Nava Atlas's Blog, page 3
May 4, 2025
Literary Gift Box Ideas Inspired by Iconic Women Writers
Literary gift boxes are a fun and thoughtful way to celebrate great books and authors. These boxes are perfect for book lovers who enjoy reading and want something special. These are great for birthdays, holidays, or book clubs.
You can fill these boxes with items inspired by famous women writers. With the right packaging, items, and design, you can create a gift box that reflects the writer’s theme.
Let’s explore some unique ideas to create a gift box that every book lover will appreciate and cherish.
What is a Literary Gift Box?
A literary gift box is a special box made for people who love books. It includes items that match a book, an author, or a reading theme. These boxes often come with a book, a bookmark, snacks, candles, and other small gifts.
Everything inside the box is picked to make the reading experience more fun and personal. Literary gift boxes are perfect for birthdays, holidays, book lovers, and fans of classic stories. They turn reading into a full experience and make every gift feel thoughtful and unique.
Creative Packaging for Literary Gift Boxes
The packaging is just as important as what’s inside. Stylish packaging makes the gift feel extra special. You can use custom book rigid boxes with book quotes, tie them with twine or velvet ribbon, or seal them with wax for a vintage look. Wrapping items in old book pages adds a unique touch.
You can also include a name tag or sticker that matches the theme. Choose colors that reflect the book or author, like soft colors for Jane Austen, or darker tones for Mary Shelley.
Themed Literary Gift Box Ideas
A theme makes the box more fun. You can choose a specific author, book, or even a time.
Some fun ideas include a Victorian Style Box for Jane Austen fans or a Gothic Mystery Box inspired by Mary Shelley. You can also make a Nature and Poetry Box based on Emily Dickinson or a Modern Classics Box for Virginia Woolf lovers.
Pick a theme your reader will enjoy. It makes the gift more personal and exciting.
Personalization Ideas
Personal touches show you care. You can fill the box with items that reflect the author’s writing style. You can include a copy of a classic book, a customized bookmark, or a notebook or journal. A candle or tea blend adds a personal touch.
Don’t forget a quote card or poem from the author. Furthermore, small gifts like pens oe art prints can enhance the experience for the gift recipient. It makes the unboxing experience unforgettable.
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Sample mailer box by Elite Mailer Boxes
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Today, many people prefer packaging that is eco-friendly and stylish. Use recyclable kraft boxes (see above) and reusable fabric wraps or cloth bags instead of plastic. For stuffing, choose biodegradable shredded paper.
If you want to print anything, try using soy-based inks. For tags and cards, recycled paper is a great choice. This shows you care about the environment. Here are some sample gift box ideas based on iconic women writers:
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Jane Austen-Inspired Gift Box
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Virginia Woolf-Inspired Gift Box
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Emily Dickinson-Inspired Gift Box
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Mary Shelley-Inspired Gift Box
Who Would Love These Literary Gift Boxes?
These literary gift boxes are perfect for book lovers of all kinds. They make great gifts for:
Literature studentsTeachers and librariansWriters and poetsFeminist readersBook club friendsThese boxes are great for special days like birthdays, graduation, or holidays. They are perfect for readers who love classic stories and admire strong women in literature.
Literary gift boxes inspired by iconic women writers are more than just gifts. With the right mix of books, thoughtful items, creative packaging, and a personal touch, you can make every box feel magical.
Whether you go bold with Toni Morrison or sweet with Louisa May Alcott, there’s a style for every reader. If you want to give a gift that feels thoughtful and full of meaning, start with a literary gift box.
The post Literary Gift Box Ideas Inspired by Iconic Women Writers appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.
April 29, 2025
Literary Centenaries: Classic Fiction by Women Writers from 1925
There’s a lot of hoopla around 2025 being the centenary of The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, published in 1925. It’s the quintessential novel of what’s come to be known as the Jazz Age.
