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10 Fascinating Facts About Adélaïde Labille-Guiard, French Portraitist

Susanne Dunlap, author of the historical novel The Portraitist: A Novel of Adélaïde Labille-Guiard (She Writes Press, 2022) presents ten fascinating facts about one of the two most important French female artists of the period before, during, and after the French Revolution.

About The Portraitist:

Adélaïde Labille-Guiard is ready to draw the line between art and politics in The Portraitist. Award-winning author Susanne Dunlap paints a historical retelling of real-life Adélaïe Labille-Guiard, a female portraitist and painter, and her earnest battle to win recognition as an artist in 18th-century Paris amidst the French Revolution.

Paris, 1774. After her separation from her abusive husband, Adélaïde Labille-Guiard is at last free to pursue her dream of becoming the premier woman portraitist in Paris. Free, that is, until she discovers at her first public exhibition that another woman artist is poised to claim that role — and she has more training and better connections in the tightly controlled art world.

To have a chance of competing, Adélaïde must first improve her skills in oil painting. But her love affair with her young teacher gives rise to suspicions that he touches up her work, and her decision to make much-needed money by executing erotic pastels threatens to create as many problems as it solves.

As her rival gains lucrative portrait commissions and an appointment as portraitist to Queen Marie Antoinette, Adélaïde continues to struggle, until at last she earns a royal appointment of her own, and, in 1789, receives a massive commission from a member of the royal family.

But the timing couldn’t be worse. Adélaïde’s world is turned upside down by political chaos and revolution. With danger around every corner of her beloved Paris, she must find a way to survive and adjust to the new order, starting all over again to carve out a life and a career—and stay alive in the process.

The Portraitist is based on the true story of one woman artist’s fight to take her rightful place in a man’s world — and the decisions she makes that lead her ultimately to the kind of fulfillment she never expected.

Adélaïde Labille-Guiard began her career in a world where royal patronage was the height of accomplishment and ended it after a bloody revolution and a new political system that set women’s rights and autonomy back about a century.

Liberté, égalité, fraternité—brotherhood—men ended up with all the privileges in the Napoleonic code. Worth noting — there’s no actual French word for sisterhood.

Nonetheless, Labille-Guiard was remarkable for what she did achieve, and her artworks can be found in museums and private collections all over the world. So why is she so little known?

 Fascinating Facts About Adélaïde Labille-Guiard

She didn’t come from an artistic family. Adélaïde’s principal rival, Elisabeth-Louise Vigée Le Brun, was taught to draw and paint by her artist father, her godfather was the artist Gabriel Doyen, and she was surrounded by the best artists of the day.

By contrast, almost nothing is known about Adélaïde’s early training. Her father was a modiste who owned a fashion boutique in Paris called À la Toilette. Interesting tidbit: before Madame du Barry became Louis XV’s official mistress she was a shop girl by the name of Jeanne Bécu in that boutique.

Adélaïde was one of two surviving children of eight; her mother died when she was 17. It’s unlikely that her sickly mother took the time to teach her how to draw. And there’s little information about her schooling either.

It’s possible that—like her rival Elisabeth—she was sent to a convent school for some of her education. But that’s pure conjecture. In any case, she somehow acquired the education she needed, although one biographer laments that she wasn’t educated enough.

 

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The Portraitist: A Novel of Adélaïde Labille-Guiard
is available wherever books are sold
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She married at the age of 19 (and was legally separated 8 years later). Divorce was illegal in Catholic Ancien Régime France. Adélaïde couldn’t get a divorce until after the laws changed in 1793, twelve years later.

She took up with François-André Vincent, a history painter, after becoming his student in 1776. Although her divorce came through soon after the Revolution, they didn’t marry until 1800.

There’s no evidence today that explains why she and André didn’t marry as soon as they were able. But it could have something to do with the fact that once they married, she relinquished the name of Labille-Guiard—the name associated with her artistic career—and became known as Madame Vincent.

Adélaïde started out painting miniatures. Painting miniatures was seen as a genteel occupation for girls and women in the 18th century, and they were generally painted with watercolors—inexpensive, easily cleaned up. But Adélaïde clearly didn’t approach the practice of art as a pretty pastime.

We know that she studied the painting of miniature watercolors with François-Élie Vincent, a member of the Académie Royale, who just happened to be the father of Adélaïde’s eventual lover and husband. She also studied pastels with Maurice Quentin de la Tour, the most famous pastellist of the time.

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Adélaïde Labille-Guiard, Self Portrait, watercolor on ivory, 1774
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Access to training in the technique and art of painting was a significant hurdle for women. The Louvre housed the École des Beaux Arts, but those classes were closed to women, so the only recourse was individual tutelage.

Without an artist family member or connections, Adélaïde must have been determined and passionate to have broken into the insular, sexist field.

 

Adélaïde and her rival dogged each other’s steps throughout their careers. Obviously, the opportunities for top-notch women artists were extremely limited. Hardly surprising, then, that these two would find each other competing for the same or similar achievements.

The parallels are remarkable nonetheless: They both exhibited for the first time in the same salon, they both had royal patronage (although Elisabeth had the prize of being Marie Antoinette’s official portraitist), they were both elected to the Académie Royale in the same year and exhibited in the same salons every other year until 1789.

After that, Elisabeth was off painting in the courts of Europe, having fled and been declared an exile and enemy of the Republic because of her ties to the royal family.

Unlike her rival, Adélaïde became a highly respected teacher and was much in demand. Her studio before the Revolution consisted of nine talented women, her nine “muses,” she called them. They were a consistent source of income for her, and one of them—Marie-Gabrielle Capet—not only became a close friend, but Adélaïde and André adopted her after the Revolution so she could inherit their estates.

Elisabeth didn’t like teaching.

 

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Marie Gabrielle Capet, Atelier of Madame Vincent,
Oil on Canvas, 1808
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After years of trying, Adélaïde became the first woman to be awarded a studio and accommodations in the Louvre. The Louvre was neither a museum nor a royal residence at that time. It was instead a center of art and creativity, and free lodging was given to members of the Académie who requested it. That is, if they were men.

Adélaïde struggled financially and lobbied for those free accommodations before, during, and after the Revolution. Her first attempt in 1787 was thwarted by the conservative Comte d’Angiviller, controller of all things artistic in France, who claimed that allowing women to come into the Louvre to study would be a corrupting influence.

She finally succeeded in 1795 and became more famous as a teacher than an artist.

Adélaïde was never paid for her biggest commission: a massive painting for the Comte de Provence. Louis XVI’s younger brother hired Adélaïde to paint a 17 x 19-foot picture to hang in the École Militaire.

Since payment always came upon completion, Adélaïde had to fork out her own funds to purchase the expensive materials—the finest canvas from the Low Countries to be stitched together for such a huge painting, masses of pigments and brushes, scaffolding, gesso, and so on.

Mesdames (the king’s aunts, who were Adélaïde’s royal patrons) secured studio space for her in the disused Bibliothèque du Roi, since her own studio was nowhere large enough to accommodate a project of that size.

She was supposed to get thirty-thousand Livres, or about $18,000 in today’s currency—bearing in mind that this amount had a great deal more purchasing power then that it has today (the average laborer earned about $30 a year).

However, instead of a big payday, Adélaïde ended by losing 8,000 livres of her own money, about $5,000. The ultimate irony is that all that’s left of this mammoth painting is an oil sketch.

 

Adélaïde painted a portrait of Maximilien Robespierre. Before the dark days of the Terror, Adélaïde made an effort to prove her loyalty to the Republic—despite her history of royal patronage—by painting portraits of all the delegates to the national convention, free. At the time, that included Robespierre.

His portrait has been lost along with all the others, which were destroyed during the worst excesses of the Terror. In fact, many of Adélaïde’s paintings and pastels met the same fate, which is one reason why there are so many fewer works by her in museums today than by Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun.

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Adélaïde Labille-Guiard,
Self Portrait with Two Students, Oil on Canvas, 1785
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When André Vincent died, the paintings in his possession by his late wife were sold for mere pennies.  Adélaïde died in 1803 at the age of 54, cause unknown, but she had likely been ill for a while. I have been unable to discover the location of her grave. However, her history-painter husband is interred in Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris, and his works sold for many thousands of Livres when he died.

Adélaïde’s work was underappreciated until late in the twentieth century. Her most famous painting, the self-portrait with her students Marie Gabrielle Capet and Marie Marguerite Carreaux de Rosemonde, is on display in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. A detail of this work is on the cover of The Portraitist.

In the Catalogue Raisonné of her output by Anne Marie Passé, of the 143 paintings identified, over half are lost (labeled “unknown location”). Compare that to her rival’s output of somewhere around 600 works, and you can easily see why Adélaïde Labille-Guiard remains relatively unknown.

The Portraitist is my attempt to change that!

 

Susanne Dunlap is the author of twelve works of historical fiction for adults and teens, as well as an Author Accelerator Certified Book Coach. Her love of historical fiction arose partly from her studies in music history at Yale University (PhD, 1999), partly from her lifelong interest in women in the arts as a pianist and non-profit performing arts executive. 

