Nava Atlas's Blog, page 25
June 19, 2022
The Sense of Wonder by Rachel Carson (1965)
The Sense of Wonder by Rachel Carson, best known for the environmental classic Silent Spring (1962) was published in 1965, a year after her death.
This widely praised book was intended to be enjoyed by children and parents together, was expanded from an essay Carson wrote in the 1950s. It’s designed to inspire families to explore and appreciate the wonders of nature together.
The book was originally embellished with black & white as well as color photographs by Charles Pratt, many of which were taken along the Maine coast, where Carson enjoyed spending summers.
Republished in 2017, the book is as fresh and relevant as it ever was — perhaps even more so, given the alarming state of the environment. The new edition features new photography by Nick Kelsh. The publisher, HarperCollins, offers this description of the new edition:
“First published a half-century ago, Rachel Carson’s award-winning The Sense of Wonder remains the classic guide to introducing children to the marvels of nature.
In 1955, acclaimed conservationist Rachel Carson began work on an essay that she would come to consider one of her life’s most important projects. Her grandnephew, Roger Christie, had visited Carson that summer at her cottage in Maine, and together they had wandered the surrounding woods and tide pools.
Teaching Roger about the natural wonders around them, Carson began to see them anew herself, and wanted to relate that same magical feeling to others who might hope to introduce a child to the beauty of nature. ‘If a child is to keep alive his inborn sense of wonder,’ writes Carson, “he needs the companionship of at least one adult who can share it, rediscovering with him the joy, excitement and mystery of the world we live in.’
The Sense of Wonder is a timeless volume that will be passed on from generation to generation, as treasured as the memory of an early-morning walk when the song of a whippoorwill was heard as if for the first time. Featuring serene color photographs from renowned photographer Nick Kelsh, this beautiful book “helps us all to tap into the extraordinary power of the natural world.”
. . . . . . . . . .
Learn more about Rachel Carson
. . . . . . . . . .
From the original review in the Alamogordo Daily News (NM), December 19, 1965: Many readers will remember Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, which caused much discussion and alarm a few years past.
Some may have read this same text in magazines, but for the parent of small children I can think of no more exciting experience than reading and examining this new book— The Sense of Wonder. The title is exceptionally apt, and the text is both stimulating and delightful.
Through these pages Rachel Carson tells how she presented the wonders of nature to a small nephew and with what almost unbelievable results. She believes that a child has this natural wonder about life and nature, but that it soon becomes calloused over and crushed back until by the time we are grown up most of us have lost this priceless gift.
A child’s world is bright and shining-new and wonderful; it is only when we disregard their enthusiasm and show indifference that they begin to lose the freshness and delight of the world around them. In helping to keep their wonder alive, we will remind ourselves of its existence.
We will regain our own “seeing eyes” and “hearing ears.” We may rediscover that the world is a marvelous place, full of exquisite sights and sounds and daily miracles all around us. From the tiniest insects to the rainbow, or the brilliant etching of the lightning against a black sky, she brings to mind all the enchantments of nature.
“If a child is to keep alive his inborn sense of wonder… he needs the companionship of at least one adult who can share it, rediscovering with him the joy, excitement and mystery of the world we live in,” says Miss Carson, and as in all other sharing, one soon finds that in helping the child to retain his own gift for discernment, we will have gained fully as much as we have given.
Some rare souls such as poets and artists never lose their appreciation for natural beauty, but for most of us, “the world is too much with us… late and soon, with getting and spending we lay waste our powers,” to quote another gifted writer.
We rush here, and dash there always in such a hurry that we miss half that transpires about us. The lively, unconscious rhythm of a bird’s flight, or its sweet and joyous call; the delicate tint of color in a sunset sky, or the sheen of sunlight on a leaf. All these things have a soothing quality for the heart of mankind, if he should take time to notice and ponder them.
As a gift for yourself, and one which you can share with many others, both young and old, take Rachel Carson’s lovely book and enjoy it. The photographer too, has given us a thing of beauty in his various mood-setting, graphic pictures of some of the beauties of nature such as dew-drops, leaves, and butterflies.
You will find in this book something of your lost childhood, and something of the great mystery of creation for which we should be thankful every day of our lives. If you enjoyed Miss Carson’s The Sea Around You. you will indeed be captivated by this one.
And when you take some small trusting hand in yours and go forth to explore together, you will thank her for reminding you that life is a wonderful experience and a that in keeping the joy of it in our hearts and lives will not only enrich ourselves, but all others with whom we come in contact.
. . . . . . . . . .
The Sense of Wonder on Bookshop* and Amazon*
. . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . .
*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!
The post The Sense of Wonder by Rachel Carson (1965) appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.
June 15, 2022
The Sea Around Us by Rachel Carson (1951)
Rachel Carson’s long-term legacy rests on her environmental classic, Silent Spring (1962), so it’s surprising to learn that a decade earlier, she had another smash bestseller. The Sea Around Us by Rachel Carson (1951) is a gracefully written, meticulously researched work of nonfiction making the case for the primacy of the oceans, a plea that has gone unheeded.
In 1948, she completed the first chapter of The Sea Around Us. Marie Rodell, a fledgling agent, took Carson on as her first client. Portions of the book were first published as a series of long articles for The New Yorker.
By July of 1951, the entire book had been published and made its appearance on The New York Times’ bestseller list, where it stayed for 86 weeks. It won the National Book Award, in January 1952.
Oxford University Press reissued the book in 2018, providing this description:
“Originally published in 1951, The Sea Around Us is one of the most influential books ever written about the natural world. Rachel Carson’s ability to combine scientific insight with poetic prose catapulted her book to the top of The New York Times best-seller list, where it remained for more than a year and a half.
Ultimately it sold well over a million copies, was translated into twenty-eight languages, inspired an Academy Award-winning documentary, and won both the National Book Award and the John Burroughs Medal.
The Sea Around Us remains as fresh today as when it first appeared over six decades ago. Carson’s genius for evoking the power and primacy of the world’s bodies of water, combining the cosmic and the intimate, remains almost unmatched: the newly formed Earth cooling beneath an endlessly overcast sky …
The seas sustain human life and imperil it. Today, with the oceans endangered by the dumping of medical waste and ecological disasters such as the Exxon oil spill in Alaska, the gradual death of the Great Barrier Reef, and the melting of the polar ice caps, Carson’s book provides a timely reminder of both the fragility and the centrality of the ocean and the life that abounds within it. Anyone who loves the sea, or who is concerned about our natural environment, will want to read, or re-read, this classic work.”
. . . . . . . . . .
Learn more about Rachel Carson
. . . . . . . . . .
The reviews for so unusual a work of nonfiction, presenting scientific fact with gorgeous language, were nearly universally laudatory. Here’s one typical review:
A 1951 review of The Sea Around Us by Rachel Carson
From the original review by E.H. Martin in the Baltimore, MD, Evening Sun, June 30, 1951: Brilliant Study of The Sea
That anyone should attempt within the covers of a book of only 216 pages to do justice to such a vast subject as the oceans of the earth in all of their aspects is remarkable enough. Even more remarkable is the fact that in The Sea Around Us, Miss Rachel Carson’s effort to accomplish this feat has resulted in not only a superb example of scientific reporting but also a work of art.
From the gray beginnings when “the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.” Miss Carson tells the cosmic story of the origins of the seas and the continents, and of the creation in the primeval waters of the first living cells. This is a drama the span of which is measured in hundreds of millions of years. It is also a drama which comes alive under Miss Carson’s talent for compression and simplification without distortion of the facts.
Throughout this book the reader finds a prodigious amount of factual information, a solid body of scientific evidence, all handled with an almost casual ease.
. . . . . . . . .
See also: Silent Spring by Rachel Carson
. . . . . . . . .
When there is disagreement among experts, when alternative hypotheses must be balanced and weighed to explain matters in the absence of definite proof, Miss Carson says so. So compelling, however, is the whole, mighty evolutionary story as she tells it that one is disposed to accept her without question as guide to the chronicle of events which took place eons before man came upon the scene.
It is not, however, with how the oceans came to be that the author is primarily concerned. Rather the main body of the book deals with the seas and their mysteries as they now exist; with their teeming life, their effects on our climate and with those forces of the sea that are only just coming to be comprehended.
As Miss Carson notes, after we have subtracted the shallow areas of the continental shelves and the scattered banks and shoals where at least the pale ghost of sunlight moves over the underlying bottom, about half the earth remains covered by miles-deep, lightless water, that has been dark since the world began.
This is the area of mystery which has withheld its secrets longer than any other. The story of what the abyssal depths are beginning to yield in the way of information as to their nature and the life they contain is one of the most fascinating the author has to tell.
With a happy combination of poetic, economical prose and sober grasp of the facts. Miss Carson deals with such diverse topics as how waves are formed, their length of “fetch” and their awesome power; the fabulous variety of life in the seas; the influence of tides and the role of the sea in the making of weather.
This last topic. treated in detail in a chapter entitled “The Global Thermostat,” throws some fresh light on the climatological phenomenon of increasing warmth in the Arctic first noted by the Swedish glaciologist Hans Ahlmann.
Miss Carson, whose first published work appeared in The Sunday Sun, taught for a few years at the Johns Hopkins University and the University of Maryland. She now holds the position of editor-in-chief of the United States Fish and Wildlife Service.
On the basis of just one chapter of her book, which appeared in the Yale Review, she won the George Westinghouse Science Writing Award for 1950. It only needs to be added that The Sea Around Us as a whole is written as admirably and fascinatingly as was that particular excerpt.
. . . . . . . . .
The Sea Around Us on Bookshop.org* and Amazon*
. . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . .
*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!
The post The Sea Around Us by Rachel Carson (1951) appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.
June 13, 2022
Silent Spring by Rachel Carson (1962): An Environmental Classic
Silent Spring (1962) is the most enduring work of nonfiction by Rachel Carson (1907–1964), the noted American marine biologist and groundbreaking environmentalist.