But it’s not the only centenary worth celebrating in 2025. There was some great 1925 fiction that came from the pens (and typewriters of women writers, including Virginia Woolf, Zora Neale Hurston, Willa Cather, Anita Loos, Anzia Yezierska, and more.
Poor Scott Fitzgerald didn’t live long enough to see the lasting legacy of his work (he was gone by 1940, at the age of 44). There’s a LOT (this is the listing on Google News alone) of news and editorializing about Gatsby. It’s kind of cool that a book is getting so much attention in the midst of all the horrors we’re living through — kind of a testament to the power of literature.
So this got me to wondering … what were the literary ladies up to in 1925? What centenaries are being swept aside or not discussed enough? Let’s give them some centenary love as well. Here are just a few …
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Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
Mrs. Dalloway, arguably one of Virginia Woolf‘s most accessible novels, describes a day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway, an upper-class woman preparing to host a party that evening. The unique aspect of the novel is that it focuses on her inner world, and that of the peripheral characters, taking the reader as she travels back in time.
Unusual for its time in using stream of consciousness as literary structure, the novel was met with positive response, and often appears on lists of best novels of the twentieth century.
As Clarissa goes around London, buying flowers and doing other preparations for the evening, she reflects on her youth and her choice of husband. She ruminates on a former suitor, the enigmatic Peter Walsh, and her youthful flirtation with Sally Seton. The novel covers many themes including time, mental and physical illness, the role of women in society, regret, sexuality, and more.
“He thought her beautiful, believed her impeccably wise; dreamed of her, wrote poems to her, which, ignoring the subject, she corrected in red ink.”
Read more lovely quotes from Mrs. Dalloway here.
Mrs. Dalloway’s centenary is coming right up on May 14. but Google News UK doesn’t list a fraction of the kind of press being bestowed upon Gatsby on this side of the Atlantic, but hopefully it will get its due on its actual birthdate.
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“Spunk” — the short story thathelped launch Zora Neale Hurston’s career
Zora Neale Hurston’s short story, “Spunk” (1925), helped launch her career as a fiction writer. She had already established herself as an ethnographer and folklorist, having been the first Black student to study anthropology at Columbia University in New York City.
“Spunk” was originally published in the prestigious Opportunity, A Journal of Negro Life, and got Zora’s literary career off to a running start. The story won second place in the journal’s fiction writing contest. At the awards dinner on May 1, 1925, Zora also won second place in the drama category for her play, Color Struck, plus two honorable mentions. These early successes helped assure Zora’s place as a writer in the creative world of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s.
Here, you can read the full text of “Spunk,” which in recent times has been adapted for the stage.
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The Professor’s House by Willa Cather
The Professor’s House by Willa Cather, published in 1925, is one of this American master’s mid-career novels. The story of Professor Godfrey St. Peter tells of a midlife crisis — before the term was coined.
When the professor and his wife move into a new house, he begins questioning the path that his life has taken. His daughters have grown up, and he loses much of his will to live, not finding anything to look forward to. Though it hasn’t achieved the enduring stature of some of Cather’s better-known works, in her skilled hands, The Professor’s House becomes a touching story of personal and spiritual self-reflection.
“The man he was now, the personality his friends knew, had begun to grow strong during adolescence, during the years when he was always consciously or unconsciously conjugating the verb ‘to love’ — in society and solitude, with people, with books, with the sky and open country, in the lonesomeness of crowded city streets.”
IMHO, Willa Cather is truly one of the Great American Novelists; do you think she gets her due?
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Gentleman Prefer Blondes by Anita Loos
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes by Anita Loos (subtitled The Intimate Diary of a Professional Lady) popularized the trope of ruthless golddigger in the character of Lorelei Lee. We accompany the unflappable flapper around New York and Europe, where she dallies with the affections of hapless men.
By the time of the book’s publication, Loos (1889 – 1991 was a successful screenwriter, and claimed that the book’s inspiration came from a real-life incident. On a train, her effort to haul around large luggage was ignored by male passengers (Loos was a tiny brunette). Yet when a blonde dropped a book, the men around her fell all over themselves in a competition to retrieve it for her.
