Pamela a head start to run across the fields near their manor house before he released the pack of bloodhounds. Whichever dog found a child first was rewarded with raw meat. She later used her father as the model for Uncle Matthew in The Pursuit of Love — a bad-tempered, eccentric, xenophobic bully.)
The “Bright Young Things” and first writings
Nancy’s eighteenth birthday in November of 1922 was marked by a grand “coming-out” ball, signifying her entrance into “Society.” In June 1923 she was presented as a debutante at Court. The following years were marked with round after round of social events, parties, and balls. Nancy mixed with the Bright Young Things of 1920s London and claimed that “we never saw the light of day, except at dawn.”
It was at this time that she met the writer Evelyn Waugh, who would remain a close friend. With his encouragement, she began writing to supplement the meager income allowed her by her father. Her first articles were largely unsigned contributions to society magazines until she was offered a regular column in The Lady in 1930.
Her first novel, Highland Fling, was published in 1931. A preview of what would become her typical style (a merciless satire of the upper classes, combined with an apparent fondness of prewar Britain and a humorous lightness of touch), it told the story of a house party at a grand, haunted castle. It made little impact, but this didn’t deter Nancy, who immediately started work on another, Christmas Pudding.
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The wedding of Nancy Mitford and Peter Rodd, 1933
Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
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Around the time that Nancy first began writing in earnest that she fell in love with James “Hamish” St Clair-Erskine, a homosexual who was introduced to her by her brother in 1928. They became unofficially engaged, despite criticism from family and friends, including Waugh who told her firmly to “dress better and catch a better man.”
Later Nancy admitted that she didn’t have “a single happy moment” with the narcissistic Erskine, and the affair ended abruptly in 1933 when he informed her that he intended to marry the daughter of a London banker.
Within a month of the breakup with Erskine, Nancy announced her engagement to Peter Rodd, known among her friends for being both clever and a horrendous bore (Nancy’s sisters dubbed him “The Old Toll-Gater,” referring to his habit of talking for hours on subjects such as medieval roads).
They were married in December 1933, but Rodd was a heavy drinker and compulsively unfaithful, draining Nancy of most of the small amounts of money she earned from magazines and her first four novels, none of which received much critical or public attention.
In 1941, after suffering repeated miscarriages, Nancy had a hysterectomy. She and Rodd separated after the war and were divorced in 1958.
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Nancy (lower left), Diana, Unity, and Jessica Mitford, 1932
Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
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The characters in Nancy’s novels were largely drawn from life. When her sister Jessica’s 1960 biography Hons and Rebels was published, Nancy wrote to Waugh complaining that the book drew more from her novels than from any actual memories of Jessica’s: “In some respects she has seen the family, quite without knowing it herself, through the eyes of my books.”
The Mitford family certainly gave her — and the newspapers — plenty of material. Pamela was known as “the boring one,” but it was relative to Jessica, who became a fervent Communist and journalist in America; Deborah, who became the Duchess of Devonshire; Diana, who left her first husband for the leader of the fascist party in Britain (Sir Oswald Mosley;) and Unity, who was a devoted fascist herself, and attempted suicide by shooting herself in the head when war was declared in 1939 (she failed, and spent the next few years brain damaged until her death in 1948).
Nancy, however, claimed to be largely indifferent to politics. She described her views as “vaguely socialist,” but according to biographer Lisa Hilton, “loathed people who were anti-Semitic and … anti-gay. She saw both as being deeply, deeply uncivilized.”
She volunteered in France to aid refugees from the Spanish Civil War and later helped Jewish refugees in London. Nancy called Diana’s husband Mosley “The Ogre” and refused to see her sister after she married him.
In case of any doubt, she made her feelings clear in her 1935 novel Wigs on the Green, a piercing satire of British fascism, as well as of Mosley, Diana, and Unity. Despite Diana’s pleas to remove some of the more critical parts of the book, Nancy refused.
Later, at the outbreak of war, she denounced her sister to the Home Office as “a ruthless and shrewd egotist, a devoted fascist and … an extremely dangerous person.” Diana was already considered a security threat, and after Nancy’s testimony was incarcerated in Holloway Prison for three years.
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The Pursuit of LoveDuring the World War II years, Nancy worked at Heywood Hill, a bookshop in Curzon Street, Mayfair. At the time, she was so hard up that she would often walk for an hour from her home in Maida Vale rather than take the bus.
She also volunteered as an ambulance driver, a canteen assistant, and a first aid worker, during which time one of her tasks was to write the names on the foreheads of the dead in indelible pencil.
However, she still found time to write, and finally found success in December 1945 with her fifth novel The Pursuit of Love. It sold two hundred thousand copies within the first year, and for the first time in her life, she became financially independent.
A 1948 sequel, Love in a Cold Climate, was equally successful. Together, the novels established Nancy Mitford as a bestselling author. Both have both been reprinted and adapted for television multiple times, among others the miniseries Love in a Cold Climate (2001) and The Pursuit of Love (2021).
A new start in Paris
In September 1942, Nancy met Colonel Gaston Palewski, General de Gaulle’s Chief of Staff and a Free French officer. Their affair continued through the war despite Palewski’s posting to Algeria in 1943. He became the love of her life, though her feelings were never fully reciprocated).
She moved with Palewski to Paris in 1946 and remained in France for the rest of her life. It was from this period onward that most of her letters to her sisters and friends in England were written — thousands of letters that form an important part of her literary legacy, perhaps equal to her books.
Paris not only marked a new start for Nancy’s personal life but gave her fresh impetus in her writing. It was here that she completed Love in a Cold Climate and her next novel, The Blessing (1951). The latter was praised by Waugh as “admirable, deliciously funny, consistent and complete, by far the best of your writings.”
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Nancy Mitford drawing by William Aston, 1938
Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
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In the 1950s, Nancy turned her attention to historical biographies, in particular of French historical characters. Her first serious work in this vein was a biography of Madame de Pompadour, published to much critical acclaim in 1954. Her biography of Louis XIV, The Sun King, was an international bestseller.
In 1960, Nancy published another sequel to The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate, Don’t Tell Alfred.
She also wrote a regular column for the Sunday Times and was in demand as a journalist and reviewer. One article in particular, written for Encounter magazine as a deliberately teasing, provocative guide to the etiquette of language, proved so popular that it was later expanded into a book, Noblesse Oblige: An Enquiry into the Identifiable Characteristics of the English Aristocracy.
In it, she detailed the correct “U” (upper-class) way of speaking, as well as offering the “non-U” (non-upper-class) alternative. The book cemented her reputation as a snob, but when asked in a 1970 BBC interview whether she was “grieved” by what the public thought of her, she replied “Not in the least bit. I don’t care.”
Although Nancy was often disparaging about her own writing, especially her “indifferent novels,” Zoë Heller, who wrote the introduction to a 2010 edition of The Pursuit of Love, described Nancy as “a genius.”
Heller wrote that “beneath the brittle surface of Mitford’s wit there is something infinitely more melancholy at work — something that is apt to snag you and pull you into its dark undertow when you are least expecting it.”
Biographer Laura Thompson wrote that Nancy Mitford’s books “read like an enchantingly clever woman telling stories down the telephone.”
Last years
In 1972 Nancy was made a Chevalier of the Légion d’Honneur and a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE). She was delighted by the first and amused by the second, which she remembered Waugh had once turned down as an “insult.”
By this time, however, she was suffering from a rare form of Hodgkin’s Disease that attacked her spine, the pain from which she once described as “something close to torture,” and which debilitated her for almost four years before she died at home in Versailles on 30 June 1973.
Nancy Mitford’s ashes are buried at the Church of St Mary’s in Swinbrook, Oxfordshire, alongside her parents and her sisters Pamela, Diana, and Unity, although she specifically requested that no cross appeared on her gravestone. She believed it to be a symbol of violence, and instead, a mole was carved like one that she had printed at the top of her writing paper.
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 Nancy MitfordNovels
Highland Fling (1931)Christmas Pudding (1932)Wigs on the Green (1935)Pigeon Pie (1940)The Pursuit of Love (1945)Love in a Cold Climate (1949)The Blessing (1951)Don’t Tell Alfred (1960)Biographies (written by Nancy Mitford)
Madame de Pompadour (1954)Voltaire in Love (1957)The Sun King: Louis XIV at Versailles (1966)Frederick the Great (1970)Biographies about Nancy Mitford and the Mitford family
Nancy Mitford by Selina Hastings (2002)Life in a Cold Climate: Nancy Mitford, The Biography by Laura Thompson (2015)The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Family by Mary S. Lovell (2003)Nancy Mitford by Harold Acton (2019)The Mitfords: Letters Between Six Sisters by Charlotte Mosley (2008)More information
Portraits of Nancy Mitford at the National Portrait Gallery Wikipedia Reader discussion of Mitford’s works on Goodreads In Pursuit of Nancy Mitford (Vanity Fair)The post Nancy Mitford, author of Love in a Cold Climate appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.
November 6, 2022
Early Poems by Alice Dunbar-Nelson (from Violets and Other Tales)
Alice Dunbar-Nelson (1875 – 1935; also known as Alice Moore Dunbar-Nelson) was a poet, short story writer, essayist, and journalist associated with the Harlem Renaissance. Presented here are poems from Violets and Other Tales (1895), her first collection, when she was still Alice Ruth Moore, her original name.
Published when she was just twenty, Violets and Other Tales includes short stories interspersed with the poems. Some of this early work hints at feminism and social justice, in a preview of the kind of writing that would become her hallmark.
Dunbar-Nelson would later become at least as well known for her short stories and searingly honest essays as for her poetry, if not more so. More of her short stories, which have come to be known as the Creole stories, have recently come to light.
Her mixed heritage of Black, Creole, European, and Native American gave her a broad perspective on race. She explored racial issues in tandem with the varied and complex issues faced by women of color.
As her reputation grew, despite a brief and disastrous marriage to poet Paul Laurence Dunbar, she continued to explore sexism, racism, women’s work, and sexuality in the various genres in which she wrote.