Her novel The Paris Affair won first place in its category in the CIBA Dante Rossetti awards for Young Adult Fiction. The Musician’s Daughter was a Junior Library Guild Selection and a Bank Street Children’s Book of the Year, and was nominated for the Utah Book Award and the Missouri Gateway Reader’s Prize. In the Shadow of the Lamp was an Eliot Rosewater Indiana High School Book Award nominee. Susanne earned her BA and an MA (musicology) from Smith College, and lives in Biddeford, ME, with her little dog Betty. You can find her at Susan-Dunlap.com.

See our Other Rad Voices category to explore more amazing women outside the literary realm.

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“Rosefrail and Fair” — Lucia Joyce, Dancer Daughter of James Joyce

This introduction to the life of Lucia Joyce, a professional dancer and the talented, troubled daughter of James Joyce and Nora Barnacle is excerpted from Everybody I Can Think of Ever: Meetings That Made the Avant-Garde  by Francis Booth, reprinted by permission.

Sylvia Beach, publisher of Ulysses, wrote in Shakespeare and Company about James Joyce’s family:

“I was very fond of them all: Giorgio, with his gruffness, hiding or trying to hide his feelings; Lucia, the humorous one – neither of them happy in the strange circumstances in which they grow up; and Nora, the wife and mother, who scolded them all, including her husband, for their shiftlessness.”

People didn’t normally think of Lucia as the humorous one; she was generally seen as being rather tragic, and later in life was in a mental institution for many years. In her contribution to Robert McAlmon’s Being Geniuses Together, Kay Boyle talks tenderly about how the fragile Lucia came to see her one day in 1928:

“Whether it had been suggested to her that she come, or whether she had come of her own accord, I did not know. But as she sat in the sunlight that came hot through the plate-glass window, I felt her tragically reaching, seeking for what could probably never be found and for a fearful moment I believed I was looking at my own reflection in a glass.

She was like the high, perishable, wishful tendril of a vine moving blindly up a wall, and the vine from which she sought escape was rooted in a territory that had for her no recognisable name. I thought of Joyce’s poem to his blue-veined daughter, and there in her delicate wrists I could see the veins, so vulnerable under the silky, transparent skin.

She was then (as perhaps I too was then, and as perhaps all daughters are until they cease being merely daughters) precariously only half a person, and the other half she sought for in panic first in one direction and then in another, not knowing in whose mind or flesh or in what alien country it might live.”

 

The poem that Boyle refers to comes from the small selection of Joyce’s early poems, Pomes Penyeach, which was published with Lucia’s illustrations and facsimiles of Joyce’s handwritten texts by Jack Kahane’s Obelisk Press in 1932, though Sylvia Beach had published a regular edition in 1927.

Harry and Caresse Crosby of the Black Sun Press had originally suggested the idea of a deluxe, illustrated, facsimile, limited edition to Joyce; he was happy for Lucia’s work to be published, happy for her to have something, to be something in her own right. Not that it was anything very much in her own right to illustrate her father’s work; her drawings would never otherwise have been published, and she would have been in no doubt about that.

Still, Joyce made sure she got a third of the royalties. Only twenty-five copies of the deluxe edition were printed, on lustrous Japanese nacre, with Lucia’s illuminated capitals delicately colored; all were signed by Joyce.

The British Library has number 25; it’s very beautiful. Number 3 was auctioned in 2015 with an estimate of $40,000 to $60,000 but failed to sell. This is the poem about Lucia that Kay Boyle referred to:

A Flower Given to My Daughter

Frail the white rose and frail are
Her hands that gave
Whose soul is sere and paler
Than time’s wan wave.

Rosefrail and fair – yet frailest
A wonder wild
In gentle eyes thou veilest,
My blueveined child.

Boyle knew Lucia on and off through her life; many years later, after Lucia’s death in 1983, Boyle had an exchange of letters about her with Joyce’s first major biographer, Richard Ellman; she told him how she and Samuel Beckett had spent an evening together sometime in 1932 when he tried to convince her that unhappiness and madness were not the same thing – Lucia was unhappy but that was not all there was to it. Boyle wrote to Ellman:

“One day, when we chance to meet again, I want to tell you of my first meeting with Samuel Beckett. It was in the sad time of Lucia’s first crisis, the beginning of it all, and Sam and I talked together at a crowded party in Walter Lowenfels’ apartment in Paris.

We both remember every word of that talk of over fifty years ago, talk which lasted from nine in the evening until two o’clock the next morning, during which he convinced me that there is such a thing as madness, and that love or understanding or any emotional response to that condition is not the cure.”

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Everybody I Can Think of Ever is available on 
Amazon US & Amazon UK
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Soon after Beckett had arrived in Paris in November 1928 to take up his teaching post at the École Normale, he first met Lucia Joyce the same evening he met her father, at their apartment in Paris. He was introduced by fellow Dubliner Thomas MacGreevy, who had preceded Beckett as a lecturer there in 1926.

MacGreevy and Beckett quickly became close friends, a friendship that lasted their lifetimes. A large number of Beckett’s letters are to him, perhaps the only person, and almost certainly the only man he ever seems to have truly confided in.

As well as the Joyce family, while in Paris, MacGreevy became a friend of Sylvia Beach, Nancy Cunard, and especially Richard Aldington, husband of HD (Hilda Doolittle), who described Beckett as “the splendidly mad Irishman.” In Beckett Remembering, Beckett describes that first meeting, though he doesn’t mention Lucia.

“I was introduced to Joyce by Tom MacGreevy. He was very friendly – immediately, to the best of my recollection. I remember coming back very exhausted to the École Normale and, as usual, the door was closed and I climbed over the railings.

I remember that: coming back from my first meeting with Joyce. I remember walking back. And from then on we saw each other quite often. I can still remember his telephone number!”

Joyce was keen to ask Beckett about everything that had been going on in Dublin and was also keen to find an assistant to help him transcribe sections of what was then called Work in Progress but eventually became Finnegans Wake.

Joyce’s eyes were by now very weak and painful. Beckett says that he was never officially Joyce’s secretary, but he was at Joyce’s apartment a lot of the time. It was through Joyce that Beckett met Ezra Pound at one of Joyce’s favorite Paris restaurants. Pound was in a bad mood, possibly because he was having to dine at a restaurant favored by Joyce, who liked eating at the Trianon.

Beckett still remembered the dinner and Pound many years later, though not warmly: “The only time I remember having met Pound was one evening at dinner with the Joyces in the Trianon, Place de Rennes. He was having great trouble with a fond d’artichaut and was very aggressive and disdainful.”

When Beckett first met Lucia there was no suggestion of her madness, though she was already troubled and in conflict with her parents, particularly Nora, who did not want her to pursue the dancing career she felt was her chosen path. She and her brother Giorgio had been moved between several countries while they were younger and had to learn a new language every time – someone said that Lucia was illiterate in four languages.

And being the daughter of such a universally revered father was difficult for her. Nora saw her main duty as being to allow Jim the quiet and space he needed to write – the children came second. But despite her parents’ objections, Lucia took dancing lessons, and took them very seriously. She performed in public several times. Beckett went with the Joyces to a dance performance she was in at the Bal Bullier on May 28, 1929.

Joyce’s niece wrote about Lucia’s shimmering costume (there is a photograph of her wearing it on the front cover of her biography by Carol Loeb Shloss).

“It was in silver sequins edged with green. One leg was covered to the heel and the other came right through the costume, so that when she put one behind the other, she created the illusion of a fishtail. Green and silver were entwined in her hair.”

Not long after, Lucia began to have self-doubt,  and by November of that year she had given up dance forever. When she met Beckett, Lucia was twenty-two and he was twenty-three, but he was already much more mature than her; she was still a girl, having difficulty differentiating herself as an individual from the strong personalities of her mother and father.

Lucia was both attractive and attracted to men; Joyce’s niece said she was “pretty, with dark, curly shoulder-length hair and blue eyes with a slight cast but … attractive in spite of it.”

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Lucia Joyce on Bloomsday;
Photograph by Berenice Abbott
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In photographs like the portrait by Berenice Abbott it’s easy to see the strabismus or squint in Lucia’s eye, which she had tried to have corrected, unsuccessfully. It does give her a rather wild look; any doctor inclined to think she was mad would not have a hard time convincing other people.

No one knows whether Beckett and Lucia slept together, but everyone agrees that she was the one pursuing him. Of course, there are precedents for artists becoming close to the daughters of their artistic mentors: Wagner and Liszt’s daughter Cosima; Ezra Pound and Dorothy, the daughter of Olivia Shakespear, Yeats’ mistress.

And there are many precedents for daughters looking for a partner who can substitute for their genius father. It might have been the perfect match, but Lucia seems to have pressured Beckett too much and for too long. He wrote to MacGreevy on July 17, 1930: 

“ . . . a letter from Lucia too. I don’t know what to do. She is unhappy she says. Now that you are gone there is no one to talk to about that. I do not dare go to Wales [the Joyce family were staying in Llandudno], and I promised I would if they were there on my way through. But that is impossible. There is no solution. What terrible instinct prompts them to have the genius of beauty at the right – or the wrong – moment!”