She used the incident as the jumping-off point for a series of sketches about a blonde flapper from Little Rock. They were published in Harper’s Bazaar as “The Lorelei stories.” The satiric stories that skewered sex tropes were such a hit that the magazine’s circulation quadrupled within a short time. The stories were soon shaped into the novel Gentleman Prefer Blondes, published in 1925, and which became the second bestselling novel of 1926. Despite the light tone of the book, it was well-received by critics and devoured by the public.
Edith Wharton deemed it “The Great American Novel,” though that distinction hasn’t held up. The best-known adaptation of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes is the 1953 film starring Jane Russell and Marilyn Monroe — quite altered from the book — as two best friends who work as showgirls.
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Bread Givers by Anzia Yezierska
Bread Givers by Anzia Yezierska (1880 – 1970) is the best-known novel by a writer whose work reflected the Jewish immigrant experience in America of the early 1900s. To set this kind of story down with a female perspective was a rarity in her time, reflecting the author’s chutzpah and determination; yet she was forthright about her struggle to write it.
At the age of ten, in 1890, Yezierska arrived with her family to New York City’s Lower East Side. A product of the immigration wave of the late 1800s, she never quite shed the feeling of being an outsider. Longing to rise above her circumstances, she was hampered by her brittle personality and a measure of self-loathing.
Bread Givers (1925) an autobiographical novel, delves into the well-trodden theme of an immigrant family whose children strain against Old World parents.
The three daughters chafe under their father’s domination. The youngest and feistiest is Sara, oddly nicknamed Blut und Eisen (“Blood and Iron”) from the time she is tiny. She’s a born rebel, fighting for autonomy and seeking self-determination. We can assume that she’s Anzia, through and through. The process of breaking away from her father’s domination is painful. Some of her strivings are awkward and uncomfortable, but she emerges as a person (mostly) in command of her world.
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More literary happenings of 1925
In the summer of 1925, Katharine Sergeant Angell walked into the offices of The New Yorker, then a fledgling magazine, and was hired. Over the next thirty-six years, she would become a powerhouse editor who transformed the publication and made many literary stars. She married another New Yorker star, E.B. White, after which she went by the name of Katharine White.Her greatest contribution was to publish women writers, establishing and nurturing their reputations. They included Janet Flanner, Mary McCarthy, Elizabeth Bishop, Jean Stafford, Nadine Gordimer, Elizabeth Taylor (the English writer, not the actress of the same name), Kay Boyle, and others. The first full biography of Katharine White, The World She Edited, was published last year. Read more about it here .So Big, Edna Ferber ’s 1924 bestseller, won the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel in 1925. No one was more surprised than she was. Gertrude Stein ’s The Making of Americans: Being a History of a Family’s Progress was published, though the author had finished it many years earlier. It was quite a task to find a publisher for it, as it was densely written with the kind of inscrutable language she became known for.March 25, 1925: Flannery O’Connor , known for stories and novels in the Southern Gothic genre, was born in Savannah, Georgia.May 12, 1925: Imagist poet Amy Lowell died of a cerebral hemorrhage; soon after, she was
posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, for the collection What’s O’Clock, published the previous year.September 10, 1925: Beloved contemporary poet Mary Oliver was born in Maple Heights, Ohio
The post Literary Centenaries: Classic Fiction by Women Writers from 1925 appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.
April 27, 2025
How Losing a Poetry Competition Launched Edna St. Vincent Millay’s Career
Edna St. Vincent Millay was just nineteen when she began to compose “Renascence” some time toward the end of 1911. Written at a time of uncertainty about her future, it was a poem about herself, yet it dealt with the common human struggle to find hope when everything seems hopeless.
She had been an outstanding student in her tiny Maine high school, and a star contributor to the popular children’s publication St. Nicholas Magazine. Once she had passed the age limit (eighteen) for submissions, she was left without an outlet for her poetry.