Poems in this selection:
Three ThoughtsA PlaintImpressionsLegend of the NewspaperPaul to VirginiaIn MemoriamAt Bay St. LouisNew Year’s DayFarewellIf I Had KnownChalmetleThe IdlerLove and the ButterflyAmid the Roses More about the life and poetry of Alice Dunbar-Nelson Poetry Foundation Georgetown University: Classroom Issues and Struggles Women Writers You Should Know This Harlem Renaissance Writer Seemed to Live an Ordinary Life. . . . . . . . . . .
A Selection of Poems by Alice Dunbar-Nelson
highlights some of her later poetry
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Three ThoughtsFIRST
How few of us
In all the world’s great, ceaseless struggling strife,
Go to our work with gladsome, buoyant step,
And love it for its sake, whate’er it be.
Because it is a labor, or, mayhap,
Some sweet, peculiar art of God’s own gift;
And not the promise of the world’s slow smile
of recognition, or of mammon’s gilded grasp.
Alas, how few, in inspiration’s dazzling flash,
Or spiritual sense of world’s beyond the dome
Of circling blue around this weary earth,
Can bask, and know the God-given grace
Of genius’ fire that flows and permeates
The virgin mind alone; the soul in which
The love of earth hath tainted not.
The love of art and art alone.
SECOND
“Who dares stand forth?” the monarch cried,
“Amid the throng, and dare to give
Their aid, and bid this wretch to live?
I pledge my faith and crown beside,
A woeful plight, a sorry sight,
This outcast from all God-given grace.
What, ho! in all, no friendly face,
No helping hand to stay his plight?
St. Peter’s name be pledged for aye,
The man’s accursed, that is true;
But ho, he suffers. None of you
Will mercy show, or pity sigh?”
Strong men drew back, and lordly train
Did slowly file from monarch’s look,
Whose lips curled scorn. But from a nook
A voice cried out, “Though he has slain
That which I loved the best on earth,
Yet will I tend him till he dies,
I can be brave.” A woman’s eyes
Gazed fearlessly into his own.
THIRD
When all the world has grown full cold to thee,
And man—proud pygmy—shrugs all scornfully,
And bitter, blinding tears flow gushing forth,
Because of thine own sorrows and poor plight,
Then turn ye swift to nature’s page,
And read there passions, immeasurably far
Greater than thine own in all their littleness.
For nature has her sorrows and her joys,
As all the piled-up mountains and low vales
Will silently attest—and hang thy head
In dire confusion, for having dared
To moan at thine own miseries
When God and nature suffer silently.
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A PlaintDear God, ’tis hard, so awful hard to lose
The one we love, and see him go afar,
With scarce one thought of aching hearts behind,
Nor wistful eyes, nor outstretched yearning hands.
Chide not, dear God, if surging thoughts arise.
And bitter questionings of love and fate,
But rather give my weary heart thy rest,
And turn the sad, dark memories into sweet.
Dear God, I fain my loved one were anear,
But since thou will’st that happy thence he’ll be,
I send him forth, and back I’ll choke the grief
Rebellious rises in my lonely heart.
I pray thee, God, my loved one joy to bring;
I dare not hope that joy will be with me,
But ah, dear God, one boon I crave of thee,
That he shall ne’er forget his hours with me.
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ImpressionsTHOUGHT.
A swift, successive chain of things,
That flash, kaleidoscope-like, now in, now out,
Now straight, now eddying in wild rings,
No order, neither law, compels their moves,
But endless, constant, always swiftly roves.
HOPE.
Wild seas of tossing, writhing waves,
A wreck half-sinking in the tortuous gloom;
One man clings desperately, while Boreas raves,
And helps to blot the rays of moon and star,
Then comes a sudden flash of light, which gleams on shores afar.
LOVE.
A bed of roses, pleasing to the eye,
Flowers of heaven, passionate and pure,
Upon this bed the youthful often lie,
And pressing hard upon its sweet delight,
The cruel thorns pierce soul and heart, and cause a woeful blight.
DEATH.
A traveller who has always heard
That on this journey he some day must go,
Yet shudders now, when at the fatal word
He starts upon the lonesome, dreary way.
The past, a page of joy and woe,—the future, none can say.
FAITH.
Blind clinging to a stern, stone cross,
Or it may be of frailer make;
Eyes shut, ears closed to earth’s drear dross,
Immovable, serene, the world away
From thoughts—the mind uncaring for another day.
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Learn more about Alice Dunbar-Nelson
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Poets sing and fables tell us,
Or old folk lore whispers low,
Of the origin of all things,
Of the spring from whence they came,
Kalevala, old and hoary,
Æneid, Iliad, Æsop, too,
All are filled with strange quaint legends,
All replete with ancient tales,—
How love came, and how old earth,
Freed from chaos, grew for us,
To a green and wondrous spheroid,
To a home for things alive;
How fierce fire and iron cold,
How the snow and how the frost,—
All these things the old rhymes ring,
All these things the old tales tell.
Yet they ne’er sang of the beginning,
Of that great unbreathing angel,
Of that soul without a haven,
Of that gracious Lady Bountiful,
Yet they ne’er told how it came here;
Ne’er said why we read it daily,
Nor did they even let us guess why
We were left to tell the tale.
Came one day into the wood-land,
Muckintosh, the great and mighty,
Muckintosh, the famous thinker,
He whose brain was all his weapons,
As against his rival’s soarings,
High unto the vaulted heavens,
Low adown the swarded earth,
Rolled he round his gaze all steely,
And his voice like music prayed:
“Oh, Creator, wondrous Spirit,
Thou who hast for us descended
In the guise of knowledge mighty,
And our brains with truth o’er-flooded;
In the greatness of thy wisdom,
Knowest not our limitations?
Wondrous thoughts have we, thy servants,
Wondrous things we see each day,
Yet we cannot tell our brethren,
Yet we cannot let them know,
Of our doings and our happenings,
Should they parted be from us?
Help us, oh, Thou Wise Creator,
From the fulness of thy wisdom,
Show us how to spread our knowledge,
And disseminate our actions,
Such as we find worthy, truly.”
Quick the answer came from heaven;
Muckintosh, the famous thinker,
Muckintosh, the great and mighty,
Felt a trembling, felt a quaking,
Saw the earth about him open,
Saw the iron from the mountains
Form a quaint and queer machine,
Saw the lead from out the lead mines
Roll into small lettered forms,
Saw the fibres from the flax-plant,
Spread into great sheets of paper,
Saw the ink galls from the green trees
Crushed upon the leaden forms;
Muckintosh, the famous thinker,
Muckintosh, the great and mighty,
Felt a trembling, felt a quaking,
Saw the earth about him open,
Saw the flame and sulphur smoking,
Came the printer’s little devil,
Far from distant lands the printer,
Man of unions, man of cuss-words,
From the depths of sooty blackness;
Came the towel of the printer;
Many things that Muckintosh saw,—
Galleys, type, and leads and rules,
Presses, press-men, quoins and spaces,
Quads and caps and lower cases.
But to Muckintosh bewildered,
All this passed as in a dream,
Till within his nervous hand,
Hand with joy and fear a-quaking,
Muckintosh, the great and mighty,
Muckintosh, the famous thinker,
Held the first of our newspapers.
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Paul to VirginiaFIN DE SIECLE.
I really must confess, my dear,
I cannot help but love you,
For of all girls I ever knew,
There’s none I place above you;
But then you know it’s rather hard,
To dangle aimless at your skirt,
And watch your every movement so,
For I am jealous, and you’re a flirt.
There’s half a score of fellows round,
You smile at every one,
And as I think to pride myself for basking in the sun
Of your sweet smiles, you laugh at me,
And treat me like a lump of dirt,
Until I wish that I were dead,
For I am jealous, and you’re a flirt.
I’m sorry that I’ve ever known
Your loveliness entrancing,
Or ever saw your laughing eyes,
With girlish mischief dancing;
‘Tis agony supreme and rare
To see your slender waist a-girt
With other fellows’ arms, you see,
For I am jealous, and you’re a flirt.
Now, girlie, if you’ll promise me,
To never, never treat me mean,
I’ll show you in a little while,
The best sweetheart you’ve ever seen;
You do not seem to know or care,
How often you’ve my feelings hurt,
While flying round with other boys,
For I am jealous, and you’re a flirt.
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In MemoriamThe light streams through the windows arched high,
And o’er the stern, stone carvings breaks
In warm rich gold and crimson waves,
Then steals away in corners dark to die.
And all the grand cathedral silence falls
Into the hearts of those that worship low,
Like tender waves of hushed nothingness,
Confined nor kept by human earthly walls.
Deep music in its thundering organ sounds,
Grows diffuse through the echoing space,
Till hearts grow still in sadness’ mighty joy,
Or leap aloft in swift ecstatic bounds.
Mayhap ’twas but a dream that came to me,
Or but a vision of the soul’s desire,
To see the nation in one mighty whole,
Do homage on its bended, worshipping knee.
Through time’s heroic actions, the soul of man,
Alone proves what that soul without earth’s dross
Could be, and this, through time’s far-searching fire,
Hath proved thine white beneath the deepest scan.
A woman’s tribute, ’tis a tiny dot,
A merest flower from a frail, small hand,
To lay among the many petaled wreaths
About thy form,—a tribute soon forgot.
But if in all the incense to arise
In fragrance to the blue empyrean
The blended sweetness of the womens’ love
Goes pouring too, in all their heartfelt sighs.
And if one woman’s sorrow be among them too,
One woman’s joy for labor past
Be reckoned in the mighty teeming whole,
It is enough, there is not more to do.
Within the hearts of heroes small and great
There ‘bides a tenderness for weakling things
Within thy heart, the sorrowing country knows
These passions, bravest and the tenderest mate.
When man is dust, before the gazing eyes
Of all the gaping throng, his life lies wide
For all to see and whisper low about
Or let their thoughts in discord’s clatter rise.