Years later she was still pursuing him, even though he had told her one day in May 1930 at her parents’ apartment that he only went there to see her father and not her. She was devastated and told her mother.

Nora took her daughter’s side; she told Beckett not to play with her daughter’s affections. James Joyce told him he was not welcome at their apartment anymore. The rift between the two writers lasted until Joyce finally realized that his daughter was genuinely ill and that a serious relationship with Beckett would have been a disaster.

Years later, Beckett described his relationship with Lucia to his biographer James Knowlson curtly and rather cruelly, as if she had meant very little to him. He minimizes the rift with Joyce and Lucia’s part in it. He says that when he went to Joyce’s apartment that day:

“Lucia was there, already very disturbed mentally. Sometimes she was perfectly normal. I had to tell her finally that I went to the house not to see her, but to see Joyce. Joyce was my interest. And, according to some accounts, Joyce was very upset . . .  And we used to walk, when she was perfectly normal. And then she had these crazy spells. I never saw her in them though. They all understood that she was incurable. But Joyce could never agree with them. He was all for trying different treatments, with Jung and so on.”

Despite his later attempts to play down Lucia’s importance to him, she undoubtedly played a big part in Beckett’s life. In 1932 he wrote a novel, only published posthumously, called Dream of Fair to Middling Women. In the novel there are three women, one of whom is called Syra-Cusa, representing Lucia – St Lucia of Syracuse is the patron saint of eyesight, a very good saint for Joyce, with his lifelong eye problems, to name his daughter for, but a cruel Joycean irony that she too had an eye problem in spite of, or perhaps because of it.

The narrator in the novel, obviously a version of Beckett himself, describes her – although she is fictional, she is quite similar to the actual Lucia whom Kay Boyle describes.

The Syra-Cusa: her body more perfect than dream creek, amaranth Lagoon. She flowed along in a nervous swagger, swinging a thin arm amply. The sinewy fetlock sprang, Brancusi bird, from the shod foot blue arch veins and small bones, rose like a Lied to the firm wrist of the reins, the Bilitis breasts. Her neck was scraggy and her head was null . . .

She was prone, when brought to dine out, to puke, but into her serviette, with decorum, because, supposedly, the craving of her viscera was not for food and drink. To take her arm, to flow together, out of step, down the asphalt bed, was a foundering in music, the slow ineffable flight of a dream-dive, a launching and terrible foundering in a rich rape of water. Her grace was supplejack, it was cuttystool and cavaletto, he trembled as on a springboard, jutting out, doomed, high of a dream-water. Would she sink or swim in Diana’s well? That depends what we mean by a maiden.

Like Joyce, Beckett here needs footnotes, two in particular: Brancusi was the sculptor whose drawing is on the title page of Harry and Caresse Crosby’s publication of Joyce’s Work in Progress, and Songs of Bilitis is an 1894 erotic, lesbian, fin de siècle sequence of prose poems written by Pierre Louÿs – a friend of André Gide, Oscar Wilde, and Claude Debussy – who claimed to have translated from a previously unknown Greek original. As for being a maiden, Lucia’s former love interest claimed that she was when she left him for Beckett.

But if Beckett thought he could get rid of Lucia so easily, he was mistaken. She continued to stalk him, as we would say now, for years. In a letter to MacGreevy of February 20, 1935 he is still saying: “She wrote wanting to see me. I have done nothing – except make détours.” In Middling Women, the narrator says:

We thought we had got rid of the Syra-Cusa. No such thing, here below, as riddance, good, bad or indifferent. Not having the stomach formally to disprove her letters merely, quickly, cite a circumstance of no importance to tickle our fauces. For days, holidays, she came not abroad, she stayed mewed up in her bedroom. What was she up to? Hold everything now. She was doing abstract drawing! Heavenly Father! Abstract drawing! Can you beat that one?

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Contributed by Francis Booth, the author of several books on twentieth-century culture:

Amongst Those Left: The British Experimental Novel 1940-1960 (published by Dalkey Archive); Everybody I Can Think of Ever: Meetings That Made the Avant-Garde; Girls in Bloom: Coming of Age in the Mid-Twentieth Century Woman’s Novel; Text Acts: Twentieth-Century Literary Eroticism; and Comrades in Art: Revolutionary Art in America 1926-1938.

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

 

More about Lucia Joyce Fire in the Brain (The New Yorker) How James Joyce’s Daughter, Lucia, was Treated for Schizophrenia by Carl Jung Why Was James Joyce’s Daughter Lucia Written Out of History?

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Quotes from My Story by Kamala Das, the Poet’s Autobiography

Kamala Das (1934 – 2009), the Indian author and poet, was far ahead of her time. Even after her death, her words continue to hold much of relevance for Indian women — and perhaps for women across the world.

In addition to her poetry, she was known for her short stories as well as her autobiography, My Story. Here we’ll explore quotes from My Story, a book  both widely admired as well as controversial.

Kamala Das (later known as Kamala Surayya) believed in living life on her own terms, and this reveals itself in her writings. Her confessional poetry style wasn’t one readily adopted by Indian poets, least of all women. Her English poetry has been compared to that of Anne Sexton’s and won her recognition and literary awards during her lifetime.

Her writings look at Indian society with a critical eye, questioning its intransigent patriarchy and deeply entrenched notions of how women are expected to behave. Where love is concerned, there is a yearning for romanticism, which ends in cynicism. A quest for the spiritual is also visible in her writings, especially her poetry.

In the Preface to My Story, Kamala Das wrote:

“Some people told me that writing an autobiography like this, with absolute honesty, keeping nothing to oneself, is like doing a striptease. True, maybe. I, will, firstly, strip myself of clothes and ornaments. Then I intend to peel off this light brown skin and shatter my bones. At last, I hope you will be able to see my homeless, orphan, intensely beautiful soul, deep within the bone, deep down under, beneath even the marrow, in a fourth dimension.”

My Story was originally in Malayalam, titled Ente Katha, describes the events and forces that shaped the authors views as she came into her own. The book earned her praise as well as notoriety for its honesty, particularly about sexuality.

And in an interview with Iqbal Kaur about she wrote My Story the way that she did, Kamala Das said:

“I needed to disturb society out of its complacence. I found the complacence a very ugly state. I wanted to make women of my generation feel that if men could do something wrong, they could do it themselves too. I wanted them to realize that they were equal. I wanted to remove gender difference. I wanted to see that something happened to society, which had strong inhibitions and which only told lies in the public.”

Following is a selection of timeless, thought-provoking quotes from My Story by Kamala Das.

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Learn more about Kamala Das
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“A poet’s raw material is not stone or clay; it is her personality.”

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“Children are intuitive about people and feel more than adults a sense of rejection.”

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“I was a burden and a responsibility neither my parents nor my grandmother could put up with for long.”

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“My grand uncle liked to see women glamorized with jewels and flowers. His second wife, my favorite aunt, was never seen even at night without her heavy jewelry, all gem encrusted and radiant … Each night she came to our house accompanied by her maids and a lantern, looking like a bride. And she walked up the steep staircase of the gatehouse to meet her famous husband in their lush bedroom, kept fragrant with incense and jasmine garlands.”

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“Poets, even the most insignificant of them, are different from other people. They cannot close their shops like shop men and return home. Their shop is their mind and as long as they carry it with them, they feel the pressures and the torments.”

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10 Poems by Kamala Das
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“One’s real world is not what is outside him. It is the immeasurable world inside him that is real. Only the one who has decided to travel inwards, will realize that his route has no end.”

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“The obsession with sin destroyed the mind of several girls who were at the beginning of their adolescence, normal and easy-going. If there was a dearth of sin, sin at any cost had to be manufactured, because forgiving the sinners was a therapeutic exercise, popular with the rabidly virtuous.”

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“Society can well ask me how I could become what I became, although born to parents as high-principled as mine were. Ask the books that I read why I changed. Ask the authors dead and alive who communicated with me and gave me the courage to be myself. The books like a mother-cow licked the calf of my thought into shape and left me to lie at the altar of the world as a sacrificial gift.”

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“Marriage meant nothing more than a show of wealth to families like ours. The bride was unimportant and her happiness a minor issue.”

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“With words I had destroyed my life. I had used them like swords in what was meant to be a purification dance, but blood was unwittingly shed.”

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“Wherever a writer goes, her notoriety precedes her.”

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“We are trapped in immortality and our only freedom is the freedom to decompose.”

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“Today at Nariman Point the tall buildings crowd one another. But when I was young and in love with a grey-eyed man it was a marshy waste. We used to walk aimlessly along the quiet Panday Road or cross the Cuffe Parade to walk towards the sun. We did not have a place to rest. But in the glow of those evening suns, we felt that we were Gods who had lost their way and had strayed into an unkind planet.”

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More about My Story by Kamala Das Review on Purple Pencil Project Reader discussion on Goodreads Wikipedia

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Contributed by Melanie P. Kumar: Melanie is a Bangalore, India-based independent writer who has always been fascinated with the magic of words. Links to some of her pieces can be found at gonewiththewindwithmelanie.wordpress.com.