Fighting despair, she grasped that no one could save her but herself. “I must exert every atom of my will and lift myself body and soul — above my situation and my surroundings …”
Fortuitously, Vincent’s mother Cora, a traveling nurse, spotted an issue of Poetry, A Magazine of Verse in a wastebasket near the bed of a sleeping patient. Rescuing it from the trash, she saw an announcement that new poetry was being collection to be titled The Lyric Year. The magazine was sponsoring a contest with three cash prizes — a grand prize of $500, and $250 for the second and third-place winners.
What a difference $500 would make to the family! In today’s money, that equaled about $15,000. Equally important, if Vincent’s poetry was selected, the exposure would be priceless. Cora pleaded with her daughter, who was distracted by her first situationship with a young woman, to buckle down and finish the new poem. Working diligently over several weeks, it ended up at a whopping 214 lines. Vincent titled the poem “Renascence.” It began:
All I could see from where I stood
Was three long mountains and a wood;
I turned and looked another way,
And saw three islands in a bay.
The first few lines sound simple, but as the poem builds, it grows darker and more complex. On a mountaintop modeled on Vincent’s beloved Mount Battie (where the poem is now inscribed on a plaque at the spot that inspired it) the narrator is awed by nature. He or she (it’s never specified) suffers, experiences death, and is buried. After a refreshing rain, the narrator is reborn and is once again able to experience great joy.
Who is this mystery poet?
While sifting through more than ten thousand mostly mediocre poems, Mr. Earle, the Lyric Year contest’s director, was so moved by “Renascence” that he fired off a letter to “E. St. Vincent Millay, Esquire.” “Dear Sir,” it began, for Mr. Earle believed that such a poem could only have come from the pen of a middle-aged man who had seen much of life.
He informed the poet that “Renascence” was accepted for publication. He then added something he shouldn’t have — that he believed it would win the top cash prize. What he didn’t say was that it wasn’t only his decision to make. And in the end, Mr. Earle was outvoted. “Renascence” came in fourth — no award, no cash prize. Vincent was crushed, but what made it worse was that she’d never heard her mother cry so hard.
The first-prize winner was embarrassed by his award. The second and third-prize winners discussed giving Vincent their prize money (though they never did). If anything in the literary world could counted as a scandal, this certainly qualified.
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A famous portrait of Vincent taken during her time at Vassar College
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And, as it turns out, she won by losing the contest. The hoopla over the loss made her famous overnight — at least, in the literary world and among devoted poetry readers. Everyone believed that “E. Vincent Millay” had been robbed of the honor as well as the prize money. Gradually, it was revealed the creator of this mature, majestic poem, was a young woman not quite out of her teens.
Suddenly, literary magazines offered to publish her work. Now, well-known poets and other writers wrote to her with admiration for “Renascence.” Her replies to her new admirers were so charming that lifelong friendships (some of which later even became romances) were forged.
That summer, Vincent lucked into the opportunity to recite her new poem at the Whitehall Inn, an elegant hotel favored by wealthy visitors to the Maine coast. In her resonant voice, she recited “Renascence” by heart to the rapt audience. Vincent enjoyed the attention immensely. But even better, because of her performances that night, she’d caught the attention of two of the guests who would soon be offering her full scholarships to Vassar and Smith, two prestigious girls’ colleges.
She chose Vassar, mainly due to its easy access to New York City. Twenty-year-old Vincent arrived in New York City already a rising star in the literary world. She was invited to teas with well-known poets and given a reception by famous writers and editors in the city. She was getting paid for poems that were published in magazines. Still, becoming an official adult made her wistful. The day before her twenty-first birthday, she wrote: “Shall be grown-up tomorrow, oh, dear! I loved being twenty. Goodbye to this beautiful year. I somehow feel that twenty-one will be different.” And she was right.
There is lots more to Edna St. Vincent’s life story, but it can’t all be told here. She didn’t live a long life, and it was never uncomplicated but she did live.