But thine was pure and undefiled,
A record of long brilliant, teeming days,
Each thought did tend to further things,
But pure as the proverbial child.
Oh, people, that thy grief might find express
To gather in some vast cathedral’s hall,
That then in unity we might kneel and hear
Sublimity in sounds, voice our distress.
Peace, peace, the men of God cry, ye be bold,
The world hath known, ’tis Heaven who claims him now,
And in our railings we but cast aside
The noble traits he bid us hold.
So though divided through the land, in dreams
We see a people kneeling low,
Bowed down in heart and soul to see
This fearful sorrow, crushing as it seems.
And all the grand cathedral silence falls
Into the hearts of these that worship low,
Like tender waves of hushed nothingness,
Confined, nor kept by human earthly walls.
. . . . . . . . . . .
At Bay St. LouisSoft breezes blow and swiftly show
Through fragrant orange branches parted,
A maiden fair, with sun-flecked hair,
Caressed by arrows, golden darted.
The vine-clad tree holds forth to me
A promise sweet of purple blooms,
And chirping bird, scarce seen but heard
Sings dreamily, and sweetly croons
At Bay St. Louis.
The hammock swinging, idly singing,
Lissome nut-brown maid
Swings gaily, freely, to-and-fro;
The curling, green-white waters casting cool, clear shade,
Rock small, shell boats that go
In circles wide, or tug at anchor’s chain,
As though to skim the sea with cargo vain,
At Bay St. Louis.
The maid swings slower, slower to-and-fro,
And sunbeams kiss gray, dreamy half-closed eyes;
Fond lover creeping on with foot steps slow,
Gives gentle kiss, and smiles at sweet surprise.
The lengthening shadows tell that eve is nigh,
And fragrant zephyrs cool and calmer grow,
Yet still the lover lingers, and scarce breathed sigh,
Bids the swift hours to pause, nor go,
At Bay St. Louis.
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New Year’s DayThe poor old year died hard; for all the earth lay cold
And bare beneath the wintry sky;
While grey clouds scurried madly to the west,
And hid the chill young moon from mortal sight.
Deep, dying groans the aged year breathed forth,
In soughing winds that wailed a requiem sad
In dull crescendo through the mournful air.
The new year now is welcomed noisily
With din and song and shout and clanging bell,
And all the glare and blare of fiery fun.
Sing high the welcome to the New Year’s morn!
Le roi est mort. Vive, vive le roi! cry out,
And hail the new-born king of coming days.
Alas! the day is spent and eve draws nigh;
The king’s first subject dies—for naught,
And wasted moments by the hundred score
Of past years rise like spectres grim
To warn, that these days may not idly glide away.
Oh, New Year, youth of promise fair!
What dost thou hold for me? An aching heart?
Or eyes burnt blind by unshed tears? Or stabs,
More keen because unseen?
Nay, nay, dear youth, I’ve had surfeit
Of sorrow’s feast. The monarch dead
Did rule me with an iron hand. Be thou a friend,
A tender, loving king—and let me know
The ripe, full sweetness of a happy year.
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FarewellFarewell, sweetheart, and again farewell;
To day we part, and who can tell
If we shall e’er again
Meet, and with clasped hands
Renew our vows of love, and forget
The sad, dull pain.
Dear heart, ’tis bitter thus to lose thee
And think mayhap, you will forget me;
And yet, I thrill
As I remember long and happy days
Fraught with sweet love and pleasant memories
That linger still
You go to loved ones who will smile
And clasp you in their arms, and all the while
I stay and moan
For you, my love, my heart and strive
To gather up life’s dull, gray thread
And walk alone.
Aye, with you love the red and gold
Goes from my life, and leaves it cold
And dull and bare,
Why should I strive to live and learn
And smile and jest, and daily try
You from my heart to tare?
Nay, sweetheart, rather would I lie
Me down, and sleep for aye; or fly
To regions far
Where cruel Fate is not and lovers live
Nor feel the grim, cold hand of Destiny
Their way to bar.
I murmur not, dear love, I only say
Again farewell. God bless the day
On which we met,
And bless you too, my love, and be with you
In sorrow or in happiness, nor let you
E’er me forget.
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If I Had KnownIf I had known
Two years ago how drear this life should be,
And crowd upon itself all strangely sad,
Mayhap another song would burst from out my lips,
Overflowing with the happiness of future hopes;
Mayhap another throb than that of joy.
Have stirred my soul into its inmost depths,
If I had known.
If I had known,
Two years ago the impotence of love,
The vainness of a kiss, how barren a caress,
Mayhap my soul to higher things have soarn,
Nor clung to earthly loves and tender dreams,
But ever up aloft into the blue empyrean,
And there to master all the world of mind,
If I had known.
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ChalmetleWreaths of lilies and immortelles,
Scattered upon each silent mound,
Voices in loving remembrance swell,
Chanting to heaven the solemn sound.
Glad skies above, and glad earth beneath;
And grateful hearts who silently
Gather earth’s flowers, and tenderly wreath
Woman’s sweet token of fragility.
Ah, the noble forms who fought so well
Lie, some unnamed, ‘neath the grassy mound;
Heroes, brave heroes, the stories tell,
Silently too, the unmarked mounds,
Tenderly wreath them about with flowers,
Joyously pour out your praises loud;
For every joy beat in these hearts of ours
Is only a drawing us nearer to God.
Little enough is the song we sing,
Little enough is the tale we tell,
When we think of the voices who erst did ring
Ere their owners in smoke of battle fell.
Little enough are the flowers we cull
To scatter afar on the grass-grown graves,
When we think of bright eyes, now dimmed and dull
For the cause they loyally strove to save.
And they fought right well, did these brave men,
For their banner still floats unto the breeze,
And the pæans of ages forever shall tell
Their glorious tale beyond the seas.
Ring out your voices in praises loud,
Sing sweet your notes of music gay,
Tell me in all you loyal crowd
Throbs there a heart unmoved to-day?
Meeting together again this year,
As met we in fealty and love before;
Men, maids, and matrons to reverently hear
Praises of brave men who fought of yore.
Tell to the little ones with wondering eyes,
The tale of the flag that floats so free;
Till their tiny voices shall merrily rise
In hymns of rejoicing and praises to Thee.
Many a pure and noble heart
Lies under the sod, all covered with green;
Many a soul that had felt the smart
Of life’s sad torture, or mayhap had seen
The faint hope of love pass afar from the sight,
Like swift flight of bird to a rarer clime
Many a youth whose death caused the blight
Of tender hearts in that long, sad time.
Nay, but this is no hour for sorrow;
They died at their duty, shall we repine?
Let us gaze hopefully on to the morrow
Praying that our lives thus shall shine.
Ring out your bugles, sound out your cheers!
Man has been God-like so may we be.
Give cheering thanks, there dry up those tears,
Widowed and orphaned, the country is free!
Wreathes of lillies and immortelles,
Scattered upon each silent mound,
Voices in loving remembrance swell,
Chanting to heaven the solemn sound,
Glad skies above, and glad earth beneath,
And grateful hearts who silently
Gather earth’s flowers, and tenderly wreath
Woman’s sweet token of fragility.
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The IdlerAn idle lingerer on the wayside’s road,
He gathers up his work and yawns away;
A little longer, ere the tiresome load
Shall be reduced to ashes or to clay.
No matter if the world has marched along,
And scorned his slowness as it quickly passed;
No matter, if amid the busy throng,
He greets some face, infantile at the last.
His mission? Well, there is but one,
And if it is a mission he knows it, nay,
To be a happy idler, to lounge and sun,
And dreaming, pass his long-drawn days away.
So dreams he on, his happy life to pass
Content, without ambitions painful sighs,
Until the sands run down into the glass;
He smiles—content—unmoved and dies.
And yet, with all the pity that you feel
For this poor mothling of that flame, the world;
Are you the better for your desperate deal,
When you, like him, into infinitude are hurled?
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Love and the ButterflyI heard a merry voice one day
And glancing at my side,
Fair Love, all breathless, flushed with play,
A butterfly did ride.
“Whither away, oh sportive boy?”
I asked, he tossed his head;
Laughing aloud for purest joy,
And past me swiftly sped.
Next day I heard a plaintive cry
And Love crept in my arms;
Weeping he held the butterfly,
Devoid of all its charms.
Sweet words of comfort, whispered I
Into his dainty ears,
But Love still hugged the butterfly,
And bathed its wounds with tears.
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Amid the RosesThere is tropical warmth and languorous life
Where the roses lie
In a tempting drift
Of pink and red and golden light
Untouched as yet by the pruning knife.
And the still, warm life of the roses fair
That whisper “Come,”
With promises
Of sweet caresses, close and pure
Has a thorny whiff in the perfumed air.
There are thorns and love in the roses’ bed,
And Satan too
Must linger there;
So Satan’s wiles and the conscience stings,
Must now abide—the roses are dead.
The post Early Poems by Alice Dunbar-Nelson (from Violets and Other Tales) appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.
October 28, 2022
Worth a Thousand Words: 4 Trailblazing Women Photojournalists
Though Margaret Bourke-White and Dorothea Lange were two of the most influential pioneering modern photojournalism, the field is still male dominated today. As we learn more about them, along with the two other trailblazing American women photojournalists presented here (Jessie Tarbox Beals and Ruth Gruber), it’s worth musing on why this is.
A photojournalist is a reporter with a camera. Some photojournalists (past and present) have only taken pictures, and a different reporter writes the text that goes with them. Others take photos as well as write articles.
The challenges of photojournalismIn some ways, a photojournalist’s job can be trickier than that of a text-only reporter. They need to consider whether a photo might be an invasion of privacy — for example, a shot of someone who’s injured, or even dead.
Decisions must be made in a flash — pardon the pun. When news is happening in real time, there are no do-overs!
News stories with photos weren’t common until the late 1920s, when what we now call the “golden age of photojournalism” dawned. Along with it came the phrase “a picture is worth a thousand words.”