In this book, Carson made a passionate argument for protecting the environment from manmade pesticides. Written with grace as well as passion, it’s an indictment of the pesticide industry that arose in the late 1950s. It lays out a disturbing view of the damage these chemicals can cause to birds, bees, wildlife, and plant life.
Rachel Carson’s official website recognizes how prescient she was: “Silent Spring inspired the modern environmental movement, which began in earnest a decade later. It is recognized as the environmental text that changed the world.”
From this site’s biography of Rachel Carson:
“The public’s growing awareness of the dangers of chemicals created a natural readership for Silent Spring, serialized in The New Yorker beginning June 16, 1962, and published as a book on September 27, 1962.
Silent Spring sold more than 100,000 copies in the first week and was on the bestseller list by Christmas. By now it has sold more than two million copies and has been translated into more than twenty languages.”
. . . . . . . .
Learn more about Rachel Carson
. . . . . . . .
Carson was subject to backlash and attacks from the pesticide industry, which conspired to discredit her. A 2012 article in Yale Environment 360 titled “Fifty Years After Silent Spring, Attacks on Science Continue” observed:
“When Silent Spring was published in 1962, author Rachel Carson was subjected to vicious personal assaults that had nothing do with the science or the merits of pesticide use. Those attacks find a troubling parallel today in the campaigns against climate scientists who point to evidence of a rapidly warming world.”
Rachel Carson has been more than vindicated for her contributions to contemporary environmentalism. Newspaper reviews were generally positive, if genuinely surprised and disturbed by the case she laid out about pesticides, particularly DDT. Here is one such review from when the book was published, after it was serialized.
. . . . . . . . .
See also:
27 Quotes from Silent Spring by Rachel Carson
. . . . . . . . . .
From the original review of Silent Spring in the Calgary Herald, October 6, 1962: In Silent Spring, Rachel Carson tells a story that intelligent citizens will find both illuminating and disturbing. Imagine a spring season without bird song. Miss Carson writes:
“On the morning that had once throbbed with the dawn chorus of robins, catbirds, doves, jays, wrens and scores of other bird voices, there was now no sound; only silence lay over the fields and woods and marsh.
On the farms the hens brooded, but no chicks hatched. The farmers complained that they were unable to raise any pigs the litters were small and the young survived only a few days. The apple trees were coming into bloom but no bees droned among the blossoms, so there was no pollination and there would be no fruit.”
Such a sterile, silent world, of course, does not exist. But some day it may, Miss Carson warns, because of care less and indiscriminate use of insecticides and other chemicals. Poisons of this kind are often more effective than the users realize: if they kill insects, weeds, rodents and other pests, they may also kill other forms of life and even penetrate human germ cells to alter the structure of heredity, thereby initiating a chain of evil that is in part irreparable and irreversible.
Many of them are capable of destroying the enzymes that protect the body from harm, of blocking the oxidation process, of causing malignancies.
It is not Miss Carson’s contention that such chemicals should never be used. She argues only that their ultimate effect upon the environment must be thoroughly studied and understood.
For example, in large areas throughout the U.S. midwest and New England a certain DDT spray was used to combat Dutch elm disease. The spray seeped into the earth and was absorbed by the cutworms, which in turn were eaten by robins: The result was thousands of dead robins-and meanwhile the Dutch elm disease continued largely unchecked, because the truly effective means of curbing it seems to be scientific pruning or the destruction of diseased trees.
Similarly, in the 1950s the Canadian government attempted to protect forests from the ravages of the spruce budworm by extensive aerial spraying. Millions of salmon were killed when the spray contaminated rivers and streams, but each year budworms reappeared in great numbers.
Miss Carson makes it clear that insect pests, insect-borne diseases and such cannot be ignored, but she questions whether even carefully controlled lethal spraying with chemicals is the answer. Scientists should look rather for a biological solution of the problem she indicates.
For example, it was discovered that a Canadian shrew devours sawfly cocoons, Newfoundland was plagued with sawflies, and when these shrews were introduced to the island, the end of the sawfly problem was in sight. There is, Miss Carson believes, a whole battery of such solutions awaiting scientists patient enough to look for them. Miss Carson says:
“If the Bill of Rights contains no guarantee that a citizen shall be secure against lethal poisons distributed either by private individuals or by public officials, it is surely only because our forefathers, despite their considerable wisdom and foresight, could conceive of no such problem.”
U.S. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, in a report on Silent Spring, adds: “We need a Bill of Rights against the Twentieth Century poisoners of the human race. The book is a call for immediate action and for effective control of all merchants of poison.”
Rachel Carson is a graduate of Pennsylvania College for Women and has taken an advanced degree in zoology at Johns Hopkins University. At first associated with the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries in Washington, she was later appointed editor-in-chief for U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
Her best-known book is The Sea Around Us (1951), a tremendous popular and critical success for which she won the Gold Medal of the New York Zoological Society, the John Burroughs Medal, the Gold Medal of the Geographical Society of Philadelphia and the National Book Award.
Much of the material in Silent Spring has been drawn from about 2,000 pages of testimony submitted in connection with a suit brought by Robert Cushman Murphy and other Long Island citizens against the State of New York for “needless and highly destructive” spraying of sections of Long Island. The case finally reached the U.S. Supreme Court, which refused to hear it on technicality.
Using this material as a point of departure, Miss Carson spent some four years gathering further relevant data from scientists all over the world. Only then did she begin the formidable job of organizing her facts in a continuous and readable narrative.
The result has been called “an eloquent protest in behalf of the unity of all nature, a protest in behalf of life.”
. . . . . . . . .
Silent Spring on Bookshop.org*
Silent Spring on Amazon*
. . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . .
*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!
The post Silent Spring by Rachel Carson (1962): An Environmental Classic appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.
June 12, 2022
“Oho, What Next?” Stella Benson’s Edit of Pull Devil, Pull Baker (1933)
In the third chapter of Pull Devil, Pull Baker, “Oho, What Next? …” Stella Benson questions her role in this book: “Sometimes, I wonder whether I am editing the Count de Savine or he me. What seems to me the extreme remoteness of his point of view makes me quite giddy.”
This excerpt is from Nicola Darwood’s Afterword to Pull Devil, Pull Baker, originally published in 1933 and reissued by Boiler House Press (2022). All quotations come from the latter edition. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.
Editing Count de Toulouse Lautrec de Savine
Benson’s thoughts on being an editor are illuminating as she occasionally edits, but often reproduces verbatim, Count Nicolas de Toulouse Lautrec de Savine’s accounts of his extraordinary and often outrageous escapades, escapades which might lead a reader to question that such a man existed.
His existence is not in doubt for Benson or for “hundreds of persons all over China.” What she does wonder about, though, is his veracity as she highlights the apparent unreliable nature of the Count de Savine’s narrative:
“It would be difficult,” Benson states, “to say how many of his stories are literally true. He is a symbol — not only in our eyes but in his own, and to insist of the literal truth from a living symbol would be ungracious.”
Some of these doubts arise, perhaps, from the Count’s loquacious description of his lineage. Descended from both French and Russian aristocracy, he belongs “to one of the most distinguiched aristocratic famelys of Europe” (Benson preserves the Count’s misspellings, though she occasionally provides a clarifying footnote).
. . . . . . . . .
Stella Benson in 1931
. . . . . . . . .
He cites one ancestor whose dying words at the Battle of Fontenoy in 1745 were “on moeur mais on ne se rend pas” (which can translate as “we moan but we don’t surrender”), a fitting motto for the Count, I would argue. Benson continues to question the complete truthfulness of the Count’s stories, although acknowledging that they derive from fact:
How much of it must we believe? Surely, very catholic memories imply a catholic experience. To take an ell, one must at least have been given the first inch. Nobody could tell a good fish story without having once caught at least a stickleback. There is no smoke without fire─no hot air without a spark of flame somewhere. Something must have happened to the Count de Savine, to enable him to describe everything.
She encourages the reader to indulge in an act of “spontaneity” when reading the Count’s stories, whether we believe him or not for, as Benson states, ‘he has hit upon a manner conspicuously appropriate to the story he has to tell.”
Stella Benson and the Count are “unnatural collaborators”
Benson first met the Count on Monday, April 13, 1931, in the Matilda Hospital in Hong Kong where he supplied her with a wealth of stories written in his own inimitable style, together with a cache of photographs of women.
Following Benson’s faithful transcription, The English Review agreed to publish some of the Count’s stories, and additional material was published in Adelphia, Everyman, Fortnightly Review, Review of Reviews, Spectator, Vanity Fair and the New Yorker, bringing the stories to the attention of a wide readership in the UK and the USA.
The full collection of stories, interspersed with Benson’s pithy commentary, was published in 1933 by Macmillan & Co in London and Harper & Brothers Publishers in New York.
Benson writes in Pull Devil, Pull Baker that she and the Count are “unnatural collaborators,” but we also get a sense in the opening chapter of the compassion that the Count evokes in her.
Benson recounts how her heart was ‘wrung’ on their first meeting, when it seemed to her “that the Count now, in the bleak freedom of old age, was less and less free,” but also that she recognises that the promise of the publication of his stories has revitalised him so that he has been “reborn as a literairy men.”
. . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . .
“Stories are his currency”By the time the Count and Benson met in 1931, he was seventy-seven years of age. Penniless and reliant on charity, his tales were, for him, invaluable: “Stories,” Benson tells us “are his currency” as he exchanges a tale for ten dollars, feeling quite aggrieved if he is offered a mere five dollars for his tale.
Those stories though are told with verve, and excitement, with the Count always portraying himself as the hero or the hour, as the “great admirer of ladies” or as a feminist. This last self-identification is predicated on the high regard in which he holds mothers who:
… give to us our birth and put us on our fiets, and before it, form us in their suffering, the blood of their blood, the boneses of their women’s bones—maternity, who take their beauty, their helth, and some times their lifes. That brogth me to my great appressiation of womens, make me an ardent and confessed feminist. More, will I say, brogth me to the Culte of Womens . . .