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Women Authors’ Friendships: Mutual Support & Companionate Rivalry

When it comes to women author’s friendships, it’s understood that the writers’ common struggles benefit from mutual support.  I wonder how much rivalry is involved, though, since writers can be an envious lot. 

There are few templates for friendships between women writers, especially after one or both achieves some measure of success. Yes, there is mutual support. And yes, there is a measure of envy and rivalry. 

This type of camaraderie has, and has always had, its delights as well as its complications. The well-known friendships between women who are now considered classic authors were no exception.

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Virginia Woolf & Katherine Mansfield

Literary mythology has often portrayed Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield as bitter rivals, but they were close friends and, for the most part, mutually supportive writing colleagues.

The rivalry between the two brilliant writers served as inspiration to both, a spur to do better. Virginia said of Katherine, “I was jealous of her writing. The only writing I have ever been jealous of.”

In October 1917, Virginia Woolf recorded in her diary her first, decidedly mixed impressions of fellow writer Katherine Mansfield. Katherine “stinks like a civet cat that had taken to street walking,” she wrote. “In truth, I’m a little shocked by her commonness at first sight; lines so hard & cheap. However, when this diminishes, she is so intelligent & inscrutable that she repays friendship.” Read more …

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Vita Sackville-West & Virginia Woolf

The relationship of Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf has gone down in literary history, and even today it holds a fascination, epitomizing the allure of the unconventional, the bohemian, the slightly eccentric, and exotic.

On December 15, 1922, Virginia Woolf recorded in her diary that she had met “the lovely aristocratic Sackville-West last night at Clive’s. Not much to my severer taste … all the supple ease of the aristocracy, but not the wit of the artist.” 

She was, of course, writing of Vita, the woman who would go on to become her lover, friend, and confidante. Their affair has inspired biographies, a West End play, and most recently, a 2019 film. But none have come close to capturing the vibrant nuances and dynamics of their personalities, or the subtleties of a relationship that was more emotional than physical and that lasted until Virginia’s death in 1941. Read more …

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Violette Leduc & Simone de Beauvoir

Simone de Beauvoir first met the French author Violette Leduc in 1945. At the time, de Beauvoir and her partner, Jean-Paul Sartre were the golden couple of Parisian intellectual circles, while Violette Leduc was a struggling writer mired in poverty.

Their first meeting, in the heady atmosphere of the Café Flore on the Left Bank, came only after Leduc had observed de Beauvoir and Sartre from a distance for several months, gathering the courage to introduce herself.

The resulting friendship seemed unlikely. Yet it lasted for several years, with mutual respect and admiration that survived Leduc’s unrequited attraction to de Beauvoir as well as the differing circumstances of the two women and their wildly diverging experiences of success. Read more …

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Anne Sexton & Maxine Kumin

Anne Sexton and Maxine Kumin were significant twentieth-century poets who provided deep friendship and support for one another as they developed and mastered their craft.

Kumin and Sexton met in 1957 when both women took a poetry workshop at the Boston Center for Adult Education. They had much in common — both were slender, dark-haired, and attractive; both came from upper-middle-class backgrounds; both lived in Newton, a wealthy Boston suburb; and both were married with children.

But the two women also differed in some ways. Sexton had never gone to college and had been told throughout her life that she was “dumb.” She was emotionally fragile. She had attempted suicide the year before and had been institutionalized for mental illness. Read more …

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George Eliot & Harriet Beecher Stowe

Mary Ann Evans, as she was born in 1819, did not always inspire friendship among fellow female novelists. Even before she found literary fame, the author better known by her pen name — George Eliot — was firmly entrenched in a London social circle that was unconventional, intellectual, and predominantly male.

There was also the matter of her “living in sin” with critic and philosopher George Henry Lewes – a state that kept many “respectable ladies” away from her front door. When Elizabeth Gaskell, for instance, wrote to Eliot to praise her fiction, she couldn’t help lamenting that “I wish you were Mrs Lewes,” and did not pursue a closer relationship.

Other women, though, were undeterred, including Harriet Beecher Stowe, the American author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, . Having previously received a kindly message from the British writer, passed on by a mutual friend, the fifty-seven-year-old Stowe first wrote to Eliot in the spring of 1869. Read more …

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Lillian Hellman & Dorothy Parker

Lillian Hellman, the legendary American playwright, met Dorothy Parker, known for her brittle poetry and acid wit, in 1931. Hellman, not yet famous, was with her longtime partner Dashiell Hammett at a New York party when Parker approached the couple, fell to her knees, and kissed Hammett’s hand.

The scene made the couple uncomfortable, and Hellman never imagined she’d want to see Parker again, let alone befriend her. But when the two women met four years later, they clicked and became lifelong friends. In Hellman’s own words about her friendship with Dorothy Parker:

“It was strange that we did like each other and that never through the years did two such difficult women ever have a quarrel, or even a mild, unpleasant word. Much, certainly, was against our friendship: we were not the same generation, we were not the same kind of writer, we had led and were to lead very different lives, often we didn’t like the same people or even the same books, but more important, we never liked the same men.” Read more …

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Zora Neale Hurston & Fannie Hurst

Zora Neale Hurston, the American novelist, memoirist, and folklorist was an active member of the Harlem Renaissance, an era of flourishing art and literature created by the black community in New York City. Fannie Hurst, her contemporary, supported social equality causes who became a wildly successful author of novels and short stories.

Hurst was incredibly successful as a novelist and story writer in the 1920s and 1930s, becoming one of the era’s top-earning authors. Through a strange twist of fate that Zora, who was virtually forgotten when she died in 1960, is now revered, widely read, and studied, while today Hurst is rarely read and little known.

Fannie Hurst and Zora Neale Hurston met at Opportunity Magazine‘s first literary awards banquet in May, 1925. At this event sponsored by the National Urban League, Hurst presented Hurston with prizes for her short story, “Spunk,” and her play, “Color Struck.” Read more …

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Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings & Zora Neale Hurston

In the summer of 1942, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings was invited to speak at historically Black Florida Memorial College in St. Augustine. One of the instructors that term was Zora Neale Hurston. At the time, Zora was completing her memoir, Dust Tracks on a Road, covering her childhood in Eatonville, Florida’s first all-black incorporated city.

Marjorie had just published Cross Creek, her memoir of the north-central Florida hamlet she had, fourteen years earlier, adopted as home.

The two women became acquainted, and when Marjorie returned to Castle Warden, the St. Augustine hotel her husband, Norton Baskin, owned and operated, she told him she’d “met the most wonderful woman.” Read more …

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Margery Williams Bianco, Author of The Velveteen Rabbit

Margery Williams Bianco (July 22, 1881 – September 4, 1944) was a British-American author and translator, best known for children’s books. Her most enduring work is The Velveteen Rabbit (1922). She received the Newbery Honor for Winterbound.

Margery William’s interest in writing was fueled by the encouragement she received from her father. As a renowned barrister and scholar, her father inspired his daughters to read and write, and by extension, fueled her passion to become a writer.

 Background and Early Life

 Born in London, England, Margery Williams was the second daughter of Robert Williams and Florence Harper Williams. In her writings about her childhood, Margery described her father as a loving parent who valued the art of reading and the development of imagination. She recalled how her father described characters from various books, bringing them to life from the printed objects.

Margery’s father died when she was seven years old, which may have influenced the themes of loss woven into her later writings.

In 1890, Margery’s family moved to the United States. First, the family settled in New York before moving to a farm in Pennsylvania. Here, Margery attended the Covenant School in Sharon Hill until the age of seventeen. Upon completing this formal education, Margery returned to England and began her writing career. Her first book was a novel for adults—The Late Returning was published in England in 1902, when Margery was just nineteen.

This was followed by two more novels — The Price of Youth and The Bar. These books, however, weren’t very successful and added little to her reputation as an author.

 Marriage and family life

Margery met Francesco Bianco, an Italian working in a book department, and married him in 1904. The couple had two children— a son and a daughter. Margery gave up her writing aspirations while the children were young and focused on her family.

The Biancos later moved to Paris, before settling in Turin, Italy. Here, Francesco Bianco joined the Italian army to fight in World War I. In this difficult period, Margery Williams sought solace in the works of the poet Walter de la Mare. She perceived that his works empathized with the perspective of children and aligned with her interest as an author. So inspired was she by the poet’s works that she wrote an essay, “De La Mare,”as an homage.

At the end of World War I, Europe was stricken by post-war hunger that greatly affected the general population. As a result, the Biancos moved from Italy to the U.S. in 1921. The family settled in Greenwich Village in New York City.

Here, Margery reignited her passion for writing, inspired by watching the playful nature of her children, Cecco and Pamela. Along with the discovery of Walter de la Mare’s works, she had the impetus to resume writing.

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The Velveteen Rabbit Turns 100
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The Velveteen Rabbit

The Velveteen Rabbit was published in 1922. The children’s story was immediately successful and would become Margery’s most enduring work. In the story, the author creatively used Walter de la Mare’s literary concepts of miracles and wonders from a child’s perspective. This book has been adapted into numerous artistic works, including broadcast media, as well as children’s theatre.