Photography has been around since the mid-1800s, so why did it take so long for it to become an important part of news reporting?
To begin with, the printing process for images was slow and tedious. Cameras were big, heavy boxes with awkward tripods; they made photographers stick out like a sore thumb. And action photography was impossible because both camera and subject had to be very still to get a decent picture.
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Jessie Tarbox Beals
Jessie Tarbox Beals (1870 – 1942) photographed the Massachusetts State Prison at the turn of the twentieth century, making her the first American woman to have her work published in a newspaper.
She was also the first woman to be hired as a staff photographer (The Buffalo Inquirer, 1902). She’s considered America’s first female photojournalist.
Photography was just a hobby for Jessie when she took it up in 1888. By 1904, she’d become successful at news and portrait photography in Buffalo, New York.
Setting her sights even higher, she closed her studio and moved to New York City. She wanted to conquer news photography in America’s biggest city, but because she was a woman, no newspaper would hire her. Once again, she opened her own portrait studio as a way to make a living.
Jessie wouldn’t give up. She decided to photograph newsworthy stories she found interesting and sold them to newspaper editors afterward. One of them was on the poor living conditions of immigrant families in tenements. It worked — a newspaper bought her photos and assigned a reporter to write a story around it. After that, she had no trouble getting assignments.
Hauling around fifty pounds of equipment dressed in hoop skirts and big hats didn’t slow Jessie down a bit. She became famous for climbing ladders and jumping into hot air balloons to get the best angles for her shots.
While always busy capturing news events, Jessie Tarbox Beals also continued to do portraits. Her subjects included presidents Taft and Roosevelt, Mark Twain, and other authors and artists of her time.
Learn more about Jessie Tarbox Beals on this site and at Harvard Radcliffe Institute.
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Margaret Bourke-White (1904 – 1971) broke ground with several firsts as a photojournalist. She was the first American woman …
war photographer and war correspondentto be allowed to document World War II combat zonesto fly a bombing missionhired by Life magazine as a staff photojournalistMargaret came by her interest from her father, a Polish-Jewish immigrant who was an avid hobby photographer. Always a restless spirit, she recalled, “I knew I had to travel.” Photojournalism became her passport to the world.
While still a student at Cornell University (the seventh college she attended), Margaret started selling photos. Henry Luce, the founder of Time, Inc. summoned her to New York City after she graduated to work for his new magazine, Fortune. Later she joined the staff of Life magazine.
Like her colleague Dorothea Lange, Margaret took some of the most memorable photographs from the Great Depression era. Later, she broke some of journalism’s toughest barriers, becoming the first American female war photographer during World War II.
In the course of her long career, Margaret captured many of the world’s major news events on film. In the 1982 film Gandhi, the actress Candice Bergen portrayed Margaret during the time of the India-Pakistan partition.
Respected in her own lifetime, Margaret Bourke-White continues to be celebrated as a true pioneer in the field of photojournalism. Learn more about her at the International Center for Photography.
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Dorothea Lange
Photo: Paul S. Taylor
Dorothea Lange (1895 – 1965) never let a permanent limp from childhood polio stop her from making great strides as one of America’s most important photojournalists.
After studying photography in college, Dorothea longed to explore the world. But she was robbed just as she was about to set sail from San Francisco, forcing her to stay put and earn money.
What started out as a short detour became a very long one. She married, set up a portrait studio, and had two children. When the Great Depression hit in the early 1930s, Dorothea was in her own thirties, starting to hit her stride as a photographer.
She took photographs that put a face on the suffering of the homeless in cities and migrants in rural areas. Her 1936 photograph, “Migrant Mother,” is one of the most famous images ever taken.
Dorothea photographed Japanese American internment camps in the World War II years. Her images were so heartbreaking that the Army seized them and censored them from public viewing for several decades. Dorothea continued to dedicate her career to bearing witness and inspiring compassion for fellow human beings.
Learn more about Dorothea Lange on this site and at NPR.org.
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Ruth Gruber
Ruth Gruber (1911 –2016) was a Brooklyn born-and-bred daughter of Russian-Jewish immigrants. A brilliant student, by age twenty she earned a Ph.D. from the University of Cologne in Germany.
Ruth’s decision to linger in Germany as the Nazis were coming into power was terribly risky, but risk wasn’t something she avoided.
Upon returning to the U.S., she wrote a series of articles about women’s lives under fascism for the New York Herald Tribune. A career in journalism was born. Ruth discovered a talent for photography that was a perfect partner to her writing.
“I had two tools to fight injustice — words and images, my typewriter and my camera. I just felt that I had to fight evil, and I’ve felt like that since I was twenty years old. I’ve never been an observer. I have to live a story to write it.”
Ruth helped bring nearly 1,000 Jewish refugees to the U.S. during World War II. She also documented the voyage of the ship Exodus that carried more than 4,500 Holocaust survivors to Palestine in 1947.
The British navy intercepted the ship and forced it to Cyprus. Ruth flew to the island nation to record the horrific conditions forced on people who had already endured so much, now stuck in crowded refugee camps.
Ruth Gruber considered herself a witness to history, especially when it came to the plight of displaced Jews. By the end of her 105-year life, she was recognized as much for her work as a human rights advocate as for her incredible career as a photojournalist.
Learn more about Ruth Gruber on this site and at Jewish Women’s Archive.
More trailblazing women photojournalists
Marion CarpenterHelen Johns KirtlandAnn RosenerMarion Post WolcottEsther BubleyAlice Rohe
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See also: 6 Female Journalists of the World War II Era
The post Worth a Thousand Words: 4 Trailblazing Women Photojournalists appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.
October 21, 2022
Inspiration from Classic Caribbean Women Writers
How can writers reconcile the demands of the social and political moment with the demands of their craft? Caribbean women writers of color offer some models in the way they explore the rich intersection of concerns with gender, race, and colonialism through their work.
Anglophone writers with links to African and indigenous Caribbean cultures as well as to the United States or the United Kingdom (or both) express those connections with language, story, and rhythm.
Following are brief introductions to several classic Caribbean women writers, listed in order of their dates of birth — Rosa Guy, Paule Marshall (shown above), Georgina Herrera, Michelle Cliff, Mahadai Das, and Jean “Binta” Breeze.
My thanks to Dr. Warren R. Harding, whose work focuses on Black Caribbean women writers, for introducing me to these notable women. Dr. Harding, who has a Ph.D. in Africana studies, is completing a post-doctoral fellowship at Brown University.
. . . . . . . . .
Rosa Guy:“Only if We Care!”
Rosa Guy (September 1, 1922–June 3, 2012) was “never afraid of the truth,” Maya Angelou said upon Guy’s death. Guy (rhymes with “key”) was born in Trinidad. Orphaned at the age of fourteen, she lived for a time with a relative who was a supporter of Black nationalist Marcus Garvey, an experience that led her to see herself as an Africanist and to oppose colonialism.
Guy studied acting at the American Negro Theatre in New York. She went on to cofound the Harlem Writers Guild in 1950, an organization that nurtured the work of writers such as Paule Marshall, Audre Lorde, and Maya Angelou.
Guy wrote for both adults and young adults. Her first novel, Bird at My Window, was written for adults and published in 1966. In the 1970s, she wrote a trilogy of novels for young adults. The Friends (1973), Ruby (1976), and Edith Jackson (1978), drew on her experiences as a young immigrant.
Her characters portray the tensions between Black West Indians and African Americans, same-sex relationships, and unwanted pregnancy—topics that were off-limits in YA literature at the time.
Alice Walker, reviewing The Friends for the New York Times, called the book a “heart-slammer.” Active in both traditional civil rights and Black nationalist movements, Guy was driven to share her ideas through her creative work. “The sharing of cultures—a rare and beautiful concept—is inevitable,” she wrote. “We cannot prevent change, but we can guide generational change if we care—only if we care!”
Guy’s most successful adult novel was My Love, My Love: Or, The Peasant Girl (1985), a retelling of “The Little Mermaid” set on a Caribbean island. The novel was adapted for the stage as a musical and was nominated for eight Tony Awards during its Broadway run of over a year.
Britannica The Guardian (obituary). . . . . . . . .
Paule Marshall:A Barbadian in Brooklyn
Paule Marshall (April 9, 1929–August 12, 2019) was an activist in the civil rights and anti-war movements of the 1960s, and saw herself as a “tripartite” person, incorporating her connections to Brooklyn, Barbados, and Africa into her work. A protégé of Langston Hughes, her work was regarded by critics to be the spark that ignited contemporary Black women’s writing.
Marshall’s parents came from Barbados, and Paule, whose original name was Valenza Pauline Burke, was born in 1929 in Brooklyn, New York.
A year spent in Barbados with her grandmother when she was nine left a lasting impact, as did her discovery of the poetry of Black poet Paul Laurence Dunbar. Her pen name Paule (the e is silent) is a nod to Dunbar, whose work inspired her to become a writer.
Marshall’s first novel, Brown Girl, Brownstones was published in 1959. She credits the Barbadian women who gathered in her mother’s Brooklyn kitchen to exchange stories at the end of their workday, these “poets of the kitchen,” as she called them, with teaching her the foundations of her craft.
“They trained my ear. They set a standard of excellence. This is why the best of my work must be attributed to them; it stands as testimony to the rich legacy of language and culture they so freely passed on to me in the wordshop of the kitchen.”
Her 1969 novel, The Chosen Place, The Timeless People, includes characters and cultural influences of Africa, the United States, the Caribbean, China, and India. Her 1983 novel, Praisesong for the Widow, portrays the anguish of a wealthy, well-educated African American woman who experiences a spiritual reawakening while visiting a Caribbean island, and garnered Marshall the most critical attention.
In her lifetime, Marshall received a MacArthur Foundation “genius” award and was designated a Literary Lion by the New York Public Library.
Britannica Emory University Scholar Blogs The Guardian (obituary). . . . . . . . .