His stories veer from ones in which he extols the virtues of his numerous “sweathearts,” and swashbuckling stories which would seem almost unbelievable but while the Count’s stories, fantastical and written with flair and panache, are enjoyable tales, arguably what is of more interest are the ways in which Benson has both edited these stories and added her own commentary.
She often interrupts the Count’s version of events with witty asides, discussions of editing practices, the addition of a remark meant to clarify points made by the Count, an extra story which acts as a counterpoint to the Count’s story, or a tangential discussion, for example about the title of the book.
Benson provides an account of editing decisions
At various points in Pull Devil, Pull Baker, Benson provides an account of her editing decisions and her own relationship with the Count’s stories. In chapter twelve, “Analysis by the Devil of the Baker’s Wares,” she considers the stories that she’s accepted and those which she has refused. Benson also discusses her decision to refuse “to have the shortcomings of grammar, spelling and vocabulary improved away.”
This decision is not taken so that she can hold the Count up to ridicule (after all, the Count is not a native English speaker) nor on account of “their ‘quaintness’ and occasional amusement,” but rather because she believes that the Count’s style “has great individuality and ingenuity.”
The penultimate chapter contains the Count’s story of “The Bygame Lizaro, the Blue Barth of Our Days, Mitting in a Prisoner Train, by my Transport from the Steps of the Bulgarian Thron to Tsar’s Jail at Petrograd in a Jail Carr.”
It is a continuation of the story of the Count’s claim, enthronement and removal from the position of the Czar of Bulgaria told earlier in Pull Devil, Pull Baker, and Benson wonders whether it is “our autobiographer’s truly true story, in disguise,” with every other story being merely “wish-fulfillment […] a romance.”
. . . . . . . . .
Pull Devil, Pull Baker is available on Amazon U.S.*, Amazon UK,*
directly from Boiler House Press, and wherever books are sold
. . . . . . . . .
What, Benson wonders, counts as truth? Is it the stories that the Count tells? Is it the editor’s narrative, interruptions and retellings?
She also considers the reader’s need for stories, for romance in a world that has seen the ‘war to end all wars’ in which lives were destroyed or ruined, where people “have adjusted themselves to the feeling of a world crumbling beneath them” and who find themselves “wary of surprises, through living all our lives in such a quait and quait unexpected world.”
But in contrast, as Benson states, the Count was born into a well-regulated world; his excitement comes in defying that world, in ‘tumbling in and out of grooves at right angles.’
In chapter fifteen, “A Draw is Declared: Baker and Devil Shake Hands,” Benson writes very effectively, and compassionately, about the “tug-of-war” between Baker (the count) and Devil (the editor). Here, as Benson concludes:
are the adventures of an adventurer who made his own destinations in a world that was not round—and believed in the destinations, even after he had walked past them. Here are the memories of an old man who has never grown old enough to be ashamed of his youth—who has never been ashamed of Romance, or of anything else in capital letters—of Experience—of Danger—of Reform—of Manhood—of Womanhood—of the Soul—of Love—of Life . . .
Leaping from frying pans to fires
As Benson says of the Count: “The world for him was really nothing but a series of frying-pans and fires, and his whole career a mere leaping from one to the other.”
In Pull Devil, Pull Baker, the reader is given a ringside seat; we can watch the Count jump from the frying pan into the fire and marvel at his escapades. We are fortunate indeed that we can sit on the sidelines, reading Benson’s commentary and the Count’s stories, stories that are “expressed with dash and [which] must be read with dash.”
But while we may read “with dash,” we can also appreciate Benson’s skill in bringing the Count’s colourful stories to our attention, a collection of “fragmentary, odd and spicy words […] sugared with brittle romance.”
Pull Devil, Pull Baker is no mere sugared confection, nor, as Benson believed, a “stunt — because it is not written by a writer,” but rather an extraordinary text which demonstrates Benson’s wit and generosity, but also her ability to experiment with form and genre.
Contributed by Nicola Darwood, a senior lecturer in English Literature at the University of Bedfordshire, UK. Her research focuses mainly on twentieth-century women writers; she has published work on Elizabeth Bowen, including A World of Lost Innocence: the fiction of Elizabeth Bowen (2012), and Stella Benson.
She is the co-editor of Interwar Women’s Fiction: ‘Have Women a sense of Humour?’ (2020) and Fiction and ‘The Woman Question from 1850 to 1930 (2020) and Retelling Cinderella: Cultural and Creative Transformations (2020) and is co-chair of the Elizabeth Bowen Society and co-editor of The Elizabeth Bowen Review.
. . . . . . . . .
*These are Amazon Affiliate links. If a product is purchased by linking through, Literary Ladies Guide receives a modest commission, which helps maintain our site and helps it to continue growing!
The post “Oho, What Next?” Stella Benson’s Edit of Pull Devil, Pull Baker (1933) appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.
June 10, 2022
Love, Resistance, & Hope: 25 quotes by bell hooks
The selection of quotes by bell hooks presented here are arranged by her favored themes of a new vision of love; the intersection of race, patriarchy, feminism, and capitalism, demonstrate how these elements determine lives and the hope that comes with resistance.
When the extraordinarily prolific and brilliant writer bell hooks passed away in December 2021, she left behind a tremendous gift for her countless readers: a legacy of thirty adult non-fiction works that will satisfy every reader of this deep thinker and cultural commentator.
While researching the life of bell hooks, I discovered the wisdom in her work that provides the potential to change every reader’s life and perspective.
Love in its many forms“The wounded heart learns self-love by first overcoming low self-esteem.” (All About Love: New Visions, 1999)
. . . . . . . . . .
“All too often women believe it is a sign of commitment, an expression of love, to endure unkindness or cruelty, to forgive and forget. In actuality, when we love rightly we know that the healthy, loving response to cruelty and abuse is putting ourselves out of harm’s way.” (All About Love: New Visions, 1999)
. . . . . . . . . .
“But many of us seek community solely to escape the fear of being alone. Knowing how to be solitary is central to the art of loving. When we can be alone, we can be with others without using them as a means of escape.” (All About Love: New Visions, 1999)
. . . . . . . . . .
“The word ‘love’ is most often defined as a noun, yet all the more astute theorists of love acknowledge that we would all love better if we used it as a verb.” (All About Love: New Visions, 1999)
. . . . . . . . . .
“Time and time again when I talk to individuals about approaching love with will and intentionality, I hear the fear expressed that this will bring an end to romance. This is simply not so. Approaching romanic love from foundation of care, knowledge, and respect actually intensifies romance.” (All About Love: New Visions, 1999)
. . . . . . . . . .
“When we understand love as the will to nurture our own and another’s spiritual growth, it becomes clear that we cannot claim to love if we are hurtful and abusive. Love and abuse cannot coexist. Abuse and neglect are, by definition, the opposite of nurturance and care.” (All About Love: New Visions, 1999)
. . . . . . . . . .
“Reviewing the literature on love I noticed how few writers, male or female, talk about the impact of patriarchy, the way in which male domination of women and children stands in the ways of love.” (All About Love: New Visions, 1999)
. . . . . . . . . .
“The one person who will never leave us, whom we will never lose, is ourself. Learning to love our female selves is where our search for love must begin.” (Communion: The Search for Female Love, 2002)
. . . . . . . . . .
“Love is a combination of care, commitment, knowledge, responsibility, respect and trust.” -(Communion: The Female Search for Love, 2002)
. . . . . . . . . .
Learn more about bell hooks
Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
. . . . . . . . . .
“The soul of our politics is the commitment to ending domination.” (Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics, 2000)
. . . . . . . . . .
“Once upon a time black male ‘cool’ was defined by the ways in which black men confronted hardships of life without allowing their spirits to be ravaged. They took the pain of it and used it alchemically to turn the pain into gold. That burning process required high heat. Black male cool was defined by the ability to withstand the heat and remain centered.” (We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity, 2003)
. . . . . . . . . .
“…The struggle to end sexist oppression that focuses on destroying the cultural basis for such domination strengthens other liberation struggles. Individuals who fight for the eradication of sexism with struggles to end racism or classism undermine their own efforts. Individuals who fight for the eradication of racism or classism while supporting sexist oppression are helping to maintain the cultural basis of all forms of group oppression.” (Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center, 2014)
. . . . . . . . . .
“Any black person who clings to the misguided notion that white people represent the embodiment of all that is evil and black people all that is good remains wedded to the very logic of Western metaphysical dualism that is the heart of racist binary thinking. Such thinking is not liberatory. Like the racist educational ideology it mirrors and imitates, it invites a closing of the mind.” (Rock My Soul: Black People and Self-Esteem, 2003)
. . . . . . . . . .
“No black woman writer in this culture can write ‘too much.’ Indeed, no woman writer can write ‘too much’… No woman has ever written enough.” (Remembered Rapture: the Writer at Work, 1999)
. . . . . . . . . .
“Why is it so difficult for many white folks to understand that racism is oppressive not because white folks have prejudicial feelings about blacks (they could have such feelings and leave us alone) but because it is a system that promotes domination and subjugation? (Killing Rage: Ending Racism, 1995)
. . . . . . . . . .
“All of our silences in the face of racist assault are acts of complicity.” (Killing Rage: Ending Racism, 1995)
. . . . . . . . . .
bell hooks page on Bookshop.org* and Amazon*
. . . . . . . . . .
“The process begins with the individual woman’s acceptance that American women, without exception, are socialized to be racist, classist and sexist, in varying degrees, and that labeling ourselves feminists does not change the fact that we must consciously work to rid ourselves of the legacy of negative socialization.” (Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism, 1981)
. . . . . . . . . .
“It is obvious that many women have appropriated feminism to serve their own ends, especially those white women who have been at the forefront of the movement; but rather than resigning myself to this appropriation I choose to re-appropriate the term ‘feminism’, to focus on the fact that to be ‘feminist’ in any authentic sense of the term is to want for all people, female and male, liberation from sexist role patterns, domination, and oppression.” (Ain’t I A Woman: Black Women and Feminism, 1981)
. . . . . . . . . .