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Edna St. Vincent Millay and Eugen Jan Boissevain married in 1923. She and the kindhearted Dutch businessman had a warm, wonderful open marriage.
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Renascence by Edna St. Vincent Millay (1912)All I could see from where I stood
Was three long mountains and a wood;
I turned and looked another way,
And saw three islands in a bay.
So with my eyes I traced the line
Of the horizon, thin and fine,
Straight around till I was come
Back to where I’d started from;
And all I saw from where I stood
Was three long mountains and a wood.
Over these things I could not see;
These were the things that bounded me;
And I could touch them with my hand,
Almost, I thought, from where I stand.
And all at once things seemed so small
My breath came short, and scarce at all.
But, sure, the sky is big, I said;
Miles and miles above my head;
So here upon my back I’ll lie
And look my fill into the sky.
And so I looked, and, after all,
The sky was not so very tall.
The sky, I said, must somewhere stop,
And—sure enough!—I see the top!
The sky, I thought, is not so grand;
I ‘most could touch it with my hand!
And reaching up my hand to try,
I screamed to feel it touch the sky.
I screamed, and—lo!—Infinity
Came down and settled over me;
Forced back my scream into my chest,
Bent back my arm upon my breast,
And, pressing of the Undefined
The definition on my mind,
Held up before my eyes a glass
Through which my shrinking sight did pass
Until it seemed I must behold
Immensity made manifold;
Whispered to me a word whose sound
Deafened the air for worlds around,
And brought unmuffled to my ears
The gossiping of friendly spheres,
The creaking of the tented sky,
The ticking of Eternity.
I saw and heard, and knew at last
The How and Why of all things, past,
And present, and forevermore.
The Universe, cleft to the core,
Lay open to my probing sense
That, sick’ning, I would fain pluck thence
But could not,—nay! But needs must suck
At the great wound, and could not pluck
My lips away till I had drawn
All venom out.—Ah, fearful pawn!
For my omniscience paid I toll
In infinite remorse of soul.
All sin was of my sinning, all
Atoning mine, and mine the gall
Of all regret. Mine was the weight
Of every brooded wrong, the hate
That stood behind each envious thrust,
Mine every greed, mine every lust.
And all the while for every grief,
Each suffering, I craved relief
With individual desire,—
Craved all in vain! And felt fierce fire
About a thousand people crawl;
Perished with each,—then mourned for all!
No hurt I did not feel, no death
That was not mine; mine each last breath
That, crying, met an answering cry
From the compassion that was I.
All suffering mine, and mine its rod;
Mine, pity like the pity of God.
Ah, awful weight! Infinity
Pressed down upon the finite Me!
My anguished spirit, like a bird,
Beating against my lips I heard;
Yet lay the weight so close about
There was no room for it without.
And so beneath the weight lay I
And suffered death, but could not die.
Long had I lain thus, craving death,
When quietly the earth beneath
Gave way, and inch by inch, so great
At last had grown the crushing weight,
Into the earth I sank till I
Full six feet under ground did lie,
And sank no more,—there is no weight
Can follow here, however great.
From off my breast I felt it roll,
And as it went my tortured soul
Burst forth and fled in such a gust
That all about me swirled the dust.
Deep in the earth I rested now;
Cool is its hand upon the brow
And soft its breast beneath the head
Of one who is so gladly dead.
And all at once, and over all
The pitying rain began to fall;
I lay and heard each pattering hoof
Upon my lowly, thatched roof,
And seemed to love the sound far more
Than ever I had done before.
For rain it hath a friendly sound
To one who’s six feet underground;
And scarce the friendly voice or face:
A grave is such a quiet place.
The rain, I said, is kind to come
And speak to me in my new home.
I would I were alive again
To kiss the fingers of the rain,
To drink into my eyes the shine
Of every slanting silver line,
To catch the freshened, fragrant breeze
From drenched and dripping apple-trees.