In The Velveteen Rabbit, Margery Williams presented the tale of a young boy who received a toy rabbit as a Christmas gift. At first, the boy hardly cares for the gift, but gradually grows fond of the toy rabbit. He becomes so attached to the toy rabbit that it becomes “real” to him.

When the boy falls ill with scarlet fever, the family must burn the toy rabbit to prevent the illness from spreading. The toy is then turned into a real rabbit by a fairy. While critics sometimes suggested that the story is cloying and sentimental, generations of readers have embraced it as a parable on the power of love.

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Portrait of Margery Williams by James Bolivar Manson, 1911
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Final Years and Legacy

After the publication of The Velveteen Rabbit, Margery Williams continued to gain notice as an author of children’s books. Fascination with toys and the use of miracles proved to be ongoing themes in her work.

Some of her notable children’s books include Poor Cecco (1925), The Apple Tree (1926), The Adventures of Andy (1926), The Skin Horse (1927), The Candlestick (1929), and The House that Grew Smaller (1931).

Later in her writing career, Margery William began writing young adult novels. In these works, she focused on young characters who were alienated or isolated from society and for whom joy and prosperity were elusive.

In 1937, Margery received the Newbery Medal for the young adult novel, Winterbound (1936). The story tells of two teenage girls who must become responsible for taking care of their family when their parents are suddenly called away. Other People’s Houses (1939 is the story of a girl who decides to earn a living in New York instead of pursuing further education.

In 1944, Forward Commandos!, Margery’s final book, was published. A departure from her customary subject matter, this novel features a male African American character. Following its publication, Margery William fell ill and died on September 4, 1944, after three days in the hospital.

More about Margery Williams Bianco

Major Works

1902 –  The Late Returning1904 –  The Price of Youth1906 –  The Bar1914 –  The Thing in the Woods1922 –  The Velveteen Rabbit1925 –  Poor Cecco1925 –  The Little Wooden Doll1926 –  The Apple Tree1927 –  The Skin Horse1927 –  The Adventures of Andy1929 –  All About Pets1929 –  The Candlestick1931 –  The House That Grew Smaller1932 –  The Street of Little Shops1933 –  The Hurdy-Gurdy Man1934 –  The Good Friends1934 –  More About Animals1936 –  Green Grows the Garden1936 –  Winterbound1939 –  Other People’s Houses1941 –  Franzi and Gizi1942 –  Bright Morning1942 –  Penny and the White Horse1944 –  Forward, Commandos!

More information and sources

Pennsylvania Center for the Book Full text of The Velveteen Rabbit As the Velveteen Rabbit Turns 100, its Message Continues to Resonate Wikipedia Reader discussion on Goodreads

Read and listen online

The Velveteen Rabbit on Project Gutenberg The Velveteen Rabbit on Librivox

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Envy & Inspiration: The Friendship of Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield

Literary mythology has often portrayed Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield as bitter rivals, but they were close friends and, for the most part, mutually supportive writing colleagues.

The rivalry between the two brilliant writers served as inspiration to both, a spur to do better. Virginia said of Katherine, “I was jealous of her writing. The only writing I have ever been jealous of.”

In October 1917, Virginia Woolf recorded in her diary her first, decidedly mixed impressions of fellow writer Katherine Mansfield. Katherine “stinks like a civet cat that had taken to street walking,” she wrote. “In truth, I’m a little shocked by her commonness at first sight; lines so hard & cheap. However, when this diminishes, she is so intelligent & inscrutable that she repays friendship.”

Despite the snobbishness and rancor of this entry, the two women formed a friendship that would be incredibly important to both, especially from 1917 to 1920. According to Virginia Woolf’s biographer Hermione Lee, it was a friendship that was “intimate but guarded, mutually inspiring but competitive.” It was based on admiration, rivalry, envy, and respect, and would continue to affect Virginia long after Katherine’s death in 1923.

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Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield
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An unlikely friendship

Virginia and Katherine had heard of each other long before they met, and were eventually introduced in February 1917 by Lytton Strachey, Virginia’s fellow Bloomsbury writer and friend. He had met Katherine at Garsington Manor in Oxfordshire, during a literary salon held by English aristocrat Lady Ottoline Morrell.

Katherine pleaded with him to introduce her to Virginia, saying that she wanted to meet the author more than anyone else, and Lytton passed this along to Virginia — along with a rather mean description of Katherine’s “ugly impressive mask of a face — cut in wood, with brown hair and brown eyes very far apart, and a sharp and slightly vulgarly-fanciful intellect sitting behind it.”

At first glance, the two women were an unlikely pair of friends. Katherine was six years younger than Virginia and had a colonial background in New Zealand, while Virginia’s family was firmly entrenched in the English upper-middle classes. Katherine embraced her sexuality and bohemian tendencies, while Virginia shied away from intimacy.

Katherine was already making a name for herself as a writer — many of her short stories were published in the little magazines of the period, and her collection In a German Pension had been published in 1911. By then, Virginia had only recently published her first novel, The Voyage Out, and wasn’t as well known.

However, they did have some things in common. Both were married; Katherine had been living with John Middleton Murry since 1911 and would marry him in 1918, while Virginia had been married to Leonard Woolf since 1912. Both were childless and both battled with illness: Katherine had arthritis as well as the tuberculosis that ultimately killed her; Virginia had mental breakdowns and violent headaches that dogged her all her life.

Perhaps most importantly, though, they shared a dedication to their work, to the craft of writing and the “precious art” of fiction, and it was this that Virginia, in particular, would keep coming back when other aspects of their friendship seemed to be “founded on quicksand.”

 

“I threw my darling to the wolves” 

Despite her reservations, Virginia immediately saw that Katherine was an ideal candidate for the Hogarth Press, still a relatively new venture for her and Leonard. She initially agreed to meet Katherine to “get a story from her,” and invited her to dinner.

They discussed the possibility of the Hogarth Press publishing Katherine’s short story “Prelude” (then called “The Aloe”). Further meetings quickly followed, during which Katherine met Leonard and Virginia’s sister Vanessa Bell, and Virginia met Katherine’s husband John Middleton Murry.

Almost immediately, they began constructing images of each other. Virginia emphasized Katherine’s tough brashness, epitomized in the “civet cat” diary entry, while Katherine focused on Virginia’s fragility, writing to Ottoline Morrell that she had felt “the strange, trembling, glinting quality of her mind.”

At the same time, both were courting the other: Katherine wrote seductively, “My God I love to think of you, Virginia, as my friend.” Virginia and Leonard accepted a heavily edited version of “The Aloe” as “Prelude” for the Hogarth Press.

Katherine was both delighted at the acceptance and annoyed at the cuts, writing to her friend Dorothy Brett, “I threw my darling to the wolves and they ate it and served me up so much praise in a golden bowl that I couldn’t help feeling gratified.”

 

“An oddly complete understanding”

This signified the start of Katherine’s influence on Virginia’s work and writing, which Virginia appreciated and resented all at once. “Prelude” was a fragmented story, an entire family history caught in intense moments of experience. It coincided with Virginia’s reading of modernist authors such as Joyce and Eliot, and her debate with herself about modernism and “the essential thing” in fiction.

She began to see similarities in the way she and Katherine approached their writing: both wanted to work through intense short pieces, without what they saw as the egotism of James Joyce or Dorothy Richardson. They wanted to explore consciousness in a more fluid and organic way than May Sinclair, for example. It was Katherine’s writing, in particular, that would influence Virginia later in Jacob’s Room and The Waves.

By the autumn of 1917, Katherine had developed the first symptoms of tuberculosis (also called consumption) and left England for the first of many lonely, miserable winters abroad. It was also the first of many gaps in her friendship with Virginia, but in May 1918, when she returned to England, they had a “most satisfactory & fascinating” renewal of their friendship.

Virginia eagerly sought out the “oddly complete understanding” between them that she felt was founded solely on Katherine’s love of writing, while Katherine also enjoyed and was inspired by Virginia’s company: “She was very nice … She does take the writing business seriously and she is honest about it & thrilled by it. One can’t ask more.”

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You may also enjoy: 
Beyond the Legend:
Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West’s Love Affair & Friendship
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“Prelude,” jealousy, and silence

The publication of “Prelude” in July 1918, precipitated more spats between them. Katherine and Murry were cross because both Virginia and Leonard disliked their chosen cover design, and while Virginia championed the book to friends who were less than enthusiastic (“Katherine is the very best of women writers—always of course passing over one fine but very modest example”), she was also jealous of Katherine’s writing.

“Tell me what you think of it,” she implored Vanessa, “& should you say that you don’t like it as much as “Kew Gardens” [the short story she was working on at the time], I shan’t think less highly of you; but my jealousy, I repeat, is only a film on the surface beneath which is nothing but pure generosity.”

Despite this, Virginia often visited Katherine at her “tall, ugly villa” in Hampstead during the autumn of 1918. She often came away with mixed feelings, and much preferred the company of Katherine alone to that of Katherine and Murry together. She was uneasy with Murry, and later she would remember him as “squirming and oozing a sort of thick motor oil in the background.”