“The moment we choose to love we begin to move against domination, against oppression. The moment we choose to love we begin to move towards freedom, to act in ways that liberate ourselves and others.” (Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations, 2012)
. . . . . . . . . .
“We can’t combat white supremacy unless we can teach people to love justice. You have to love justice more than your allegiance to your race, sexuality and gender. It is about justice.” (Interview with Jet magazine, 2013)
. . . . . . . . . .
“The first act of violence that patriarchy demands of males is not violence toward women. Instead patriarchy demands of all males that they engage in acts of psychic self-mutilation, that they kill off the emotional parts of themselves. If an individual is not successful in emotionally crippling himself, he can count of patriarchal men to enact rituals of power that will assault his self-esteem.” (The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love, 2004)
. . . . . . . . . .
“The function of art is to do more than tell it like it is — it’s to imagine what is possible.” (Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations, 2012)
. . . . . . . . . .
“Dominator culture has tried to keep us all afraid, to make us choose safety instead of risk, sameness instead of diversity. Moving through that fear, finding out what connects us, reveling in our differences; this is the process that brings us closer, that gives us a world of shared values, of meaningful community.” (Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope, 2003)
. . . . . . . . . .
“To build community requires vigilant awareness of the work we must continually do to undermine all the socialization that leads us to behave in ways that perpetuate domination.” (Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope, 2002)
. . . . . . . . . .
Contributed by Nancy Snyder, who writes about women writers and labor women. After working for the City and County of San Francisco for thirty years, she is now learning everything about Henry David Thoreau in Los Angeles.
. . . . . . . . . .
*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!
The post Love, Resistance, & Hope: 25 quotes by bell hooks appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.
June 8, 2022
Mansfield Park by Jane Austen (1814) — Plot summary and analysis
Jane Austen by Sarah Fanny Malden (1889) offers a 19th-century view of Jane Austen’s works. The following analysis and plot summary of Mansfield Park by Jane Austen (1814) focuses on her third published novel, and the one considered most controversial.
Mansfield Park is the story of Fanny Price, sent by her impoverished family to be raised in the household of a wealthy aunt and uncle. The story follows her into adulthood and is a commentary on class, family ties, marriage, and the status of women.
The novel went through two editions before Jane Austen’s death (1817) but didn’t receive any public reviews until 1821. Critical reception for this novel, from that time forward, has been the most mixed among Austen’s works.
In an introduction to a contemporary edition, Kathryn Sutherland portrays Mansfield Park as a darker work than Austen’s other novels, because it challenges “the very values (of tradition, stability, retirement, and faithfulness) it appears to endorse.”
The 1889 publication of Malden’s Jane Austen was part of an Eminent Women series published by W.H. Allen & Co., London. The following excerpt is in the public domain:
. . . . . . . . .
Learn more about Jane Austen
. . . . . . . . .
When Pride and Prejudice came out in 1813, it completed the series of Jane Austen’s earlier writings, excepting only Northanger Abbey, which was not then in her hands for publication.
The two novels that had already appeared were finished before she was four-and-twenty; those that followed were not begun till she was well over thirty, and I think that, even without the authority of dates, no one could doubt that Mansfield Park, Emma, and Persuasion belong to a later stage of authorship than Sense and Sensibility or Pride and Prejudice.
They are no less brilliant, but they are more mature; the motives and actions of the dramatic personæ are more complex; there is less rapidity in the working out (rapidity is usually a sure sign of youth), and the satire is a little softened.
The feelings expressed, too, are more womanly and less girlish. In both the earlier novels, the predominant passion is the love of the sisters for each other; the lovemaking is gracefully worked out and properly adjusted, but on the lady’s side it is left very much to our imagination, and it is scrupulously kept under till the gentleman has revealed his devotion.
Mansfield Park: Its residents and relatives
Mansfield Park is the ancestral home of the Bertram family, and Sir Thomas Bertram is the worthy, aristocratic, and high-bred, albeit somewhat pompous and formal, owner of the property, which is a very good one. He has two sons, Tom and Edmund, and two daughters, Maria and Julia.
Lady Bertram is “a woman of very tranquil feelings, and a temper remarkably easy and indolent.” She has two married sisters, Mrs. Norris and Mrs. Price. Mrs. Norris has married a clergyman, to whom Sir Thomas has given the family living of Mansfield, and, as she has a decided “spirit of activity,” no children, and nothing particular to do, she finds ample occupation in presiding over other people’s affairs, especially in the Bertram family.
Mrs. Price’s marriage has been unfortunate; she “married, in the common phrase, to disoblige her family, and, by fixing on a lieutenant of marines without education, fortune, or connections, did it very thoroughly.”
A breach takes place between her and her sisters in consequence; her home is many miles distant from theirs, and no communication is kept up, until, after struggling on for eleven years in poverty and difficulty, with a fast-increasing family, and an unemployed husband, she is compelled to apply to her sisters for help.
It is easy to guess after this what Mrs. Norris’s share of the undertaking will amount to, but Sir Thomas has not yet learned to see through his sister-in-law, and the arrangement is carried out as she has planned it, and in the full belief that she will take her fair share in it.
Fanny Price comes to live at Mansfield Park
Fanny Price is accordingly sent for; and Miss Austen has painted nothing more true than the sufferings of a sensitive, timid child suddenly removed from the home, and plunged into a thoroughly uncongenial atmosphere.
No one is unkind to her, but no one understands or shares her feelings; she has no companion among her cousins, and the elders, seeing her quiet and obedient, have no idea of all that she silently suffers.
Tom and Edmund Bertram, at sixteen and seventeen, are quite out of their little cousin’s reach, and Maria and Julia Bertram, having always been well taught, and accustomed to thinking much of their own attainments, are full of contempt for a cousin only two years younger than themselves, but far less well-informed.
Finding a friend in Edmund Bertram
Edmund Bertram is the only one in his family in whom Fanny finds a kind friend. He has all his father’s sterling qualities, with much more gentleness and tenderness than Sir Thomas ever shows, and, having surprised Fanny in tears one day, he finds out by degrees how readily she responds to any kindness, and how easily she can be made happy by it.
He devotes his leisure time to comforting her under the painful sense of her own deficiencies and bringing her forward as much as possible, for he has discovered that she is very timid and retiring, but has plenty of ability, and is far more intellectual in her tastes than his accomplished sisters.
He interests himself in her pursuits, devises little pleasures for her, directs her taste in readings, and as a reward for the affection and care he bestows upon her through the next five or six years, he makes her by degrees a very lovable and charming companion — far more like a sister to him than the highly accomplished Maria or Julia ever can be.
Edmund Bertram himself is an excellent specimen of a cultivated, thoughtful, right-minded young Englishman, not brilliant, but with plenty of sense, thoroughly good, and trustworthy.
Jane Austen once said of him that he was very far from being what she knew an English gentleman often was; but it is difficult for us to take this view of him, and, indeed, the only weak point in him is his clerical position, which, we must remember, was looked upon very different then from now.
. . . . . . . . .
Jane Austen Postage Stamps
. . . . . . . . .
When Fanny is fifteen, Mr. Norris dies; and Sir Thomas naturally supposes that Mrs. Norris will now take the opportunity of installing Fanny in her home.
Fanny is therefore left at Mansfield Park, much to her own thankfulness, as well as Mrs. Norris’s; and her position there as a constant companion to her aunt becomes well defined. Lady Bertram cannot do without someone at hand to help and advise her continually.
The Miss Bertrams do not care for the society of their mother, who has never interested herself in any of their pursuits; and, therefore, while they enter into all the society of the county under Mrs. Norris’s chaperonage, Fanny spends her hours quietly at home, delighted to be unnoticed and of use.
Just as his children are all grown up, Sir Thomas Bertram is obliged to go to the West Indies to see about some of his property there; a voyage which, of course, entails an absence of several months, and he is sincerely grieved at having to go, but, unfortunately, his absence is rather a relief than otherwise to his children.
With all his warm affection for them, he has never been able to win any of their hearts, except, perhaps, Edmund’s. The others feel real relief at his departure, all the more as some new acquaintances have lately appeared, with whom they can now be on terms of unrestrained intimacy.
Enter Henry and Mary Crawford
Henry and Mary Crawford are excellent pictures of the brilliant, worldly, amusing, clever young people, who are such well-known features of London society, but to the Bertrams, they are a novelty; and, as Mary Crawford has twenty thousand pounds, and is quite ready to be fallen in love with by Sir Thomas’s eldest son.
Julia Bertram is equally ready to make a conquest of Henry Crawford, matters seem likely to go on very comfortably. Unluckily everything does not quite fit in as it should. Maria Bertram, the eldest daughter, is already engaged to Mr. Rushworth — wealthy, well-born, and very dull, for whom she does not care in the least.
Maria, as she is the most handsome of the two sisters, it amuses Henry Crawford to carry on a flirtation with both, so that neither can say which is preferred; and Mr. Rushworth is kept in a continual state of irritation, while nothing is said or done that could give tangible grounds for jealousy.
Meanwhile, Tom Bertram, who is a mere man of pleasure, does not seem especially bewitched by Mary Crawford, and she, on her side, is unaccountably attracted by Edmund Bertram.
Mary has done her best to get rid of whatever heart she had to start with, but she has not wholly succeeded, and now, in spite of his being a younger son, and destined for Holy Orders, and of his not being nearly so polished or complimentary as the men she is accustomed to, his straightforwardness, high principle, and simple admiration for her fascinate the hardened coquette, and she is on the verge of caring for him as much as she is capable of caring for anyone.
The attraction is quite as great on Edmund’s side, and this is less wonderful, as Mary Crawford is beautiful, clever, and amusing; his taste cannot always approve of her, but he sets down much that pains him to the account of the society in which she has lived, and the sincere affection between her and her brother makes him believe her capable of real feeling.
Feelings begin to grow for Edmund
Edmund makes Fanny his confidante in this—as in everything else—and talks to her constantly about the Crawfords; while Fanny, at first agreeing entirely in his estimate of them, by degrees begins to differ from him, and slowly wakes up to the pain of not yet of suspecting her own feelings for Edmund, but of seeing that she is no longer his first object, and of being unable to agree in his estimate of the Crawfords.