For soon the shower will be done,
And then the broad face of the sun
Will laugh above the rain-soaked earth
Until the world with answering mirth
Shakes joyously, and each round drop
Rolls, twinkling, from its grass-blade top.
How can I bear it; buried here,
While overhead the sky grows clear
And blue again after the storm?
O, multi-colored, multiform,
Beloved beauty over me,
That I shall never, never see
Again! Spring-silver, autumn-gold,
That I shall never more behold!
Sleeping your myriad magics through,
Close-sepulchred away from you!
O God, I cried, give me new birth,
And put me back upon the earth!
Upset each cloud’s gigantic gourd
And let the heavy rain, down-poured
In one big torrent, set me free,
Washing my grave away from me!
I ceased; and through the breathless hush
That answered me, the far-off rush
Of herald wings came whispering
Like music down the vibrant string
Of my ascending prayer, and—crash!
Before the wild wind’s whistling lash
The startled storm-clouds reared on high
And plunged in terror down the sky,
And the big rain in one black wave
Fell from the sky and struck my grave.
know not how such things can be;
I only know there came to me
A fragrance such as never clings
To aught save happy living things;
A sound as of some joyous elf
Singing sweet songs to please himself,
And, through and over everything,
A sense of glad awakening.
The grass, a-tiptoe at my ear,
Whispering to me I could hear;
I felt the rain’s cool finger-tips
Brushed tenderly across my lips,
Laid gently on my sealed sight,
And all at once the heavy night
Fell from my eyes and I could see,—
A drenched and dripping apple-tree,
A last long line of silver rain,
A sky grown clear and blue again.
And as I looked a quickening gust
Of wind blew up to me and thrust
Into my face a miracle
Of orchard-breath, and with the smell,—
I know not how such things can be!—
I breathed my soul back into me.
Ah! Up then from the ground sprang I
And hailed the earth with such a cry
As is not heard save from a man
Who has been dead, and lives again.
About the trees my arms I wound;
Like one gone mad I hugged the ground;
I raised my quivering arms on high;
I laughed and laughed into the sky,
Till at my throat a strangling sob
Caught fiercely, and a great heart-throb
Sent instant tears into my eyes;
O God, I cried, no dark disguise
Can e’er hereafter hide from me
Thou canst not move across the grass
But my quick eyes will see Thee pass,
Nor speak, however silently,
But my hushed voice will answer Thee.
I know the path that tells Thy way
Through the cool eve of every day;
God, I can push the grass apart
And lay my finger on Thy heart!
The world stands out on either side
No wider than the heart is wide;
Above the world is stretched the sky,—
No higher than the soul is high.
The heart can push the sea and land
Farther away on either hand;
The soul can split the sky in two,
And let the face of God shine through.
But East and West will pinch the heart
That can not keep them pushed apart;
And he whose soul is flat—the sky.
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You may also like … 12 Iconic Poems by Edna St. Vincent Millay 13 Love Poems by Edna St. Vincent Millay Renascence: and Other Poems (1917) – full textA Few Figs from Thistles: Poems and Sonnets (1920, 1921) – full text Second April (1921) – full text The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver (1922) – full textThe post How Losing a Poetry Competition Launched Edna St. Vincent Millay’s Career appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.
April 15, 2025
E.L. Konigsburg, Children’s Book Writer who “Dared to Disturb the Universe”
Elaine Lobl Konigsburg, known as E.L. Konigsburg (February 10, 1930–April 19, 2013) was a prolific American writer and illustrator of books for children and middle grade readers.
In 1967, she published her first children’s book, Jennifer, Hecate, Macbeth, William McKinley, and Me, Elizabeth. That same year, her second book, The Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, was also published. (Photo above right by Ron Kunzman)
E.L. Konigsburg’s first book won the 1968 Newbery Honor, and her second won the 1968 Newbery Medal. Though not written at the same time, both were published the same year due to an interesting turn of events.