That winter Katherine stayed in England but contacted no one. In the absence of any letters from her, Virginia assumed that they had quarreled, and tried to work out how in her diary:

“It is at this moment extremely doubtful whether I have the right to class her among my friend … Upstairs I have letters in which she speaks of finding the thought of me a joy, dwelling upon my writing with excitement; I have letters making appointments, pressing for visits, adding postscripts of thanks & affection to visits already paid. But the last is dated December, & it is now February. The question interests, amuses, & also slightly, no, very decidedly, pains me …”

A brief reconciliation in the spring was cut short by Katherine’s illness. By August 1919 was desperately ill with tuberculosis — sick enough to say goodbye to all her London friends before setting off for the Italian Riviera. To Virginia, she wrote, “Do not think I am forgetful of you …You would not believe me if you knew how often you are in my heart & mind. I love thinking of you.”

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A poor review of Night and Day

In the autumn of 1919, their friendship was severely tested once again by a poor review that Katherine wrote of Virginia’s latest novel, Night and Day. In a November edition of the little magazine Athenaeum, she wrote:

“We had thought that this world had vanished forever, that it was impossible to find on the great ocean of literature a ship that was unaware of what had been happening. Yet here is Night and Day, fresh, new and exquisite, a novel in the tradition of the English novel. In the midst of our admiration it makes us feel old and chill. We had never thought to look upon its like again!”

In her letters to Murry, she angrily wrote of the novel’s “lie in the soul” and “intellectual snobbery,” complaining at how it ignored the impact of World War I and dragged the reader back to a world that had vanished. She also revealed her jealousy of Virginia’s domestic life and marriage, writing bitterly, “That’s one thing I shall grudge Virginia all her days — that she & Leonard were together.”

Virginia, understandably, was hurt and furious. She took no account of Katherine’s illness or the bitter, depressed state of mind that had produced the review, and took it very much to heart, writing in her diary that it made her feel like “a decorous elderly dullard.”

She was further angered and dismayed by a curt note Katherine sent on her return to England: “I would be delighted if you’d care to come & see me one afternoon, but I am grown very dull.”

She did, however, make the effort to visit Katherine. They quickly fell to talking about writing just as they always did, and things thawed between them to the point that Virginia felt she could raise the subject of Night and Day — which Katherine now called “an amazing achievement.”

When pressed, Katherine did allude to the book’s omission of World War I and her feeling that it was somehow a false portrayal of life. Virginia admitted to finding such an honest appraisal refreshing, and later wrote in her diary, “To no one else can I talk in the same disembodied way about writing …”

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The last overtures of friendship

Later, when Katherine left for Menton in August 1920, Virginia wrote of  “… the blankness of not having her to talk to … A woman caring as I care for writing is rare enough I suppose to give me the queerest sense of echo coming back to me from her mind the second after I’ve spoken.”

This notion of intimacy blossomed in Orlando a few years later “when it seemed as if the doors of each mind stood wide open to the other so that they could pass in and out with perfect freedom — he taking the words from her lips, or the other way about.”

Virginia recorded their last conversation, in which they’d talked about the different ways in which they perceived themselves: “I said how my own character seemed to cut out a shape like a shadow in front of me. This she understood (I give it as an example of her understanding) & proved it by telling me that she thought this bad: one ought to merge into things.”

She added, “Strange how little we know our friends,” and wondered if Katherine would write. Katherine did not. But by the early spring of 1921, she was so miserable in France that Murry asked Virginia to write to her.

Virginia obliged, sending a gossipy, intimate, funny letter that also pleaded for a return to their old friendship: “Please, Katherine, let us try to write to each other.” She received no reply, and that seemed to mark the end of their friendship.

Virginia never quite forgave Katherine’s silence and seemed to take great pleasure in disparaging her. She maintained she was glad when Katherine didn’t win the Hawthornden Prize in May 1922; she was harsh about Katherine’s book The Garden Party. She didn’t think of going to see Katherine when she returned, briefly, to London in the summer of 1922.

 

Katherine’s death and a postumous “friendship”

Tragically Katherine died from her illness in January 1923. She was just ____ years old. It was, in a way, the start of a new, posthumous friendship, one driven by Virginia’s remorse and regret. Virginia felt that there was “no point in writing … Katherine won’t read it. Katherine’s my rival no longer. There’s no competitor.”

For years afterward, she would continue to judge herself against Katherine in her writing: Katherine, she knew, had written in her journals of writing from deep feeling, and in her diary Virginia asked herself, “Am I writing The Hours [the early title of Mrs. Dalloway] from deep emotion? … Or do I write essays about myself?”

According to Hermione Lee, “Katherine haunted her as we are haunted by people we have loved, but with whom we have not completed our conversation, with whom we have unfinished business.”

When Virginia finished writing Mrs. Dalloway, her thoughts immediately turned to Katherine. With this novel, she felt she had finally “beaten” her old rival, but wrote in her diary, “But I stick to it; K. & I had our relationship; & never again shall I have one like it.”

Further reading:

Virginia Woolf by Hermione Lee (Vintage, 1997)Katherine Mansfield: A Secret Life by Claire Tomalin (Penguin, 2003)A Secret Sisterhood: The Literary Friendships of Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot,
and Virginia Woolf by Emma Claire Sweeney and Emily Midorikawa (Mariner Books, 2018)

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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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Eulalie Spence, Playwright of the Harlem Renaissance Era

Eulalie Spence (June 11, 1894 – March 7, 1981) was an award-winning American playwright, stage director, actress, and educator. As a prolific Black writer in the first half of the twentieth century, Spence was most active during the Harlem Renaissance era.

She was so esteemed and  prolific in her heyday that her relative obscurity today is unfathomable. Like many of her contemporaries who blossomed during the Harlem Renaissance years, she was multitalented — a writer and playwright, as well as an actress and teacher. She authored some fourteen plays, five of which were preserved in print; nearly all were staged. 

An immigrant from the British West Indies, Spence went against the prevailing trend of her time among Black creatives, which was to use the arts in all forms to press for racial justice. She believed that plays were for entertainment and considered herself a “folk dramatist.” 

She was a member of W.E.B. Du Bois’s Krigwa players from 1926 to 1928, and though she clashed with the eminent Du Bois about the purpose of theatre, she was a highly visible member of the Black arts community of the Harlem Renaissance, and one of its most popular.

Later, Spence became a mentor to one of her high school students who would later become a renowned theatrical producer. That was none other than Joseph Papp, founder of The Public Theater and Shakespeare in the Park theatre festival. Spence was the only Black teacher in his predominantly white high school, and he described her as “the most influential force” in his life. 

As a playwright, Spence was most active from 1923 to 1929; her last and most controversial play, The Whipping, came out in 1934.

 

Early years—from the British West Indies to Brooklyn

Eulalie Spence was born in Nevis, British West Indies, to Robert and Eno Lake Spence. Her early childhood was spent on her father’s sugar cane plantation. When it was destroyed by a hurricane in 1902, the family moved to New York City. They briefly lived in Harlem before settling in Brooklyn.

Eulalie’s upbringing in a family of seven girls wasn’t easy under the family’s circumstances. Still, she maintained a gentle, loving spirit that helped keep the large family close-knit. Robert struggled to keep steady work, always dreaming of returning to his homeland. The family endured a hardscrabble life in a tiny Brooklyn apartment.

Despite the impoverished circumstances of her childhood in Brooklyn, Spence managed to draw positive inspiration from her parents. Her mother would often read to her, which  strengthened their bond. She admired her mother’s strong and independent demeanor. These attributes would later inspire the female characters in her plays.

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Eulalie Spence in the 1920s
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Education and teaching career

Eulalie forged a path through school to get a good education. She graduated from the Wadleigh High School for Girls, which became the first all-girls’ public high school in New York City.

After Wadleigh, Eulalie attended and graduated from the New York Training School for Teachers. In 1924, she enrolled at National Ethiopian Art Theatre School, whose primary aim was to empower Black actors through training and employment. 

Much later, she continued her education, culminating – with a Master of Arts in Speech from Teacher’s College, Columbia University in 1937.

She taught at the Eastern District High School in Brooklyn for more than thirty years, from 1927 to 1958, overlapping with her theatrical endeavors (she didn’t make a living from the latter). The only Black teacher in a predominantly white school, she taught dramatics, English, and elocution. As mentioned earlier, one of her students was Joseph Papp, who was greatly inspired by her.

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RELATED CONTENT

Renaissance Women: 13 Female Writers of the Harlem Renaissance
Women Poets of the Harlem Renaissance to Rediscover and Read7 Black Women Playwrights of the Early 20th Century
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Playwriting, acting, and directing career

Though she authored some fourteen plays, Spence’s creative journey wasn’t an easy one. Her star as a playwright shone brightest in the 1920s, in the heyday of the Harlem Renaissance era. 

Most of Spence’s plays were performed by a theatre company known as Krigwa (Crisis Guild of Writers and Artists). She first affiliated with them when she won second place in the group’s 1926 playwriting competition. Her one-act play was titled Foreign Mail.

Krigwa (formerly known as Crigwa), was founded in 1925 by William Edward Burghardt (W.E.B.) Du Bois. It started with the mission of sponsoring an annual playwriting competition, and later transitioned into a theatre company for staging plays. 