She sees more heartlessness in Miss Crawford than Edmund suspects; she perceives more or less of the double game which Edmund is too honorable to dream of, but which Mr. Crawford is playing between the Bertram sisters, and, with increased sufferings, she begins to fear that Edmund’s hitherto high unswerving standard of right and wrong, is becoming lowered by his admiration for Mary Crawford.
It is not the least wonderful that he should be fascinated, for there is an amount of good feeling at times in Mary Crawford that is irresistibly attractive.
It has been said that Miss Austen has always more affection for her female characters than her male ones, and I think this is true of the Crawfords; both are worldly, selfish, and untrustworthy, but Henry Crawford has no redeeming points, except his affection for his sister, while we are allowed to feel that Mary has more depth of feeling and that, if earlier in life she had fallen into better hands, she might have been a good and noble woman.
Private theatricals to while away the time
Edmund, indeed, believes that she might still become so; Fanny’s clearer sight sees that the attempt would be hopeless. The complications thicken when some private theatricals are started at Mansfield Park, ostensibly to while away the time till Sir Thomas returns, but really to amuse Tom Bertram and his friends. The description of them from first to last is excellent but too long to quote at length, though the opening difficulties will appeal to all who have ever belonged to an amateur theatrical company.
A play is, however, found at last, and matters would go smoothly, but that the opportunities for lovemaking in the rehearsals are so many, Henry Crawford and Maria Bertram are so unguarded, and Mr. Rushworth and Julia Bertram both so jealous from their different standpoints, that Fanny, who sees it all, is much grieved.
The play, Lover’s Vows, is in itself objectionable for such a party as theirs, but everyone seems blind to this; and only Fanny, and, perhaps, Mr. Rushworth, of all the Mansfield Park party, is rejoiced when Sir Thomas’s unexpected return puts a stop to the theatricals and makes Tom Bertram and his friends seek amusement elsewhere.
Preparations for Maria’s wedding in question
Henry Crawford, having amused himself sufficiently with the Bertram sisters, departs also on some visits; and preparations go on for Maria’s wedding, though Sir Thomas, who has not met Mr. Rushworth before, is much disappointed in him. He had expected a very different son-in-law, and, beginning to feel grave on Maria’s account, tried to understand her feelings.
Little observation was necessary to tell him that indifference was the most favorable state they could be in. Her behavior to Mr. Rushworth was careless and cold. She could not—did not like him. Sir Thomas resolved to speak seriously to her. Mr. Rushworth had, perhaps, been accepted on too short an acquaintance, and, on knowing him better, she was repenting.
With solemn kindness Sir Thomas addressed her; told her hid fears, inquired into her wishes, entreated her to be open and sincere, and assured her that every inconvenience should be braved, and the connection entirely given up if she felt herself unhappy in the prospect of it; he would act for her and release her.
An unwanted suitor for Fanny
With the departure of Maria, and Julia, who accompanies her sister, Fanny becomes more than ever the daughter of the house, and, is treated with real kindness by everyone but Mrs. Norris, who never can bear to see her established there as an equal. She is very happy in her present life, and when her favorite brother, William, returns from sea, and is invited to stay at the Park, her happiness would be absolutely perfect, but for two circumstances.
One is the terms of increasing attachment on which Edmund and Miss Crawford stand; the other is that Mr. Crawford, having returned to the Grants for a fortnight’s visit, has, to everyone’s amazement, his own included, remained on there as Fanny’s declared suitor; he is, in fact, caught in his own trap.
To while away dull hours in the country, he had begun what he merely intended as a flirtation with her, but, quite unintentionally, his heartless sport has turned into earnest, and he is now seriously bent upon marrying her.
Neither he nor his sister has any doubt of his success, and when, through private influence, he procures William Price’s promotion, he feels sure enough of his ground to venture on a proposal which fills Fanny with horror and dismay.
Her refusal, though decided, is useless. He applies to Sir Thomas, who, knowing only that he is well-born, rich, clever, and very much in love, warmly takes his side, and a long siege sets in, in which the lover has everyone’s influence exerted on him, and Fanny stands alone in her determined rejection.
Edmund, Miss Crawford, and Sir Thomas, all believe that her refusal is merely from timidity; they are not conscious of the objections to his character, and Fanny keeps her secret so well, though with difficulty, that no one suspects her of having already given her heart elsewhere.
Crawford’s pursuit is resolute; he even follows her to Portsmouth, where she has gone for a visit to her own family and puts up with vulgarity and discomfort there for the sake of showing her how much he is in earnest; but after that, he is obliged to go to London for a time, and his visit there affects Fanny’s deliverance from a most unwelcome suitor.
. . . . . . . . .
Quotes from Mansfield Park
. . . . . . . . .
It is easy to see from what has been already quoted that any connection between Maria Rushworth and Henry Crawford would be very dangerous for both, and it is almost impossible for them not to come across each other in London society.
When they first meet, Mrs. Rushworth treats her former admirer with repellent coldness, and this instantly wakens his vanity. He determines to soften her into greater kindness, and succeeds only too well, for he has never had any idea how strong her feeling for him had been; and when once it is roused again, she is quite incapable of controlling it.
Matters are so evident, that an old friend writes to warn Sir Thomas, who sets off at once for London, but arrives too late; Maria has already left her husband’s house with Mr. Crawford, and Julia puts the climax to her father’s distress by eloping at the same time with an acquaintance of Tom Bertram, Mr. Yates who figured so conspicuously in the theatricals.
The first impulse of the whole Bertram family is to turn to Fanny, who is still at Portsmouth, for comfort and sympathy; and she hurries back to Mansfield Park to help and support them through all the days of misery that follow, while Sir Thomas and Edmund are vainly endeavoring to trace and bring back Maria.
Tom Bertram is dangerously ill, and there is much anxiety for him; but, deeply as Fanny feels for the whole family, her thoughts turn most constantly to Edmund, with an intense longing to know how all this will affect his prospects with Mary Crawford.
Sir Thomas is equally anxious on his younger son’s account, with the difference that he, seeing Edmund’s attachment, and knowing of no objections to Miss Crawford herself, is earnestly desirous for Edmund’s success. Fanny’s feelings are more mixed.
Convoluted relationships and conflicts
The relations between Edmund Bertram and Mary Crawford are among the best passages in Mansfield Park, but they are given by such a multiplicity of fine touches that no extracts could do them justice. On her side, there is as much attachment as worldliness and vanity have left her capacity for, held in check by a resolution never to become a clergyman’s wife, but tempered by a secret conviction that her influence can prevent him from taking orders.
This state of feeling produces a cat-and-mouse kind of conduct, to which Edmund submits; first, because he is in love; secondly, because he cannot understand that the sentiments she sometimes expresses are really earnest; and, finally, because he hopes in the power of her better nature to conquer the hardness and levity which he believes are only skin deep.
Miss Crawford, who is in London at the time of the elopement, has lately seemed far more encouraging than before and asks him now to call upon her. He goes, his thoughts divided between his own hopes and his sympathy for what she must be feeling about her brother; and when he returns to Mansfield Park after the interview, Fanny hears it all.
She had met him, he said, with a serious—certainly a serious—even an agitated air; but, before he had been able to speak one intelligible sentence, she had introduced the subject in a manner which he owned had shocked him.
The answer that Edmund makes to all this may be imagined but cannot be given at length; suffice it that his eyes are at length opened, and he bids Mary Crawford farewell in a harangue, which is, perhaps, a shade too sententious, but so genuine in its pain and disgust that all intercourse between the Bertram and Crawford families is ended forever.
A heartbroken Henry return to Mansfield Park
He returns to Mansfield Park to recover slowly from the wound he has received, with the help of Fanny’s affectionate sympathy; nor is he wholly unavenged, for though Mary Crawford laughed at his “sermon,” her heart had been touched by his devotion.
Henry Crawford will not marry Maria Rushworth; and, as Sir Thomas refuses to let her live again at Mansfield Park, Mrs. Norris, to everyone’s extreme relief, departs to make a home for Maria elsewhere, which is as unhappy as might be expected.
In every other respect, matters by degree brighten for the Bertrams. Julia’s marriage turns out better than it had any right to do; Tom Bertram recovers and reforms, and Edmund’s marriage to Fanny, some years later, completes everyone’s happiness.
A summation of Mansfield Park
Mansfield Park is lengthy, but this can hardly be considered a blemish, as it was the deliberate intention of the author, and, after all, it is “readable from cover to cover.” The only part that could appear to anyone unnecessary is Fanny’s visit to her relations at Portsmouth, and no one would wish to lose so good a picture of the home mismanaged by the incapable wife and mother.
Henry Crawford’s lovemaking to Fanny is longer than I suspect that gentleman would ever have endured, but it is necessary to allow time for the renewal of his intimacy with Mrs. Rushworth, and it may be intended as a marked proof of Fanny’s power over him that he submits to so long suspense.
From first to last Fanny Price is charming, and, seeing how admirably her character is worked out, Mansfield Park cannot be considered too long for art, as it certainly is not too long for enjoyment.
More about Mansfield Park by Jane Austen Reader discussion on Goodreads Mansfield Park on Austenprose Audio version on LibrivoxThe post Mansfield Park by Jane Austen (1814) — Plot summary and analysis appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.
June 7, 2022
South Riding by Winifred Holtby (1936)
South Riding was the last published novel of Winifred Holtby (1898 – 1935), released the year after her untimely death at the age of thirty-six. It remains her best-known work and has been adapted several times for various media.
Winifred Holtby was an accomplished British author, journalist, and activist. According to this site’s biography of Holtby:
She also had a successful career in journalism and wrote the first critical study of Virginia Woolf in English. During her lifetime, her fame derived from her work for prominent newspapers and magazines, including the feminist publication Time and Tide. She wrote about democracy and social welfare, feminism and pacifism, education and responsibility, racism and injustice.