Georgina Herrera:A Genuine Cuban Voice
Georgina Herrera (April 23, 1936–December 13, 2021) was an Afro-Cuban poet who was praised for her awareness of “the simultaneity of suffering and joy, the fleetingness of the terrible and the permanence of the kind.” While she wrote in Spanish, her work is known internationally and has been translated into English.
Born to a family of Nigerian descent in Matanza, Cuba, Herrera was a feminist. Her devotion to elevating older Black women’s stories in Cuban society led many to consider her one of Cuba’s most genuine voices.
Forced to leave school when she was in eighth grade, Herrera fled to Havana in 1956, when she was 20. She worked at first as a house cleaner and published her first collection of poetry, GH, in 1962. She then took a position with a Havana radio station where she wrote short stories, plays, and radio dramas.
In the early 1960s, her poetry and her associations with other outspoken writers led to her marginalization. But she continued writing, and ultimately published nine books of poetry that have been translated into several languages.
Her 2016 volume, Always Rebellious/ Cimarroneando, won the 2016 International Latino Book Award for Best Bilingual Poetry Book. Her poem “Africa” from that volume expresses her determination to claim her African identity within her Caribbean context:
Whenever I mention you
or whenever you are named in my presence,
it will be to praise you.
I care for you.
At your side I remain, as at the foot of
the tallest tree.
I think
of the water in your rivers, and my eyes
remain moist.
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Michelle Cliff:Claiming Multiple Identities
Michelle Cliff (November 2, 1946–June 12, 2016) wrote that the aim of her work was “to reject speechlessness … to invent my own particular speech with which to describe my own peculiar self, to draw together everything I am and have been.”
Cliff’s “own peculiar self” embodied complexities: she was a light-skinned Black lesbian born in Jamaica, raised in both Jamaica and a West Indian neighborhood in New York City, who studied in London and the United States.
In 1975, while working for W. W. Norton as a production editor for books on women’s studies, she met poet Adrienne Rich. The two became partners and remained so throughout their lives.
Cliff’s first book, Claiming an Identity They Taught Me to Despise, was a series of prose poems published in 1980. Her first novel, Abeng, was published in 1984 and portrays a relationship between a light-skinned Jamaican girl and a darker girl from an impoverished family.
Subsequently, Cliff published No Telephone to Heaven (1987), a novel that portrays characters in Jamaica, New York, and London: Free Enterprise: A Novel of Mary Ellen Pleasant (1993), about a Jamaican woman who worked with Pleasant, the first African American millionaire, to help finance John Brown’s 1859 raid; and the essay collection, If I Could Write This in Fire (2008), described as the “emotionally urgent” expression of “a radical, powerful, and essential artist.”
Poetry Foundation NY Times (obituary) Poetry Foundation (obituary) Emory University Scholar Blogs If I Could Write in this Fire. . . . . . . . .
Mahadai Das:A Poet of Her People
Mahadai Das (October 22, 1954–April 3, 2003) was a descendant of indentured Indian laborers. Born in Guyana, a nation on the Caribbean coast of South America, Das received a B.A. at Columbia University. Her work in a doctoral program at the University of Chicago was cut short after she fell ill.
Politically active at a time when it was dangerous to be so in Guyana, Das brought passion and wit to her work as well as a willingness to risk everything for her beliefs and her craft. She refused to use a pen name, even though the government of her country was actively prosecuting—and killing—its opponents.
Das, whose first collection of poetry was titled I Want to Be a Poetess of My People, was one of the first Indo-Caribbean women to publish her work.
In the poems in that book as well as in her subsequent volume, A Leaf in His Ear, she explores the discrimination faced by those of the Indian diaspora, her Indian heritage, and the discrimination she faced as a woman, even from men with whom she shared that heritage and identity. A powerful brief poem, untitled, illustrates the authority of her voice:
Look at me:
when you speak,
mountain ranges
rise inside me.
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Jean “Binta” Breeze:Bringing the Rhythms of Reggae to Poetry
Jean “Binta” Breeze (March 11, 1956–August 4, 2021), the Jamaican poet, was often referred to as “a one-woman festival” for her powerful poetry performances.
Recognized as the first woman to make a name for herself in the male-dominated field of dub poetry—an art form that combines the rhythms of reggae music with poetry performance—Jean “Binta” Breeze used a wide range of subjects and styles to encapsulate the experiences of Black women.
Born and raised in rural Jamaica, Breeze took the African name “Binta,” which she was told meant “close to the heart,” while living in a Rastafarian community. In 1985, she was invited to perform at the International Book Fair of Radical Black and Third World Books in the UK.
She returned to London soon after to teach theater studies. Within a couple of years, she was able to leave teaching to focus on writing. She was influenced by the British feminist movement of the 1990s, but she was always clear that she wrote “for the Caribbean and the third world.”
“I want to make words/music/move beyond language/into sound,” she wrote. In later years, she divided her time between England and Jamaica.
She published several books of poetry, including Third World Girl, which includes poems selected from Riddym Ravings, Spring Cleaning, On the Edge of an Island, and The Arrival of Brighteye.
She also released five albums, and you can hear recordings of her readings at Poetry Archive. She wrote scripts for theater and film, and her poem “dreamer” was posted in the London Underground as part of a celebration of Caribbean poetry. She became a Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) in recognition of her services to literature.
Poetry reading on YouTube The Guardian (Obituary) The First Woman Dub Poet WikipediaContributed 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.
The post Inspiration from Classic Caribbean Women Writers appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.
October 13, 2022
The Tenth Muse: Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz
Juana Inés de Asbaje Ramírez de Santillana (November 1648 (?) – April 17, 1695), more familiarly known as Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz was a Mexican writer, poet, philosopher, composer, and Hieronymite nun.
Known as the “Tenth Muse” or as “The Phoenix of America” due to her formidable achievements in literature and scholarship, she is now revered as an early feminist.
Her writing is the subject of vibrant academic discourse on subjects as wide-ranging as women’s rights, environmentalism, colonialism, and education.
Early years
The exact date of Sor Juana’s birth is unknown; however, most accounts place her birth in November 1648, with her baptism not taking place until December 1651.
She was born out of wedlock to a Creole mother, Doña Isabel Ramírez de Santillana, and a Spanish father, Pedro Manuel de Asbaje. The family — her mother, grandparents, four sisters, and a brother, with her father mostly absent — lived in relative comfort on a hacienda in San Miguel Nepantla, near Mexico City.
Juana’s intellectual pursuits began at an early age. Some accounts claim that she learned to read at the age of three, when she hid in the hacienda chapel with her grandfather’s books from the adjoining library.
While stories of her reading and writing Latin by age four, and Greek by age eight, are probably exaggerated, there is no doubt that she was formidably intelligent.
At the age of sixteen, she was sent to live in Mexico City with her maternal aunt. She begged her mother to allow her to disguise herself as a boy, to gain entrance to Mexico City University which was then open only to men. Her mother refused, and Juana continued her studies in private.
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Life at CourtJuana’s intelligence and beauty attracted the attention of the viceroy, Antonio Sebastián de Toledo, Marqués de Mancera, and the vicereine, Doña Leonor Carreto. In 1664 she was invited to court as a lady in waiting.
The system that she navigated during this time was complex. Mexico was a highly autocratic society, and the University, the Court, and the Church were the most powerful institutions in the country.
The Court represented the point of contact with Europe and European culture, while the Church controlled the dissemination of knowledge and culture. It was a man’s world, run by men for men, and this makes Sor Juana’s achievements, in the precarious feminine space that she made for herself between these institutions, even more astounding.
She was much admired for her literary accomplishments, especially after the Marqués “tested” her in a meeting of several prominent theologians, philosophers, and poets, all of whom were astonished by her intelligence, and she received several offers of marriage, all of which she declined.
In the biography Sor Juana, or The Traps of Faith (1982) Octavio Paz wrote of the impact this repressive patriarchal system had on Sor Juana’s writing:
“Her work tells us something, but to understand that something we must realize that it is utterance surrounded by silence: the silence of the things that cannot be said. The things she cannot say are determined by the invisible presence of her dread readers [those clergy who read and disagreed with her work] … An understanding of Sor Juana’s work must include an understanding of the prohibitions her work confronts …”
Religious life and secular writing
In 1667, with a “total disinclination to marriage” and a desire to have “no fixed occupation which might curtail my freedom to study,” Juana began her life as a nun, first in the austere convent of San José de las Carmelitas Descalzas and then, from 1669, in the more lenient Convent of Saint Paula of the Order of San Jerónimo.
Here the nuns had their own living quarters, complete with kitchens, bathrooms, and parlors, and often their own servants too. Sor Juana was allowed to study, correspond with other scholars, compose music that was both secular and religious, and hold an intellectual salon in her quarters each week.
In the convent, where she remained until her death, Sor Juana amassed one of the largest private libraries on the continent (around 4,000 volumes), together with an enviable collection of scientific and musical instruments.
She continued to be supported by powerful figures, and when the new viceroy, the Marqués de la Laguna, arrived in 1680, both he and his wife visited Sor Juana and supported the publication of her works in Spain. Under their patronage, she became the unofficial court poet and wrote plays, poetry, religious services, and for state festivals.
In her poetry, she employed the full range of forms and themes of the time, including sonnets, romances, and ballads, and drew on a vast range of Classical, mythological, religious, and philosophical sources of inspiration.
Her lyrics were moral and satirical as well as religious, and she also wrote dramatic, scholarly, and comedic works. Her output was prolific, and she wrote fluently in three languages: Spanish, Latin, and Nahuatl.
Many of Sor Juana’s secular poems were love poems, written in the first person as a woman narrator, and preoccupied not with the romance of love but the disillusionment, pain, and jealousy that accompany it.
She acknowledged feeling en dos partes dividida (divided into two parts), torn between reason and passion, devotion and sensuality.