When school libraries received a substantial increase in funding, an enormous backlog of books was sent to the printing presses. After catching up with this backlog, the publisher printed both of Konigsburg’s books, making it possible for her to have two titles published in the same year.
As it turned out, both titles made the Newbery Medal list: a winner and a runner-up. Konigsburg was the only author to have ever achieved that milestone. In 1997 she won the Newbery for her 13th book, The View from Saturday.
With this award, Konigsburg joined Joseph Krumgold, Lois Lowry, Katherine Paterson, Elizabeth George Speare, and Kate DiCamillo as the only authors to win more than one Newbery. The Newbery Medal is an award granted each year by the American Library Association for the most distinguished American children’s book.
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Early life and backgroundElaine Lobl was born in New York on February 10, 1930, to Jewish-Hungarian parents Adolph and Beuhlah Klein Lobl. The family soon moved to Pennsylvania, where Elaine would spend a majority of her growing-up years in small mill towns such as Farrell, a company town that had formed when several steel mills converged in the South Sharon area in the early 20th century.
At its peak in 1920, the population of Farrell was 15,586, but the time the Lobls moved there in the 1940’s, the population was steadily declining. Like many mill towns across the country during the Great Depression, there was less demand for steel; therefore fewer mill jobs. During WWII, production at the mills revved up to produce the steel used for making helmets, aircraft, ammunition, and myriad other products for the war.
The background to Elaine’s teen years was punctuated with a regular blast from industrial whistles and the thudding and scraping of metal against metal as the mills met the war’s demands. The Lobl family made their home above the store they maintained and, thanks to the resurgence of the steel industry, managed fairly well.
As a child, Elaine loved school so much that she felt that getting A’s was what she was best at in life. Because she wasn’t very good at music or sports, she was glad that those were only pass/fail classes, so that she could maintain her A’s. Elaine also loved to read. Her favorite books were the works of Jane Austen, as well as Frances Hodgson Burnett‘s The Secret Garden, and P.L. Travers‘ Mary Poppins. She often read in the bathroom, locking the door to extend her privacy.
Living above the family store, a random sulfuric whiff from the mill tingeing the air, Elaine wished she could find books to read with people like her, like her family – not just books with people who had maids and butlers and sophisticated language.
During the Depression, Elaine’s father lost his job, money was scarce, and the Lobl family moved in with relatives for a time. Elaine wished for books she could relate to. In high school, Elaine practiced her love for drawing and developed a passionate interest in science. She was the editor of the school newspaper and the valedictorian of her class.
Education and a love for science
From 1947 to 1948, Elaine worked as a bookkeeper for the Shenango Valley Provision Company, a meat plant in Sharon, Pennsylvania. There she met the man who would later become her husband, David Konigsburg, the brother of one of the owners. At this job, Elaine managed to earn enough money to pay tuition for her first year at the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University).
She studied chemistry while working many odd jobs. She also learned how to apply for scholarships and how to receive work-study assistance, so she raise enough funds to pay for school. She graduated with honors with a BS in chemistry in 1952.
After graduation, Elaine married David Konigsburg before starting graduate school at the University of Pittsburgh. David’s work as an industrial psychologist drew the couple to Florida, and Elaine began teaching chemistry at a girls’ private school, where she discovered that she was more interested in what was going on in the students’ heads than inside the test tubes.
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Raising a family and stepping into writingThe Konigburgs had three children, and when the family moved to New York in the early 1960’s, the youngest daughter began school. Konisburg was left to ponder what to do with her newly found free time. She knew she wanted to do something creative and decided to give children’s book writing a try.
She wanted to write books for children around the ages of 8 to 12 because she felt it to be a time when children seek acceptance from their peers – both by being like everyone else and by being different from everyone else.
So, with pencil in hand, she drew her characters, wrote their stories, and found the path through reconciling these struggles faced by children.