South Riding’s publication was completed with Vera Brittain’s intervention (her dear lifelong friend), overriding the concerns of Alice Holtby, Winifred’s mother. It has never been out of print and sold 40,000 copies in the first year in the UK and 20,000 copies in the US. It was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1937 and, over time, has enjoyed a resurgence of popularity with a film, radio dramatizations, and the 2011 BBC series.
South Riding is set in a fictional area of Yorkshire. The main characters are Sarah Burton, a young headmistress, Joe Astell, a poverty-fighting socialist, Robert Carne, a conservative who is tormented by a disastrous marriage, and Mrs. Beddows, the first woman alderman of the district. The latter was surely inspired by Holtby’s mother, Alice, who held the same post in her real-life area of Yorkshire.
A brief plot summary
From the Audible audiobook description:
“Winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, Winifred Holtby’s greatest novel was published posthumously Winifred Holtby’s masterpiece is a rich evocation of the lives and relationships of the characters of South Riding. Sarah Burton, the fiery young headmistress of the local girls’ school; Mrs Beddows, the district’s first alderwoman–based on Holtby’s own mother; and Robert Carne, the conservative gentleman-farmer locked in a disastrous marriage — with whom the radical Sarah Burton falls in love. Showing how public decisions can mold the individual, this story offers a panoramic and unforgettable view of Yorkshire life.”
The book enjoyed much positive attention from the time it was published, becoming a true modern class for its complexity, readability, attention to the details of everyday life, and observations of human nature.
A 1936 Review of South Riding
From the original review by L.P Hartley in The Observer (London, March 1, 1936: “Miss Winifred Holtby’s Last Novel”
The title of Miss Holtby’s latest and, unhappily, her last novel suggests à fabulous setting, but as a matter of fact, there is nothing other-worldly in South Riding.
Even without the help of the map on the jacket we could identify the estuary of the River Leame and recognize the great city of Kingsport on its northern shore.
And perhaps those familiar with the district will be able to find counterparts for Flintonbridge and Kiplington and Cold Harbour Colony — that stretch of Dutch landscape reclaimed from the marshes of the Leame by an eighteenth-century philanthropist.
A view of society in Southeast Yorkshire
Miss Holtby has used her imagination not to create a world but to bring vividly before our eyes a world already in being. South Riding shows, in panorama and also in cross-section, a comprehensive view of society in Southeast Yorkshire, and among the hundred-and-sixty-nine characters are to be found a kitten, Kate Theresa, who plays a small part in the story, and a horse, Black Hussar, who plays a large one.
There is a common force which affects the lives of all these people if it does not actually bring them together: the County Council.
The book is divided into eight parts: Education, Highways and Bridges, Agriculture and Small Holdings, Public Health, Public Assistance, Mental Deficiency, Finance, Housing, and Town Planning: and each is prefaced by an extract from the agenda or minutes of the Council meetings.
It is, therefore, as collectivist in conception as a novel can be: “We are all members one of another” might be its motto. But Yorkshire people, whatever their political convictions, are in the main individualists at heart. Miss Holtby was well aware of this.
The Council issues its decrees and the electors obey, but not like automata. Each has his or her private interpretation of the public will, his or her personal reactions.
Miss Sarah Barton
In the case of Miss Sarah Barton, the Council’s action changed the entire shape and color of a life. But for her appointment to the headmistress-ship Kiplington High School for Girls she would never have met Robert Carne or fallen in love with him.
She would have remained what she was, conscientious, energetic, efficient, compassionate, with a justifiable confidence in herself and her powers. She would have continued to make war on muddle and ignorance; but without the experience of that supreme defeat and humiliation (a little softened by Mrs. Beddows’ nearly forgotten message) she would have been incomplete, with no knowledge of suffering save at second-hand.
Carne himself, sporting farmer, and local squire, would have been much the same kind of man had there been no Council whose progressive ideas he could obstruct. In the hunting: season he often failed to attend its meetings, and when he was turned out he did not greatly repine.
Half of his heart was with his wife in the private. asylum in Harrogate; the other half he divided between Maythorpe, his horses, and his daughter (if she was his daughter), Midge. (Midge’s education was a source of sore trouble to Miss Barton).
Carne had no social conscience beyond the desire to maintain the station his family had kept for five hundred years. Miss Barton was drawn to him by the attraction of opposites; in him she admired just those qualities of which, theoretically, she most disapproved.
. . . . . . . . .
South Riding on Bookshop.org* and Amazon*
. . . . . . . . .
Every kind of human being
A score of other themes, each with its own individuality, are woven into the amazingly rich and complex pattern of South Riding. Some deal with people too near the poverty line to be able to indulge psychological eccentricities, some (e.g., the curious case of Alderman Snaith, who found relief from certain obsessions in lending Mr. Huggins money to manage his amours) are much less straightforward.
We meet every kind of human being from Mrs. Beddows, sane, sensible and hearty (but for one weakness), to Mrs. Carne, a helpless, hopeless lunatic.
And there are nearly as many moods. It is indeed a far cry from the songs and jokes perpetrated by Mrs. Hubbard’s “Jazz Octette” (“Take your feet off the table, Father, and give the cheese a chance!”) to the scene where Miss Barton confesses to Mrs. Beddows her love for Carne.
Judged by the facts recorded, the story cannot be called sanguine or cheerful. There is an unusually high rate of lunacy, illness, and general misfortune in this particular corner of England.
Sympathy with human nature
The author had an unquenchable belief in and sympathy with human nature; the courage and vitality that enabled her to cover so triumphantly her gigantic canvas blow like a high wind through the story, ventilating its most infected crannies.
Only at the end, I think, where the shadows disperse and the sky brightens, does the author’s hand lose a little of its sureness. Optimism and the will to optimism are different things, and Miss Holtby’s gallant effort to infer from her heroine’s change of heart a more hopeful future for society at large does not ring quite true as I have had the misfortune to read for a very long time.
Media adaptations of South Riding 1938: The first film adaptation 1974: Adaptation for Yorkshire Television 1999: The radio version was broadcast on BBC Radio 4 2011: BBC Television Series (three parts)More about South Riding by Winifred Holtby South Riding by Winifred Holtby – Goodreads South Riding by Winifred Holtby – The Guardian South Riding by Winifred Holtby -JacquiWine’s Journal
. . . . . . . . . .
*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!
The post South Riding by Winifred Holtby (1936) appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.
June 6, 2022
Elizabeth X, or The Secret of Elizabeth by Vera Caspary
Prolific American author Vera Caspary’s last published novel, Elizabeth X, was released first in the U.K. in 1978, the year before her autobiography, The Secrets of Grown-ups. It was reissued in the U.S. the following year as The Secret of Elizabeth.
This analysis of Elizabeth X, or The Secret of Elizabeth by Vera Caspary is excerpted from A Girl Named Vera Can Never Tell a Lie: The Fiction of Vera Caspary by Francis Booth ©2022. Reprinted by permission.
We are back in familiar Wilkie Collins territory, with multiple narrators telling the same story from different angles. As with Collins’ The Woman in White and Caspary’s own Stranger Than Truth, but unlike Laura and Final Portrait, the narrators are listed in the contents at the beginning of the book, so we know in advance what to expect.
Echoes of The Woman in White
At the beginning of both Collins’ novel and Elizabeth X, the narrators find a mysterious woman dressed in white wandering down the road. Here is the scene from The Woman in White.
There, in the middle of the broad bright high road—there, as if it had that moment sprung out of the earth or dropped from the heaven—stood the figure of a solitary woman, dressed from head to foot in white garments, her face bent in a grave inquiry on mine, her hand pointing to the dark cloud over London, as I faced her.
I was far too seriously startled by the suddenness with which this extraordinary apparition stood before me, in the dead of night and in that lonely place, to ask what she wanted. The strange woman spoke first.
“Is that the road to London?” she said.
In Elizabeth X, a couple is driving down a road through a forest near Westport, Connecticut late at night when the wife sees a young woman in white wandering unsteadily; she wants to stop the car to help the distressed woman, but the husband is suspicious, thinking it may be a trap.
Among the dense foliage, a white shape moved like a specter, indistinct at first, then clearly seen, hidden again by thick brush, and after the car had rounded a curve, its headlights picked out a girl in a white dress. His foot remained steady on the accelerator
… City crime had crept into the countryside. Young women were said to carry guns. Better for a man to mind his own business in these parlous days … Although he doubted the wisdom of the act, he stopped beside the girl. Kate jumped out. “Can we give you a lift?”
The girl seemed startled, wary as an animal who has heard movement in the underbrush. Kate’s hand fell gently upon the girl’s bare arm. “You needn’t be afraid of us. We want to help you. Where do you want to go?”
There was no reply. The girl, clad in a white dress with arms and legs bare, shivered in the cool night air. She obeyed humbly when Allan told her to get into the back seat. “Where are you going?” he asked and was again rewarded with silence.
The male narrator in Collins’ The Woman in White on the other hand has no suspicions about the strange young woman he meets.
“What sort of a woman she was, and how she came to be out alone in the high road, an hour after midnight, I altogether failed to guess. The one thing of which I felt certain was, that the grossest of mankind could not have misconstrued her motive in speaking, even at that suspiciously late hour and in that suspiciously lonely place.”
Similarly, although the husband in Elizabeth X thinks the woman must be either “stoned or drunk,” the wife assumes she is an innocent victim.
The narrator of this first section of Caspary’s novel is neither the husband, Allan Royce, nor his wife Kate, but is merely a neighbor of the couple reporting on conversations he has had with Allan on a morning commuter train.
And, in case we have not yet got the connection with Wilkie Collins, Caspary makes her prim and extravagantly literary first narrator – whose late mother was a writer of mystery novels and who himself has a Ph.D. in nineteenth-century mystery stories – hammer home the point with no attempt at subtlety, delivering it in a rambling, stilted, almost euphuistic style reminiscent of Collins’ nineteenth-century prose as well as the rather precious manner of speaking of Waldo in Laura, based, as we know on Collins’ Count Fosco.