The primary aim of the Harlem-based theatre group was to create, nurture, develop, and promote budding writers, performers, actors, and directors housed in the black community.

That same year, a second play titled Her saw her win yet another second-place award in a literary contest hosted by Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life. Her received countless accolades for its skillful writing.

Her ushered in the second season of the Krigwa Players which had Spence’s two sisters, Olga and Doralene, take part in the productions. Later in 1927, another of Spence’s plays, The Hunch, came in second in yet another round of the Opportunity contests; Undertow tied for third place in a 1927 contest sponsored by The Crisis, the journal of the NAACP.

Fool’s Errand (1927) was a finalist in the International Little Tournament on behalf of the Krigwa Players; it was subsequently published by Samuel French.

In addition to these award-winning works, Spence wrote several other plays. On Being Forty is one of her best-known plays; it was staged on several occasions, including a production by the Bank Street Players and the National Ethiopian Art Theatre.

Spence had the privilege of directing two plays around this period for the Dunbar Garden Players. These were Joint Owners in Spain by Alice Brown and Before Breakfast by Eugene O’Neill.

Spence preferred to write comedies and drama and would avoid racial propaganda as much as possible. Her plays would often focus on the day-to-day domestic lives of African-Americans especially touching on typical love triangles where male characters tended to be weaker than female characters.

While her characters were typically Black, she preferred to steer clear of racial themes. What’s more, she made use of Black dialect, which often subjected her to criticism by some of her contemporaries in the Black arts community.

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A major career fallout

While Eulalie Spence was doing well as a playwright under the umbrella of Krigwa Players, she eventually experienced a career setback. Though she helped expand the visibility of this theatre group, Spence never saw eye to eye with W.E.B. Du Bois.

Du Bois insisted that theatre and other arts were for the purpose of positive propaganda, to elevate the stature of Black people. Spence felt that theatre was better leveraged as a vehicle for entertainment. She emphasized her stance in a widely read essay for Opportunity magazine. In it, she wrote: “We go to the theatre for entertainment, not to have old fires and hates rekindled.”

Since she refused to write the kind of dramas Du Bois thought she should, they came to a major fallout. In the 1927 Little Theatre Tournament, Du Bois decided to keep all the prize money to himself at the expense of paying Spence and other actors. This resulted in the disbandment of the Krigwa Players.

 

The Whipping — a controversial final play

In 1934, Eulalie Spence adapted The Whipping, a novel by Ron Flanagan. It would be her last play as well as her only three-act play, marking a significant milestone in her writing career.

The Whipping features a sensational plot that goes beyond the Black/white racial divide in a rather spectacular articulation. Spence went past the norm of that era and instead of writing about the lives of black people which most Black female writers in the Harlem Renaissance were accustomed to, she wrote about the theatrics of a white woman. It involved this character subverting the Klan.

Further fueling controversy around The Whipping, it was not only adapted from a story by a white author about a white character, Spence hired a white agent to represent her, further breaking the prevalent racial barriers at the time.

Nonetheless, despite a buildup to a striking performance, Spence suffered another setback. Her scheduled production was abruptly canceled without notice or explanation just a few days before it was to open.

As a result, a devastated Spence was forced to option her screenplay to Paramount Pictures. She did receive five thousand dollars, a significant sum at the height of the Depression, but it was never adapted to film, nor staged. And it was the only money she ever earned for her writing. Despite these setbacks, The Whipping remains a significant milestone in Spence’s writing career. 

After all the drama surrounding The Whipping, Spence withdrew from the public limelight and focused her attention on teaching at Eastern District High School. She continued to write and act for Columbia University’s Laboratory Players.

 

The Legacy of Eulalie Spence

Spence remains one of the most influential and prolific African-American female writers of the Harlem Reconnaissance era. In the eleven years of her most active writing phase, she successfully authored enduring masterpieces, from The Starter (1923) to The Whipping (1934).

In addition to her plays, Spence wrote noteworthy essays for Opportunity including “Negro Art Players in Harlem” and “A Criticism of the Negro Drama as it Relates to the Negro Dramatist and Artist” (both published in 1928).

Spence’s plays showed sensitivity to race and gender, drawing their emotional tenor from her family’s experiences as immigrants. She stood firm in writing what she called “folk plays,” which emphasized the daily lives of Black people, resisting Du Bois’s call for “race plays.” Her plays showcased strong female characters and sometimes featured love triangles. 

Spence died at the age of eighty-six in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. At the time of her death, she had been living with her niece, Patricia Hart. Her obituary described her only as a retired schoolteacher, neglecting to mention her career as a significant playwright.

More about Eulalie Spence

Major Works (plays)

The Starter (1923)On Being Forty (1924)Foreign Mail (1926)Fool’s Errand (1927)Her (1927)Hot Stuff (1927)The Hunch (1927)Undertow (1927)Episode (1928)La Divina Pastora (1929)The Whipping (1934)

More information and sources

Wikipedia Eulalie Spence Papers — New York Public Library Lost Voices in Black History Talking B(l)ack: Construction of Gender and Race in the Plays of Eulalie Spence

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China Court by Rumer Godden (1961)

At first glimpse, China Court by Rumer Godden, the prolific British author, seems fairly straightforward. But this 1961 novel is a book of subtlety and many layers. The grand house that is called China Court is almost a character in itself, developing alongside its human inhabitants. 

Though not as widely read as she was during her lifetime, Rumer Godden’s books still resonate with contemporary readers. Though there are some mixed reviews, overall, China Court ranks highly in this reader discussion on Goodreads.

Originally subtitled The Hours of a Country House, here it’s described by the publisher of the 2021 edition (Open Road Media):

“A New York Times-bestselling novel of the lives, loves, and foibles of five generations of a British family occupying a manor house in Wales.

For nearly one hundred and fifty years the Quin family has lived at China Court, their magnificent estate in the Welsh countryside. The land, gardens, and breathtaking home have been maintained, cherished, and ultimately passed along–from Eustace and Adza in the early nineteenth century to village-girl-turned-lady-of-the-manor Ripsie Quin, her children, and her granddaughter, Tracy, in the twentieth.

Brilliantly intermingling the past and the present, China Court is a sweeping family saga that weaves back and forth through time. The story begins at the end, in 1960, with the death of the indomitable Ripsie, whose dream of a life at the grand estate was realized through her marriage to the steadfast Quin brother who loved her–though he wasn’t the one she had always loved.

With thrilling literary leaps across the decades, the story of a British dynasty is told in enthralling detail. It is a chronicle of wives and husbands; of mothers, sons, and daughters; of those who could never stray far from the lush grounds of China Court and the outcasts and outsiders who would never truly belong.

Bearing comparison to One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez, Rumer Godden’s novel relates the history of a family with sensitivity, wit, compassion, and a compelling touch of magical realism. 

A family’s loves, pains, triumphs, and scandals are laid bare, forming an intricate tapestry of heart-wrenching humanity, in a remarkable work of fiction from one of the most acclaimed British novelists of the twentieth century.”

 

A 1961 review of China Court by Rumer Godden

From the original review of China Court in the Daily News Leader (Staunton, Virginia), February 26, 1961:

Whether she is writing of India, where she spent her childhood — as in The River, Black Narcissus, and Kingfishers Catch Fire; or of her native England, as in A Candle for St. Jude, An Episode of Sparrows; or of France, as in The Greengage Summer, Rumer Godden writes not only with great skill but with a strong feeling for place and an obvious affection for people.

China Court is a lovely old Cornish manor house: “It must have looked very plain, quite uncompromising, when it was first built. It is a granite house; naturally, granite is the local stone.”

As Miss Godden tells its story, this great house, built and lived in with such pride in the 19th century, has become an anachronism — inefficient, uneconomical, wholly impractical. Only old Mrs. Quin and her 21-year-old granddaughter, Tracy, love. To them it’s more than a house, it’s their home.

Other members of the family — Mrs. Quin’s daughters and their husbands, Tracy’s aunts and uncles — believe emphatically that the place should be disposed of: “It’s ridiculous, Mother, you living alone in that great house … It has no amenities … If you sold it, even as it is now, you could have a much bigger income and comfortable little flat. You would be far more free.”

To all such arguments, Mrs. Quin replies firmly, “I don’t wish to be free. Even in this generation a few people do not wish to be free of their house.”

In her beautifully worked-out story, one ranging back and forth across five generations, Miss Godden tells of China Court and of the people who have filled it with warmth and life. In the end it is the eccentricity of one generation which comes to the rescue of another, and which makes it possible to save the house for future descendants of the Quins.

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

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10 Classic Women Authors and Their Cats

In this site’s overview of classic women authors and their dogs and cats, it seems like dogs have the clear edge as writers’ preferred furry friends. But digging deeper, I’m no longer so sure of that! As it turns out, women authors and their cats are just as companionable, which this roundup will amply demonstrate.

I got to thinking about this when I heard that my friend and colleague Bob Eckstein had produced The Complete Book of Cat Names (That Your Cat Won’t Answer to, Anyway). Bob is a New Yorker cartoonist and a wonderful watercolorist. You may also enjoy this excerpt from his book, Footnotes from the World’s Greatest Bookstores.