There has been much debate over the nature of her friendship with the Marqués’s wife, María Luisa. The only real clues lie in Sor Juana’s poetry. Poems dedicated to Lisi or Lysis extol her virtues — which would have been traditional and expected for a court poet — but some also seem to allude to a romantic relationship, or at least the desire for one:
My divine Lysis:
do forgive my daring,
if so I address you,
unworthy though I am to be known as yours.”
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Sor Juana on Academy of American Poets
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Sor Juana achieved great fame in both Mexico and Spain, but with renown came disapproval from church officials. In the early 1680s, she broke with her Jesuit confessor, Antonio Núñez de Miranda, writing to him in 1681:
“The cause of your anger…has been none other than the ability that God has given me in creating these wretched verses without asking permission from Your Reverence.”
She also lost the protection of the Marqués and marquise de la Laguna after they departed for Spain in 1688.
She was always an outspoken supporter of women’s rights, in particular women’s rights to education, and often used her work to criticize the patriarchal system that rendered women all but invisible.
One of her best-known poems, “Hombres necios” (Foolish Men) fiercely accuses men of the same behavior that they criticize in women:
You foolish men who lay
the guilt on women,
not seeing you’re the cause
of the very thing you blame…
Their favor and disdain
you hold in equals state,
if they mistreat, you complain,
you mock if they treat you well…
Famously, Sor Juana paraphrased St. Teresa of Ávila in saying that “One can perfectly well philosophize while cooking supper.”
In response, several high-ranking Catholic officials, including the Archbishop of Mexico, publicly condemned her “waywardness.” In November 1690 the bishop of Puebla, Manuel Fernández de Santa Cruz, published — without Sor Juana’s permission — her critique of a 40-year-old sermon by António Vieira, a Portuguese Jesuit preacher.
Fernández de Santa Cruz, using the female pseudonym Sister Filotea, added his own letter to this Carta Atenagórica, in which he criticized Sor Juana for not focusing on religious studies. While he conceded that some of her critical points were valid, he maintained that as a woman she should give up writing and devote herself to prayer instead.
Sor Juana responded in March 1691, in the famous Respuesta a Sor Filotea. In it, she defended the right of women to education and knowledge and traced the many obstacles she had faced throughout her life in her pursuit of learning, including her self-inflicted punishments for learning too slowly:
“It turned out that the hair grew quickly and I learned slowly. As a result, I cut off the hair in punishment for my head’s ignorance, for it didn’t seem right to me that a head so naked of knowledge should be dressed up with hair, for knowledge is a more desirable adornment.”
She stated that the study of “human arts and sciences” were necessary for an understanding of sacred theology and underscored her devotion to the pursuit of learning.
The pressure of censorship
Besieged by criticism and under great pressure from her confessor, Sor Juana stopped writing. Whether this was a process of forced abjuration, or whether she simply chose to stop writing to avoid further censure, is unclear.
There is a document of repentance dated March 1694, in which she agreed to undergo penance, and she supposedly voiced her regret at “having lived so long without religion in a religious community.”
Sor Juana’s library and collections were sold for alms, and she renewed her religious vows. She died in April 1695 while nursing her fellow sisters during a plague epidemic.
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Legacy of Sor Juana Inés de la CruzAlthough Sor Juana’s work was largely ignored for centuries after her death, the 1980s saw new translations appear, inspired by a growing feminist movement, and a ground-breaking biography written by Octavio Paz.
Sor Juana is now considered an icon of Mexico and Mexican identity: her name was inscribed on the wall of honor in the Mexican Congress in 1995, her image has been printed on the 200 peso note, and her former cloister is a center for higher education.
It was her relationship with María Luisa which has fascinated filmmakers and writers the most. The 1999 novel Sor Juana’s Second Dream, by poet and scholar Alicia Gaspar de Alba, portrays the friendship as homoerotic, and became the basis for the play The Nun and the Countess by Odalys Nanín. It also inspired an opera, Juana, which premiered at the University of California Los Angeles.
More recently, interest in Sor Juana and María Luisa has been sparked by the 2016 television series Juana Inés, which was first produced in Mexico and is now available on Netflix.
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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.
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Further reading
Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz: Selected Works, edited by Julia Alvarez,translated by Edith Grossman (W.W. Norton, 2016)Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz: Feminist Reconstruction of Biography and Text,
by Teresa A. Yugar (Wipf & Stock, 2014)Sor Juana, or The Traps of Faith, by Octavio Paz
(no longer in print but available in English translation)
More about Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Explore the Life and Works of Sor Juana Britannica Rediscovering a Revolutionary (LA Times)
See more author biographies on this site.
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October 10, 2022
An excerpt from Rapture and Melancholy: The Diaries of Edna St. Vincent Millay
Rapture and Melancholy: The Diaries of Edna St. Vincent Millay, edited and annotated by Daniel Mark Epstein (Yale University Press, 2022) sheds an intimate light on an iconic American poet.
A revival of interest in the life and work of Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Edna St.Vincent Millay began in the early 2000s with the publications of What Lips My Lips Have Kissed (2001), also by Daniel Mark Epstein (2001), and Savage Beauty by Nancy Milford (2001) and
Millay received the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1923 for The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver, her fourth collection. She was the first woman (and only the second person) to win this award. Only thirty-one at the time, she was already one of America’s best-known poets, able to attract huge, enthusiastic crowds on her reading tours.
Enriching this treasure trove of diary entries, which spanning from Millay’s mid-teens to middle age, are Epstein’s chapter openers. His insights provide context for each section, and are helpful for filling in time gaps, as Millay wasn’t always a consistent diarist.
In the Foreword to Rapture and Melancholy, Holly Peppe, Millay’s literary executor, writes that until 1998, “when the diaries were transferred to the Library of Congress from Steepletop, Millay’s home in Austerlitz, New York, they have remained safely out of view, available only to credentialed scholars. With this book, Daniel has changed all that.”
Edna St. Vincent Millay’s life, from beginning to end, was unconventional and intense. She truly did burn her candle at both ends, as she wrote in her famous four-line poem, “First Fig.” After her untimely death in 1950, her legacy dimmed — many would argue, unfairly. Epstein has harnessed the inner world of a true original, helping to restore her to her rightful place in American letters.
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More about Edna St. Vincent Millay
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From the publisher of Rapture and Melancholy, Yale University Press:
The English author Thomas Hardy proclaimed that America had two great attractions: the skyscraper, and the poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay. In these diaries the great American poet illuminates not only her literary genius, but her life’s a devoted daughter, sister, wife, and public heroine; and finally as a solitary, tragic figure.
This is the first publication of the diaries she kept from adolescence until middle age, between 1907 and 1949, focused on her most productive yers. Who was the girl who wrote “Renascence,” that marvel of early twentieth-century poetry? What trauma or spiritual journey inspired the poem?
And after such celebrity why did she vanish into near seclusion after 1940? These questions hover over the life and work, and trouble biographers and readers alike.
Intimate, eloquent, these confessions and keen observations provide the key to understanding Millay’s journey from small-town obscurity to world fame, and the tragedy of her demise.
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Rapture and Melancholy
is available wherever books are sold
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… by Daniel Mark Epstein: To what does Edna St. Vincent Millay owe the honor of having her diaries published and read in 2022, more than seventy years after her death? Her status as a poet and playwright of the first magnitude, secure until the 1940s, is now a subject of debate.
Her poems remain in print and her play Aria da Capo is occasionally revived; but as of this writing her work is rarely included in textbooks or college syllabi.
The reasons for this are largely political, or in any case extra-literary. The poet had the fortune and misfortune to become a legend in her own time, what we now quaintly call “a cultural icon.”
Her binge drinking and promiscuity were notorious even in the 1920s when such behavior was commonplace. She became the bad girl of American letters who published her modern escapades in verses that demonstrated mastery of the classic forms and meters. No one had seen anything like it.
Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, who had enough Latin between them to recognize her achievement, ostentatiously ignored the upstart whose ballads and sonnets made her rich. She needed no one’s help, and what she was writing did not fit the modernist’s profile of “free verse.” Her success was a reproach to modernism.
Meanwhile she behaved as badly as Byron and Baudelaire, Sappho in a cloche hat, chain-smoking, sipping gin, and bed-hopping … The poetry was transgressive and subversive. Compared with the unimpeachable verse of Elizabeth Bishop, Millay’s poetry is still shocking.
… The diaries — which the mature writer never intended for publication — are unfiltered. From beginning to end she writes without restraint or inhibition, recording thoughts, dreams, emotions, and impressions meant only for her own clarification and reflection.
In these pages, we hear Millay’s intimate voice, the woman speaking to herself about her most private and urgent concerns.
About Daniel Mark Epstein: Millay biographer Daniel Mark Epstein is a poet and dramatist, the author of books about Abraham Lincoln, Walt Whitman, and Bob Dylan. He is a recipient of awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Find him at DanielMarkEpstein.com.
An excerpt from Rapture and Melancholy
July 20, 1910 Wednesday Night
Journal of a Little Girl Grown-Up
I’m tired of being grown-up! Tired of dresses that kick around my feet, tired of high-heeled shoes; tired of conventions and proprieties; tired, tired and sick of hairpins! I want to be a little girl again.
It seems to me, looking back over my jump-rope and hop-scotch days, that I never played half hard enough, always came in a little too soon, lay abed a little too long. If I had only known, and had climbed enough trees and made enough mud-pies to last me through the awful days when I should want to and couldn’t!
And the awfullest thing about it is that I haven’t forgotten how. It wouldn’t be so bad if I just couldn’t remember; but to know how so well—to want to so bad—and not to be able to! It seems to me I can remember everything I ever did, every place I was ever in.
My mind is a labyrinthian picture-gallery in which every paint-ing is some scene from my life—vivid and distinct, even in its most trivial details. It takes but the tiniest thing, the faintest sound or scent, often-times imagination—to bring such a scene before my eyes. There is a little spicy-smelling yellow flower growing in clusters on a bush, in old-fashioned gardens I think they call it “clove” or a “flowering currant.”