. . . . . . . . . .
Laura by Vera Caspary
. . . . . . . . . .
Enter Chauncey GreenleafI think we can assume that Caspary, on her twentieth full-length novel and at the age of seventy-nine is relishing the layers of irony here, especially as she has saddled this first narrator with the unlikely name of Chauncey Greenleaf.
Having protested that he is incapable of creating a mystery story, Greenleaf immediately proceeds to do exactly that, explaining, like the narrators of Thelma and Evvie, that he does not have perfect or first-hand knowledge of the story at this stage. Chauncey even admits to us that some of what he is telling us is made up or assumed.
Kate Royce wants to take the mysterious woman home and look after her, and Allan wants to go to the police. “They’d book her for vagrancy or something, and she’d have a police record for the rest of her life. An innocent young girl,” says Kate “What makes you think she’s so innocent?” replies Allan. Under protest, he takes the girl back to their stunning designer house in the woods, which looks like a film set – Allan is a modernist architect.
Kate’s loss
Despite her glamorous house and enviable lifestyle, Kate is no Caspary woman. “Kate Royce had the correct Connecticut commuter’s wife appearance; tweed skirt, matching sweaters; a short string of pearls, ponytail.” We soon find out why she is so maternally concerned about the unknown girl.
“Allan recognized the sweetness and firmness that had been absent since that evil day when she had found her baby dead in its crib,” as Chauncey puts it. Ever the literary showoff, Chauncey tells us parenthetically, about Kate’s loss:
“I am reminded of an entry in Mary Shelley’s journal: Find my baby dead. Send for Hogg. Talk. A miserable day. In the evening read ‘Fall of the Jesuits’”
Kate even christens the amnesiac woman Elizabeth after her own dead baby. Having promised Allan that she will take the girl to the police the next day, Kate decides to keep her, a daughter substitute perhaps. She takes “Elizabeth” to her family doctor to be checked out; Dr. Greenspan is rather more thorough than is strictly necessary.
“There was no evidence of rape, but infinitely more startling was the fact that the girl was a virgin. Both Kate and Harvey Greenspan considered an unviolated hymen an anachronism in a girl whose exact age was undetermined, but who was certainly over twenty.”
Trying to uncover Elizabeth’s past
The Royces have brought in a psychiatrist to see if she can uncover Elizabeth’s past; the psychiatrist thinks her memory loss is a subconscious escape from something she is ashamed of.
Chauncey, like Kate but for different reasons, is so smitten that he cannot believe Elizabeth is anything other than an innocent ingénue. He quickly moves from being enamored to being possessive and proprietorial. Chauncey wants to remake her, new, from wet clay, to paint himself onto her wet canvas.
. . . . . . . . . .
A Girl Named Vera Can Never Tell a Lie on Amazon (US)*
and *
. . . . . . . . . .
In the next chapter, “Leaves from a Notebook,” the narration is briefly taken over by Elizabeth herself. Elizabeth makes it quite clear in the notebook what she thinks about Chauncey’s proposal, which he blurted out when he was alone with her one day.
“Mr. Greenleaf asked me to marry him. Not exactly asked. He said if we were married no one could take me away. I cannot imagine being married to an old man. He must be forty at least. Maybe more.”
Chauncey is forty-nine.
Disturbing memories begin to surface
Elizabeth has been asked questions by the FBI who, think she may be on the run from some crime. In fact, she may — there are several young women on the FBI’s list of people wanted for grave crimes. And she does have flashes of something bad happening. “A dead man is lying on the floor. I see the pattern of streaks on a marble floor, but not the man’s face. Maybe he is not dead.”
To add to the mystery, Elizabeth starts dating a mysterious man, Rick Shannon, who turns up at the house and maybe a private eye but whose motives are not clear.
Kate takes over the narration in the next chapter, “The Private Life of an Amnesia Victim,” which is introduced by Chauncey who says that Kate can relate things he cannot know. Kate does not contradict him but does add extra detail.
“I have read what Chauncey has written and there is no need for me to repeat any of it, but there are many things he could not know. Like Elizabeth’s nightmares and her terrified reaction to blood and killing on television.”
Watching one of the violent programs on TV that Allan likes but Kate doesn’t, Elizabeth reacts very strongly. “I turned from the horror to see Elizabeth curled in the armchair, shrunken and as white as a ghost against the black leather upholstery. The look on her face is unforgettable.”
Is Elizabeth the fiancée of a multimillionaire?
Kate tells us among other things that a well-known multimillionaire, Gordon Hildebrandt, thinks Elizabeth is his fiancée Claire Foster and has asked Kate on the phone to look after her until he can get there – he is apparently far too busy with important business to come immediately and asks if there is a small airfield near to them so they can fly there in his private plane when he is ready.
Hildebrandt then effectively kidnaps Elizabeth and flies her to New York where he keeps her in his suite at the Waldorf Astoria, locked in a room while he conducts his important business; as with the wealthy alpha male husbands in The Husband, The Man Who Loved His Wife and Ruth, we are spared the details of their major financial dealings.
We find out the truth about this relationship in a section containing the letters of Hildebrandt’s lawyer to his wife during the kidnapping episode, of which he disapproves: Elizabeth is not and never has been Hildebrandt’s fiancée; she has never even known him, but we do not find this out until much later.
Hildebrandt’s actual fiancée has changed her mind about marrying him and disappeared; to save face he has claimed publicly that she was kidnapped and has apparently paid a large ransom, but all this was made up to protect his public image; Hildebrandt needed a woman to play the part and chose the similar-looking Elizabeth.
After a few days of being imprisoned in New York’s top hotel, the lawyer helps her escape and Elizabeth goes back to Kate.
. . . . . . . . . .
The Secret of Elizabeth on Bookshop.org* and Amazon*
. . . . . . . . . .
That leaves two parties claiming ownership of Elizabeth: a psychiatrist called Dr. Hyde – Kate keeps referring to him as Dr. Jekyll to keep the literary references coming – who claims she is Grace Dearborn, a disturbed woman who has escaped from the sanitarium which he runs.
Caspary drops a subtle hint that this may be true: later, when Elizabeth slowly starts to remember things, we find out the color of her room, probably another sly literary reference by Caspary to The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman.
“This is it. What I hoped and prayed for. Waking up. Remembering. Real, not a nightmare. But I think nightmares are real and real life is a nightmare. I am here. In this room, is a yellow room in Kate’s house. Elizabeth’s room, they call it. Please God let me stay Elizabeth.”
Is Elizabeth a senator’s daughter?
Elizabeth’s other possible backstory is that she is the daughter of a Senator from Kansas, though he is not claiming that his daughter, Gloria Dixon, is lost. Rick first spots the possible connection; it turns out that Rick is not what he seems and like everyone else he wants something from her.
Like Norman in The Gardenia, Rick is a newspaper reporter exploiting a woman with no memory for a story that he hopes will get him a full-time job with a national magazine. Rick is with Elizabeth when the moral fundamentalist senator Dixon appears on TV, accused of various improprieties; the look on Elizabeth’s face convinces Rick that she knows the Senator. He flies to Kansas to confront the man. Rick is met by the Senator’s housekeeper, Lucy Price.
Lucy Price
Lucy’s character seems to have been described in-depth for purely intertextual purposes – she has only one function in the plot, though it is a pivotal one. Later, when Elizabeth begins to regain her memory she tells us that “Miss Price was hired as my governess … Pricey is a white black woman—very beautiful, with eyes the pale green of peridots.”
Here, in what she probably expected would be her last novel, Caspary is referring us back to her first novel nearly fifty years earlier, The White Girl, and the subject of racism and “passing.”
Despite Lucy’s Master’s degree and her gold Phi Beta Kappa key, she has been held back by her race. Her role as governess immediately brings to mind – our mind as well as Rick’s – nineteenth-century novels of poor orphan girls making their way in the world, like perhaps Ruth, as written by another Elizabeth: Mrs. Gaskell.
Rick, suddenly becoming uncharacteristically literary, says of Miss Price:
“Her story was typical, the stereotype of an old-fashioned novel. Poverty, an unemployed father, a sick mother, tubercular sister. Lucy Price had been lucky in getting a job that might have been conceived by a Brontë sister or Daphne du Maurier.”
In some ways, Lucy is rather like Mrs. Danvers in Rebecca and her name perhaps concatenates the orphan’s Lucy Snowe from Villette and Fanny Price from Mansfield Park. Caspary is shamelessly and joyously squeezing in yet more references from her favorite classic British authors in this late and perhaps valedictory novel.
Caspary may even be thinking of Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), her prequel to Jane Eyre, where Mr. Rochester’s wife, a Creole heiress, is locked away like Elizabeth for being “mad.”
And if we know our Jane Eyre well enough we may remember Mr. Rochester saying to her, “Little girl, a memory without blot or contamination must be an exquisite treasure – an inexhaustible source of purification; is it not?” which seems to sum up both Chauncey and Kate’s view of Elizabeth’s blank canvas.
So, which claimant is right? We know that the so-called Elizabeth is not Claire but is she, Grace or Gloria? Well, in fact, she is both. Senator Dixon is her father but has had her locked up in a sanitarium under a false name. Her sin was – according to her father – lust, compounded by murder.
Elizabeth carries one horrifying childhood memory that she has always wanted to get rid of and that may help explain her amnesia: one day Elizabeth caught her father in flagrant with her governess, mentor, and friend Lucy Price.
It was this experience that exposed her father to her as a monster and drove her to offer her virginity to the nearest available man: her cousin Hugh, her father’s assistant.
Who killed cousin Hugh?
But just as “Elizabeth” was about to give herself to Hugh, her father burst in on them in turn. What happened next is not entirely clear, even by the end of the novel, but Hugh ended up dead after a fight of some kind. The Senator claims his daughter killed her cousin Hugh; she, when she finally remembers, is convinced her father did it.