On the subject of naming cats, Bob observes:

Online studies from respected cat blogs have shown that 80% of cat owners regret the name they gave their kitten. Number one reason? “It became too popular.” (Number two reason given was “Too stupid to say in front of company.”)

It’s hard to say how much thought our classic women authors gave to naming their cats, or whether they would have gone with some of Bob’s often hilarious suggestions (Catsy Cline, Mick Jaguar, Purradise Lost). I was unable to find out what most of the following authors named their cats, but here’s hoping they came up with something more creative than “boots” and “fluffy.”

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The Complete Book of Cat Names by Bob Eckstein
is available on Bookshop.org* and Amazon*
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Colette

French author Colette, best known for Gigi and the Claudine stories, was a noted cat lover. Her 1936 novella, La Chatte, is about a love triangle of sorts — between a woman, her husband, and the cat that he seems to favor over her. She famously wrote, “Time spent with a cat is never wasted.”

 

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Margaret Mitchell

In this photo of the young and beautiful Margaret Mitchell, (author of Gone With the Wind) it’s not clear whether this is actually her cat, but it’s one of those photos you see everywhere.

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Beverly Cleary

Anyone who has an office or studio that their cat has access to knows that he or she just can’t wait to walk all over your papers. Here’s prolific children’s book author Beverly Cleary(known for the Ramona Quimby series and many others) and her feline companion, around 1955.

 

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Barbara Pym

Barbara Pym became known for her novels about the small comforts of mid-twentieth-century Englishwomen’s daily lives (Excellent Women and many others). In her real life she apparently found comfort in a cat.

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Patricia Highsmith

Patricia Highsmith, who broke into print with the classic thriller Strangers on a Train (and later The Talented Mr. Ripley, among many others), was famously a people-hater. But she loved animals, especially cats. A biographer wrote that her relationship with cats “often counted as her longest and most successful emotional connection.”

 

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Doris Lessing

Nobel Prize-winning author Doris Lessing may have been known for the feminist classic, The Golden Notebook (and later, complex novels in the science fiction realm), but she was so enamored of her feline companions that she produced a little-known memoir, On Cats (2008).*

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L.M.  Montgomery

L.M. Montgomery, Canadian author of the beloved Anne of Green Gables series was a cat lover and a great observer of both human and cat nature. Drawn from her journals, Lucy Maud and the Cavendish Cat* tells of the constancy of her feline companion as she struggled to produce her first writings. In Anne of the Island, a character says of cats: “I love them, they are so nice and selfish. Dogs are TOO good and unselfish. They make me feel uncomfortable. But cats are gloriously human.”

 

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Elizabeth Bishop

Esteemed poet Elizabeth Bishop was a lifelong cat lover, starting with her childhood cat, Minnow. Here’s an early poem, “Lullaby for the Cat,” with the odd line, “Not a kitten shall be drowned / In the Marxist State.”

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Ursula K. Le Guin

When the brilliant fantasy writer Ursula K. Le Guin was alive, she wrote an online journal from the perspective of her black-and-white cat, Pard. Here are some of them. Le Guin expressed her love for felines in her children’s series, Catwings.

 

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Iris Murdoch

Iris Murdoch, the Irish-born British novelist and philosopher is evidently quite cozy with this cat, but details about her feline friend are hard to come by.

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

 

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“Wilder, Eve” – Else Lasker–Schüler’s Vision of Woman in Eden

Along with Nelly Sachs and Paul Celan, Else Lasker-Schüler (1869 – 1945) was one of the most important German-Jewish poets of the twentieth century. And along with August Stramm and Georg Trakl, she was one of the most important early German expressionist poets.

This look at one of her best-known works is adapted from the forthcoming Wilder, Eve, Some Early Poems of Else Lasker-Schüler, translated by Francis Booth. Reprinted by permission.

Born Elizabeth Schüler into a middle-class banking family in what is now Wuppertal, Germany in 1869, she began writing poetry very early, imagining herself as a child living in the Orient, a fantasy that persisted throughout her life.

Else Lasker-Schüler later lived a bohemian life among writers, artists, and intellectuals in Berlin, where she moved to train as an artist in 1894 with her first husband, physician, and chess master Jonathan Berthold Lasker.

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Else in her youth
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Else and Jonathan divorced in 1903 and in the same year Lasker-Schüler married the artist Georg Lewin, who founded the seminal expressionist magazine Der Sturm, which pioneered the new art movement and published all of its leading figures, including Else herself. She called her new husband Herwarth Walden, after Thoreau’s Pond.

After their divorce, Lasker-Schüler was left in poverty and without an outlet for her art and poetry. She soon formed a close friendship with Franz Marc of the Blue Rider group of painters; they exchanged illustrated postcards and letters, many of which are still extant and have been published.

In a dedication in her 1917 Collected Poems, from which all the translations in this book are taken, Lasker-Schüler says. The cover, drawn by me, I give to Franz Marc.

In 1912 she also became close, both romantically and artistically, to the expressionist poet Gottfried Benn, formerly a pathologist who dissected hundreds of bodies in 1912/1913, around the time of the publication of his first volume, Morgue and other Poems.

While in Berlin, Lasker-Schüler embraced political activism, writing, and agitating against the publishing industry and in favor of animal rights, artists’ rights, and Jewish causes. Although not explicitly a feminist, she advocated and herself always used “gender-just” grammar, anticipating by over 100 years the recent debates over “das Gendern” / gendering.

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Else in 1932
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Else lived in Berlin until 1933, when she fled Nazi persecution, despite having won the prestigious Kleist Prize in 1932, first living in Switzerland but finally settling in Jerusalem where she lived until her death in 1945.

In Israel, she lived a life of poverty and eccentricity, mocked by local children for her strange behavior and mode of dress. Lasker-Schüler formed a literary salon in Jerusalem called Kraal, which was opened by Martin Buber in 1942, but its meetings were banned since they were held in German.

This book of translations takes its title, Wilder, Eve – the comma is crucial – from the poem Die Stimme Edens / “The Voice of Eden,” where Lasker-Schüle addresses the “Wilder Eve,” or rather, where she advises Eve to be wilder, to embrace her ‘wild’ or independent self.

The German word Wilde has several implications here, all of which may be intended to portray Else’s original woman as the outsider, a role she advocates all women embracing: eine Wilde is a wild woman; wilde(r) can refer to a student who does not belong to any fraternity/sorority or to an independent official who does not belong to any party; wilderer means poacher. The word I have translated as “womb” in the third stanza (Schoß) can also mean lap or bosom.

 

Wilder, Eve

Wilder, Eve, confess to straying,
Your desire was the snake,
Its voice writhed over your lip
And bit at the hem of your cheek.

Wilder, Eve, confess to raging,
The day that you wrested from God
Since you saw the light too early
And into the blind chalice sank shame.

Colossal
Ascending out of your womb
At first like fulfilment fearfully,
Then gathering itself impetuously
Creating spontaneously
God’s soul . . .

And it wakes
Beyond the world,
Its beginnings lost,
Beyond all time,
And back to your thousand-heart,
End outstanding . . .

Sing, Eve, your anxious song alone,
Lonely, drop-heavy as your heart beats,
Loosen the dark cord of tears
That lays down on the neck of the world.

How the moonlight changes your countenance.
You are beautiful . . .
Sing, sing, hark, to the sound of carousing
Plays the night and knows nothing of events.

Everywhere the deaf roar —
Your fear rolls over the earth’s steps
Down God’s back.

There is hardly a space between him and you
Hide yourself deep in the eye of the night,
That your day may wear night-dark.

Stifle heaven, that bends itself towards stars
Eve, shepherdess, they coo
The blue doves in Eden.

Eve, turn round before the last hedge yet!
Do not cast shadows with yourself,
Bloom, seducer.

Eve, you are called eavesdropper
Oh you foam-white grape
Refugee still from the tip of your slenderest eyelash.

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Else Lasker-Schüler as her character Prince Yussuf, 1912

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 Quotes by Else Lasker-Schüler

“I was born in Thebes (Egypt), though I also came into the world in Elberfeld, in the Rhineland. I went to school until I was 11, became a Robinson, lived in the Orient for 5 years, and I have been vegetating ever since.” (Mankind’s Twilight, 1920)

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“At the age of five I wrote my best poems; my mother always found the scribbled scraps of paper that came out of my clothes pocket when I took out the favorite buttons from my button collection.” (Collected Works)

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“Whether one plays with green, purple, and blue stones or whether one writes poems, it is exactly the same. (Letters to Karl Kraus)”

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Contributed by Francis Booth,* the author of several books on twentieth-century culture:

Amongst Those Left: The British Experimental Novel 1940-1960 (published by Dalkey Archive); Everybody I Can Think of Ever: Meetings That Made the Avant-Garde; Girls in Bloom: Coming of Age in the Mid-Twentieth Century Woman’s Novel; Text Acts: Twentieth-Century Literary Eroticism; and Comrades in Art: Revolutionary Art in America 1926-1938.

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

 

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