The smell of it inevitably never fails to take me back into a little playhouse I made once under such a bush, just this side of the church-yard fence. It is a hot summer afternoon. The air is drowsy with the sweetness of the tiny trumpet-shaped flowers above my head and, save for the monotonous droning of many bees, there is no sound anywhere.
I am painstakingly trimming a rhubarb leaf hat with white-clover and buttercups with which my lap is filled. Beside me are two long, slender white wands from which I have been peeling the bark for ribbons, with primitive implements of sharp teeth and nails.
I can taste again the sweetness of the smooth round stick in my mouth. I see again the moist, delicate green of the bark’s living. And into my nostrils I breathe the hot spicy fragrance until my soul is steeped in it.
Then on and on into picture after picture after picture, through a meadow where, at every step, I had to pick the violets to clear a place for my feet; over the short stubble of a wide level field to the place where a friendly grapevine climbed a tree and, with its own weight bent the branches
to the ground, bringing forth grapes and apples into easy reach; up the side of a woody hill and [wandered] a winding path to a secret spot where fox berries grew bigger, sweeter, and more plentifully than anywhere else in the world.
Hundreds of places, each one as dear as these each one so distinct that I know I could find now if it is still there. If I could just go back like na little girl and revisit each scene alone. Who would there be to say “Go away, you can’t come here, for you are a little girl no longer”?
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See also: 12 Poems by Edna St. Vincent Millay
The post An excerpt from Rapture and Melancholy: The Diaries of Edna St. Vincent Millay appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.
October 2, 2022
In Search of Virginia Woolf’s Lighthouse, Godrevy Light
What is it that makes us long to see what the writers we love once saw? To stand in their footsteps? Do we imagine that some fairy dust will fall from nearby trees or rise from abandoned floorboards to bring us the wisdom or the art that flowed from their fingers to their manuscripts, whether through pens or pencils, typewriter keys, or pixels?
That’s what was on my mind on a visit to Cornwall, England, when I was determined to get to Godrevy Light, the lighthouse that inspired Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse.
Godrevy Light
Like the characters in Part I, “The Window,” I found getting to the lighthouse difficult. My spouse and I, Americans who drive as little as possible, don’t want to drive in the UK, where we would certainly be disoriented by the different positioning of steering wheels and road lanes.
Trains and buses get us to most of the places we want to go, but I could not find a way to get out to Godrevy Point, the nearest land to the lighthouse. Bus service is so infrequent that I (the travel agent in our household) could find no way to go out and return the same day.
I considered hiring a taxi but was dismayed to realize that while the lighthouse was only three miles from shore at Godrevy Point, the roads from any settlement served by a bus or a train were winding and indirect. The more I investigated, the more travel to the lighthouse seemed time-consuming and expensive.
The Godrevy Lighthouse stands on a small rocky island, inhabited today only by birds and seals. You can judge its beauty when I tell you that a photo of the lighthouse was the winner of the 2021 South West Coast Path photo competition. (For context, the South West Coast Path provides the gorgeous scenery for TV shows such as Poldark and Broadchurch.)
The white octagonal-shaped tower was built in 1859, after a steamer wrecked on the rocky reef known as the Stones and sank. Everyone on board drowned. After the lighthouse was built three keepers alternated month-long duties to staff the light.
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To the Lighthouse (1927)
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At the beginning of To the Lighthouse, Mrs. Ramsay prepares for the proposed visit by knitting a stocking for the Lighthouse keeper’s little boy. She also looks around for “old magazines, and some tobacco, indeed whatever she could find lying about … to give those poor fellows who must be bored to death sitting all day with nothing to do ….”
To explain why she wants to deliver these things to the Lighthouse, she asks her daughters, “How would you like to be shut up for a whole month at a time, and possibly more in stormy weather, upon a rock the size of a tennis lawn? … and to have no letters or newspapers, and … to see the same dreary waves breaking week after week?”
In 1934, some seven years after the publication of To the Lighthouse (but decades after the time in which it was set), the Godrevy Lighthouse became automatic. The keepers who had concerned Mrs. Ramsay were relieved of their dreary and boring duties as well as their livelihood. (For another perspective on lighthouse keepers see Jeanette Winterson’s Lighthousekeeping.)
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Godrevey Lighthouse
This photo and at top, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
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To the Lighthouse is regarded as Woolf’s most autobiographical novel. It describes two days, ten years apart, in the lives of the Ramsay family. While the story is set in the Scottish Hebrides, Woolf says in her diary that Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay are closely modeled on Woolf’s parents, Leslie and Julia Stephen, and that the events in the book recall the family’s summers in St. Ives, Cornwall.
The book had therapeutic value for Woolf—her mother, like Mrs. Ramsay, died suddenly. Woolf was thirteen at the time of her mother’s death, and she says she was “obsessed” with her mother until she wrote To the Lighthouse. Afterward she wondered why it was that once she had described her mother that “my vision of her and my feeling for her” became “so much dimmer and weaker?”
The phenomenon of something becoming “dimmer and weaker” happens in the novel as well. In Part I, the Lighthouse is the object of six-year-old James’s longing and the intended recipient of Mrs. Ramsay’s charitable efforts.
It provides Mr. Ramsay with the power to disappoint (and thus to win his son’s hatred). It gives the Ramsay’s houseguest, Charles Tansley, (a man who whispers in painter Lily Briscoe’s ear, “Women can’t paint, women can’t write”) the opportunity to disparage dreams.
When James makes it to the Lighthouse in Part III, he is disappointed. “The Lighthouse was then [when he was six] a silvery, misty-looking tower with a yellow eye that opened suddenly and softly in the evening.” When he finally arrives, ten years later, he sees “the whitewashed rocks; the tower, stark and straight,” and he thinks, “So that was the Lighthouse, was it?”
He resolves the contradiction in the next paragraph. “The other was also the Lighthouse. For nothing was simply one thing.”
And that, I think, is how Woolf frees herself of her obsession with her mother. Like the Lighthouse, Mrs. Ramsay dominates Part I. She is the close third-person narrator through which we see much of the section, and when she is not the narrator, she is the object of other people’s narrative thoughts.
Everyone in Part I is obsessed with Mrs. Ramsay: her beauty, her kindness, her ability to manage a household of children and guests and servants, and her skills as a matchmaker. She delights in bringing people together and through the force of her desire effects a marriage proposal. By simply looking at young Paul Rayley, Mrs. Ramsay makes him understand that she wants him to propose marriage to Mindy Doyle as she sends the two of them out for a walk together.
Lily Briscoe, determined to remain unmarried, resents Mrs. Ramsay’s power, and yet she longs to bask in her light.
Yes, her light.
For Mrs. Ramsay is the Lighthouse. See how she is described here, for example, half turning “to pour erect into the air a rain of energy, a column of spray, … as if all her energies were being fused into force, burning and illuminating…” Later, her husband thinks, “it hurt him that she should look so distant, and he could not reach her” (just as they cannot reach the distant lighthouse).
Mrs. Ramsay herself thinks she would like to go with some of the others as they set out on a walk. “Of course it was impossible for her to go with them. But she would have liked to go, had it not been for the other thing.” The “other thing” is never named, and I would say Mrs. Ramsay cannot go with them because she is the Lighthouse, the point that guides the others in their travels.
She is a manipulative and powerful woman who embodies beauty and warmth. She epitomizes maternal love and at the same time, a cold, unreachable distance. Like the Lighthouse in the eyes of sixteen-year-old James, she is not simply one thing.
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Virginia Woolf
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I couldn’t figure out how we would get to the Godrevy Light. I wasn’t sure we would even be able to see the lighthouse from St. Ives (as opposed to the Godrevy Headlands a few miles away), and so when our bus rounded a curve and began its steep descent into the village and I caught a glimpse of the tower, surprisingly close, my hand flew to my chest.
My heart really did give a little leap. I was so thrilled to see the light that had inspired one of my favorite novels that when the bus arrived at the outskirts of St. Ives (the roads being too narrow for it to continue into the town), I scrambled off eagerly, realizing only once we were walking in the village that I had left my hat on my seat.
It was a hat I had carried with me on many trips, one of the few I had ever worn that I thought flattered my face, a crushable thing that opened out to a wide-brimmed sunhat to shade my pale complexion. Yet unlike other losses, I was not dismayed to have forgotten it. It had served me well for many years, and I was certain it could be replaced quite easily. I was excited to be in St. Ives and within sight of the lighthouse.
Crowded beachside restaurants offered views of the gleaming structure on its stony perch. I imagined that we would eventually have lunch at one of those tables, though I suspected the menus would be heavy on fried foods and not to my taste. As we navigated the winding streets and alleys of St. Ives, buildings blocked our view of the bay.
Nonetheless, we made our way to the Barbara Hepworth Museum and Sculpture Garden. Hepworth was a contemporary of Woolf’s, about twenty years younger, and like Woolf, brought a modernist sensibility to her creative work. Both women were inspired by Cornwall and St. Ives—for Hepworth, as for so many other visual artists, it was the quality of the light reflected off water, rugged land, and crushed shells.
Woolf saw that light as well, “wave after wave shedding again and again smoothly a film of mother-of-pearl,” and she also saw that other light from across the waves, “first two quick strokes and then one long steady stroke.” In other words, the light of the Lighthouse.
Hepworth’s stone constructions were partially inspired by Cornwall’s craggy landscape and its neolithic quoits, tors, and circles. From the sculpture garden, we climbed up and then down steep, cobbled paths to the Tate St. Ives and entered its domed portico. Hungry by then, we headed up to the top-floor cafe to find an outdoor table on the terrace where my heart leapt once again when confronted with a perfect view of (drumroll, please) the Lighthouse!
I gazed across the bay to that sober sentinel, white against the gray-blue sky and sea, and thought about Mrs. Ramsay as I enjoyed my parsnip soup garnished with roasted onion jam. There had to be a way to get to the island, and later, as we walked along the bustling harbor promenade, the way appeared. Posters on the seawall offered seal- and bird-watching trips to Godrevy Island. I booked passage for the two of us the day after the next (our last in Cornwall).