We are inclined to believe the Senator did do it because we know that Hugh had evidence to expose fraud by his boss, evidence which has now come out publicly. Elizabeth screams at him. “You’re scared. It wasn’t only that Hughie was ruining your little flower, it was what he knew about your lies and cheating and taking bribes and the filthy sex things you –”
Elizabeth’s father has had her locked up in the sanitarium, ostensibly to protect her from a murder charge but probably to keep her quiet. There she is subjected to terrifying treatments designed to break her down; this is apparently what led to her amnesia.
At one point Elizabeth goes back to Chauncey and tells him about her treatment in the sanitarium. She tells him that Dr. Hyde, during his twice-weekly treatments, tried to hypnotize her into believing that she had struck the blows that had killed Hughie.
“Elizabeth” takes off
Against all odds, Elizabeth gives her virginity to Chauncey, his coy confession making us cringe. “Although it may be indecorous, I shall state for the benefit of inexperienced readers that it is not unpleasant to bed a willing virgin.” But the next morning she has gone.
“I have not seen her since. She was not in my bed when I woke, nor in the guest room when I peeped in there before I hurried to catch the early train.”
Much later, Chauncey gets a present. It is from France, “from the Hermes shop on the Rue Faubourg St Honoré and contained a large crocodile traveling bag bearing my monogram in gold, and fitted with an assortment of brushes, combs, gold-topped jars, and crystal bottles; a typical gift of the rich, costly and far too heavy to be carried on a plane, thus utterly useless.”
He assumes it is from the former Elizabeth, staying with her mother in France but gets no reply to his letter. And that is the end of Elizabeth.
The lacuna she leaves behind her is however filled in one respect, with “the infant born nine months to the night that Kate and Allan took a lost girl into their home. As the child’s godfather, I held her in my arms when she was christened Elizabeth.”
The novel ends with a perfect definition of the psycho-thriller as invented and developed by Vera Caspary over a period of more than fifty years.
“Our recollections differ widely. To each of us, Elizabeth is an intensely personal symbol, the shadow of an unacknowledged need. We seldom speak of her nowadays, perhaps because she was dearest to us as a mystery.”
. . . . . . . . . .
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.
. . . . . . . . . .
*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!
The post Elizabeth X, or The Secret of Elizabeth by Vera Caspary appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.
June 3, 2022
Excellent Women by Barbara Pym
British author Barbara Pym (1913 – 1980) was often compared to Jane Austen for her comedies of manner; she was called Britain’s “new Jane Austen.” Excellent Women was her second novel, published in England in 1952.
Barbara Pym’s novels explore manners and morals in village life with subtle, understated wit and keen insight into human nature that transcends their local flavor. The nine novels published in her lifetime are considered the Pym canon; there were four others published posthumously.
Many Pym devotees cite Excellent Women as their entry-point to her novels, and for legions of fans, it remains their favorite. Shirley Hazzard wrote of Barbara Pym:
“She is herself the poet of the lonely, the virtuous, the ironic; of the unostentatiously intelligent and witty; of the angelically self-effacing, with their diabolically clear gaze. Nothing escapes such persons; and they escape nothing.”
Oddly, after the book’s successful initial British publication, and its subsequent status as a true Pym classic, it was turned down by eighteen American and European publishers. It wasn’t published in the U.S. until 1978, at which time it was greeted with the enthusiasm it deserves. The book has gone through many editions since and is still in print.
. . . . . . . . . .
Learn more about Barbara Pym
. . . . . . . . . .
From the original review by Joyce W. Milkie in The Times and Democrat (Orangeburg, SC): “Pym’s Characters Are Credible.”
This is Georgian light fiction set in a comparatively modern setting. Understated and veddy, veddy British, Mildred Lathbury is almost unbelievable in some ways, as a member of the 20th Century gang. In others, she is credible and completely delightful.
Barbara Pym, most assuredly an English writer, wrote this book some time ago and it has just been reissued. For those who enjoy the light touch, the mannered tale, this is a gem of the first water, a delightful look at a way of life now almost gone. If you adore Jane Austen, you’ll delight in Pym’s books.
Mildred Lathbury, who narrates the story, is a spinster (and one gets the idea she doesn’t really like her unmarried state) who seems to have a number of eligible men around but none of them center on her. She is the daughter of a clergyman and is a “high church.”
She has ample means so she can devote her time to involvement in other people’s lives and in helping her “distressed gentlewomen.” She is one of those “excellent women” who help out other people but tend to be resignedly borne with by even those they help.
Mildred, who has more of a sense of humor and is more attractive than most of these “excellent women” tend to be, doesn’t really want to be numbered among these tedious people. She really would like to be married, romantically and ideally, but she just doesn’t know how to go about it.
She has a few heart flutters when a handsome ex-Navy officer and his wife move in downstairs. His wife, she thinks, doesn’t appreciate him. Then there is Julian, the clergyman at her church, who has his sister to care for him but succumbs to the lure of a glamorous widow and sorrows because he thinks Mildred is secretly in love with him. (She isn’t.)
There are other lives touching Mildred’s and she helps where she can and tries to keep hands off when she believes that’s the best thing.
One gets involved with Mildred, a charming and retiring character, and one hopes, sincerely, she may find that romantic attachment she so obviously craves but won’t bestir herself to promote.
Pym writes with cool clarity and with gentle, underplayed humor. Her people are credible and one does get involved with them, but Mildred is the one the reader cares the most about.
. . . . . . . . . . .
Excellent Women on Bookshop.org* and Amazon*
. . . . . . . . . . .
“I realized that one might love him secretly with no hope of encouragement, which can be very enjoyable for the young or inexperienced.”
. . . . . . . . . . .
“My thoughts went round and round and it occurred to me that if I ever wrote a novel it would be of the ‘stream of consciousness’ type and deal with an hour in the life of a woman at the sink.”
. . . . . . . . . . .
“Once you get into the habit of falling in love you will find that it happens quite often and means less and less.”
. . . . . . . . . . .
“There are some things too dreadful to be revealed, and it is even more dreadful how, in spite of our better instincts, we long to know about them.”
. . . . . . . . . . .
“I was so astonished that I could think of nothing to say, but wondered irrelevantly if I was to be caught with a teapot in my hand on every dramatic occasion.”
. . . . . . . . . . .
See more
Quotes from Excellent Women and Other Novels by Barbara Pym
. . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . .
*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!
The post Excellent Women by Barbara Pym appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.
The River by Rumer Godden 1946)
The River by Rumer Godden, a 1946 novel, is a coming-of-age tale based on the author’s experiences growing up in the colonized Bengal region of India, now part of Bangladesh.
Like so many of Godden’s novels, this one has a cinematic flavor, and indeed, is one of the nine books by this prolific author to be adapted to film. In the late 1940s, Godden collaborated on the script for the film version of The River. It was directed by Jean Renoir and released in 1951.
The well-received film won an international award at the Venice Film Festival that year. It later became a great favorite of Martin Scorsese and later also influenced director Wes Anderson. It’s still considered a classic mid-century film.
Plot synopsis of The River by Rumer Godden
From the Open Road Media 2021 reprint edition:
“Facing harsh adult realities, a young English girl in India must leave childhood behind, in this masterful tale from a New York Times–bestselling author. The Ganges River runs through young Harriet’s world.
The eleven-year-old daughter of the British owner of a successful jute concern, she loves her life in Bengal, India, on the river’s edge, so far removed from the English boarding school she attended before the outbreak of hostilities in Europe.
Often left alone by an overworked father and preoccupied mother, Harriet is enchanted by the local festivals, colors, and vibrant life surrounding her. Now, as she stands on the brink of adulthood—too old to play childish games with her reckless little brother, Bogey, yet too young to be touched by such grown-up concerns as the faraway Second World War—a stranger’s unexpected arrival will rock her world.
When Captain John, a handsome soldier returning wounded from the battlefield, becomes her family’s new neighbor, Harriet is instantly entranced, beset by a rush of unfamiliar emotions: longing, jealousy, infatuation. But the inevitable change inherent in growing older may be too heavy a burden for a young girl to bear when it carries with it disappointment and heartbreaking loss.
Inspired by the author’s personal experiences as a child raised in India—and the basis for the acclaimed classic motion picture of the same name from French film director Jean Renoir—Rumer Godden’s The River is a lovely, moving portrayal of childhood’s end. Evocative, heartfelt, and bittersweet, it is a coming-of-age story without equal from a major twentieth-century novelist.”
. . . . . . . . .
The River on Bookshop.org and Amazon*
. . . . . . . . .
From the original review by Christine Boble Govan in the Chattanooga Daily Times, October 27, 1946: When I think of Rumer Godden’s style I think of jade and moonstones and smooth, polished natural wood. There is a clarity and a finish about it that is rare, and yet what she writes is always so skin to the earth and its miracles that it must inevitably be thought of in terms of the natural.
The river has become a symbol to mankind. Time and the river, the river of life-the constant flow and movement of a thing which remains the same in form-is bound to become a symbol. It is a thing upon which so much of man’s fortune depends, a thing on which he has so often placed his dreams.
“Harriet’s river was a great, slowly moving, mile-wide river between banks of mud and white sand, with fields flat to the horizon, just fields and rice fields under a weight of blue sky.The river emptied itself, through the delta, into the Bay of Bengal, its final sea.”
The story of Harriet’s growing up by the river might, as Miss Godden points out, have taken place anywhere with a slight change of scenery. As it is, her story is full of the flavor of India brushed in so that in the book it is what it was in Harriet’s life, an integral, unobtrusive but part.
A little girl grows up when she becomes aware of pain and human cruelty, of birth and death, and of that ephemeral bliss which is a part of being aware.
She grows up quietly like a flower, but within her are the mystery, the beauty, the promise, and the vulnerability of a fragile plant. Rumer Godden, with her impeccable style and her ability to create feeling quietly and profoundly, has given us this intimate and tender story of one little girl’s growing.
. . . . . . . . .
You may also enjoy The Peacock Spring by Rumer Godden,
another coming-of-age novel set in India
. . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . .
*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!
The post The River by Rumer Godden 1946) appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.