Everything was working out perfectly, and when the bus arrived to take us back to Penzance, I was delighted to find my old friend, my hat, sitting on a ledge next to the driver.
Just as in To the Lighthouse, the day of the planned boat trip dawned stormily, and a message on my phone told me our cruise had been canceled and my money refunded. Just as in the novel, the weather would interfere with our effort to reach the Lighthouse.
Perhaps in ten years, I will return to Cornwall to visit the lighthouse.
Or perhaps it is enough that, like Lily Briscoe, the painter who concludes Woolf’s book and who never goes to the Lighthouse, I have had my vision: I have seen the Lighthouse not only as it appears off the coast of St. Ives, but as Woolf herself portrayed it.
The Lighthouse is more than one thing, after all. It is the thing that inspires and the thing that stands guard. It is the thing that comforts and the thing that cannot be reached. Like my hat, perhaps, it is the thing that is lost and the thing that is found.
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.
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September 12, 2022
Lolly Willowes; or The Loving Huntsman by Sylvia Townsend Warner
Lolly Willowes; or The Loving Huntsman was the first novel by modernist author Sylvia Townsend Warner. Published in 1926, it’s now considered an early feminist classic.
Considered comedy of manners, this novel is steeped in social satire. This collection of reviews was gathered in High Collars & Monocles: 1920s Novels by British Female Couples by Francis Booth, © 2020. Reprinted by Permission.
Following is a synopsis and two reviews from 1926, when the book was originally published. A more recent look back at Lolly Willows in the Guardian lauds it as a social satire and “an elegantly enchanting tale that transcends its era.”
Lolly Willowes: a brief synopsisThe Scotsman, February 18, 1926, provided a synopsis in its coverage of Lolly Willowes, or The Loving Huntsman by Sylvia Townsend Warner (London: Chatto & Windus)
There is a piquant charm in this quiet chronicle of the life of an old spinster who makes a compact with the Devil, throws her relations to the winds, and asserts her right to stay out all night in the hills.
If it be objected that the patient Aunt Lolly whose submissive girlhood, submissive sisterhood, and submissive aunthood are so delicately and with fine persistence pictured by the writer could never develop into such a “monstrosity” as a witch, then the objector is referred to the exquisite old lady herself, who, it is certain, will charm doubt into conviction.
For does she not explain everything when she tells the “loving huntsman” of Great Mop village that “one doesn’t become a witch to run round being harmful, or to run round being helpful either, a district visitor on a broomstick?
It’s to escape all that – to have a life of one’s own, not an existence doled out to you by others, charitable refuse of their thoughts, so many ounces of stale bread of life a day, the workhouse dietary so scientifically calculated to support life.”
Thus is it. Aunt Lolly at last satisfies her inmost cravings to be herself: and may all overweening nieces and nephews, brothers and sisters-in-law, take warning from this tale of an old spinster who turns. The writer, who has already made herself known by an appealing book of verse, must be congratulated for the delicious fancy and charming irony of the present prose study. It is a book to be read again with increased pleasure.
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Sylvia Townsend Warner
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From the Times Literary Supplement (London), February 4, 1926: Miss Sylvia Townsend Warner gives us in Lolly Willowes not only a first novel of remarkable accomplishment but an object-lesson in the proper way of bringing Satan into modern fiction.
She wastes no time in cold philosophical argument, in pumping up horror before and after the event, in giving away the surprise and then making it seem preposterous; instead she prepares the ground with extraordinary subtlety.
Laura Willowes is the unmarried daughter of one, sister of another, and aunt of a succeeding generation of a respectable, solid, acquisitive, comfortable middle-class family. Her youth was spent at Lady Place, a house near Yeovil where her father kept the accumulated family furniture and owned the brewery.
And when her father died she was unquestioningly taken in by her brother Henry and his wife Caroline to live with them, as the children’s Aunt Lolly, at the house in Apsley Terrace and in the lodgings of the summer holidays.
Up to the end of part one nobody could anticipate the development. Laura’s life, all the life of all Aunt Lollys, is set down for us in sentences of deft observation and concealed irony. Miss Warner’s economy of phrase is admirable.
“By the time the Willowes family met at breakfast all this activity had disappeared like the tide from the smooth, garnished beach. For the rest of the day it functioned unnoticed. Bells were answered, meals were served, all that appeared was completion.
Yet unseen and underground the preparation and demolition of every day went on, like the inward persistent working of a heart and entrails. Sometimes a crash, a banging door, a voice raised, would rend the veil of impersonality. And sometimes a sound of running water at unusual hours and a faint steaming hiss in the upper parts of the house betokened that one of the servants was having a bath.”
Nobody would suspect the emergence of a cloven hoof from this quiet realism. Into seventy-three pages Miss Warner compasses twenty years of Laura’s life with Henry and Caroline, she and they and their offspring and their life etched with fine precision.
If one is afraid of what is coming, the fear is that nothing is to come but one more study – though an unusually artistic one – of a frustrated woman’s life and death. There have been hints, it is true, but too deep for the un-intuitive. At the age of forty-seven, however, the war being over, Laura is more than usually oppressed by the day-dreams that customarily invaded her during autumn in London.
Something is waiting for her, she must find a clue, but the clue eludes her. An impulse seizes her in a greengrocer’s shop, it leads to the Chilterns, she buys a map and guide, and calmly startles a family dinner-party by announcing that she is going to Great Mop to live in a cottage. There is a trap for the unwary here, too.
The prophetic will exclaim: “Ah, yes, the country, nice old landladies, village worthies, landscape and echoes of Henry Ryecroft;” and they will be most deservedly confounded, for Miss Warner gives them all these things, and the real surprise on top of them. The crisis comes when nephew Titus comes to Great Mop two, to write a book on Fuseli.
In depicting Laura’s dumb anguish at this invasion of her privacy and desecration of her mysterious love for her chosen country, a new note of passion suddenly breaks out. The whole family seems to be advancing upon her once again, and, alone in a solitary field, she invokes the woods for help. The answer is prompt, but we cannot bring ourselves to spoil the delightful surprise prepared for the reader and for Laura on the latter’s return to tea.
It must suffice to say that Aunt Lolly realizes at length to what all the omens of her life have pointed. She is – we are compelled to divulge it – a witch, a modern witch, one of thousands. Miss Warner works out her idea, witches’ Sabbath, Satan and all, so delicately and tactfully that it never becomes incongruous.
Titus is bewitched into the arms of a fiancée, and Laura, having passionately breathed to her master the hidden truth about witches, remains at Great Mop among her companions. It is a charming story, beautifully told, spare in outline but emotionally rich, on which we congratulate the author.
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High Collars & Monocles by Francis Booth
is available on Amazon US and Amazon UK
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From the original review Edwin Clark, New York Times, February 7, 1926: It is on rare and infrequent occasions that such perfected and deftly fascinating fiction as Lolly Willowes swims within the reviewer’s ken.
David Garnett, who is remembered as something of a master of wit and shrewd observation, has remarked that this is one of the year’s witty books. However, this novel needs no such introduction. It is the cameo-like realization of the life of a quaint and subtly attractive maiden lady. It recalls the two exquisite novels of Elinor Wylie, but Lolly Willowes is closer to the present.
Behind the story of Lolly, but at least once removed, is the inevitable theme of the old order changing. The effect upon her life is less pronounced than usual because of her passive temperament. The Willowes are an old family of landed gentry. Lolly is heir to much accumulated tradition.
Her father is a brewer, her mother is a semi-invalid. She is the youngest of the three children. Hence, she grows up in a family where the males of the house were always expected to look after her. In turn, she compared all other men in terms of her father and brothers. With complacency she looked out upon the world from their country seat, Lady Place, in Somerset. It was satisfying to her. . .
The sly and almost subdued comedy of this novel is a strong suggestion of the quality of Jane Austen. The handling of sentiment, family life, and much feminine observation has the adroit fitness of the divine Jane.
In the handling of the narrative, however, a different method is employed; the straightforward method of the comedy of manners could not capture the inner life of Lolly, and fill so minutely the picture of this involved family life, for all its surface commonplaceness.
Beginning in the later Victorian age of gentility, the story is woven into the present restless age, without neglecting or overemphasizing the war; the technical skill and compression is of a high order.
At forty-seven, Lolly realizes that she has had almost no life of her own. Rebellion stirs in her. To the horror of her brothers, to the surprise of their children – now grown-up – she insists upon escaping from them. This whim of hers to leave them and live in the village of Great Mop – population 227 and twelve miles from anywhere – is embarrassing because Henry has invested her money in an enterprise that just at the moment is in decline. Lolly accepts a loss and departs.
Once at Great Mop she begins to recapture the serenity that had made her inner life bright at Lady Place. . . .
The family hope for her return. They visit her. She has horror at the thought of returning to Apsley Terrace, London. The idea preys upon her mind and finds outlet in fantasy. Thus, James’s son, now graduated from Oxford, comes to stay with her at Great Mop. Though she thought herself very fond of him, he greatly distresses her. She starts a sprightly flirtation with the Prince of Darkness, in an effort to find that fellowship that her life has lacked. Finally, she is free of her relatives. She could at last do what she liked. . .
In the limitations of its genre, Lolly Willowes is an exquisite fantasy of wit. Also, in its mixture of comedy of manners and dark romanticism, there is a viable essence that is enchanting. Lolly, indeed, going her kind, lonely way, is a character that ingratiatingly sets herself in memory.
Doubtless, the Willowes, with their traditions and sane conservativeness, will not be forgotten. But, in the last analysis, it is Lolly – who might be another Emily Dickinson, had she only had the medium of expression – who captivates our fancy. Her secret life is ours in the artless words of her historian.
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More about Lolly Willowes Full text at Wikisource The 100 Best Novels: No. 52: Lolly Willowes Reader discussion on Goodreads. . . . . . . . . .
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 & Monocles: 1920s Novels by British 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.
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