Jennifer, Hecate, Macbeth, William McKinley, and Me, Elizabeth, and The Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, were books about people like her own children and characters her own children could relate to. And, as it turned out, not just her own children, but many, children who were able to relate to E.L. Konigsburg’s characters – proven by the continued success of the books.
An inspiring speech: Daring to disturb the universe
In a 1986 talk at Florida Community College at Jacksonville, Konigsburg gave an inspiring presentation full of literary nuggets. In her speech, she included many astute scientific observations, but one of the larger takeaways from the talk was when she stated that those who dare to disturb the universe must first have the courage to disturb the neighborhood.
Though Konigsburg’s speech was punctuated with the creative processes involved in scientific exploration, it was nestled in the fantastic prose from the words of T.S. Eliot‘s famous poem, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, when he wrote:
I grow old … I grow old …
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.
Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
It was Konigsburg’s observation that in order to disturb the universe, in order to do the human things that humans should do in their time on earth, they must engage their creative impulse. Konigsburg uses examples of Galileo, Newton, and Einstein to illustrate how people must often struggle against popular thought in order to accomplish what they know to the very core of themselves to be true.
In her speech, Konigsburg melded science and fantasy, blended Einstein’s microscope with Eliot’s meter, with poise and grace and intention, because “… any creative act disturbs the universe,” and disturbing the universe is a uniquely human thing to do, something that, perhaps, humans are supposed to do. Why else would humans be creative? Be it cooking, decorating, mathematical reasoning, arts, crafts, engineering, science, etc. humans are creative and, as logic dictates, should disturb the universe in their time on earth.
Konigsburg, then, was more than a writer and illustrator of award-winning children’s books. She was also an astute philosopher, historian, and speaker, reaching a level of noted genius not all writers achieve.
Konigsburg published a collection of her speeches in 1995, TalkTalk, a children’s book author speaks to grown ups. The topics range from why children’s books matter to where ideas come from to finding the courage to disturb the universe. The book is sprinkled with full-color images and immersed in many deeply expansive scientific and historical observations. A melding of science, philosophy, and art, it’s a true Elaine Lobl Konigsburg original.
E.L. Konigsburg passed away in 2013 at the age of 83. Her last children’s book was published in 2011, marking a forty-four-year span of a writing life. She wrote books that won prestigious awards, were translated into dozens of languages, and made into movies and plays. Her twenty-four books include nineteen novels (some of which she illustrated), two picture books (both illustrated by her), and three nonfiction books.
Contributed by Tami Richards, a history enthusiast and freelance writer living in the Pacific Northwest. More of her work can be found here.
Further reading
E.L. Konigsburg’s complete bibliography Obituary on Publishers Weekly Newbery Award acceptance speechThe post E.L. Konigsburg, Children’s Book Writer who “Dared to Disturb the Universe” appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.
April 8, 2025
Her Vision, His Genius: How Jo van Gogh-Bonger rescued Vincent van Gogh’s Legacy
Saving Vincent: A Novel of Jo van Gogh (She Writes Press, April 15, 2025) by Joan Fernandez is based on the true story of the fascinating woman who singlehandedly rescued Vincent van Gogh’s artistic legacy (Photo at right, Jo in 1889; photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons). Here, Joan introduces her novel:
In 1891, timid Jo van Gogh-Bonger lived safely in the background of her art dealer husband Theo’s passionate for selling work by unknown artists, especially his ill-fated, deceased brother Vincent.
When Theo van Gogh died unexpectedly, Jo’s brief happiness was shattered. Her inheritance—hundreds of unsold paintings by Vincent—was worthless. Pressured to move back to her parents’ home, Jo defied tradition, opened a boarding house to raise her infant son alone, and chose to promote Vincent’s art herself.
Her ingenuity and persistence drew the powerful opposition of a Parisian art dealer who vowed to stop her and sink Vincent into obscurity. It would take Jo fifteen years for the world to finally take note of Vincent van Gogh.
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Learn more about
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As I researched and wrote my story about Jo, I frequently returned to a few questions to deepen and explore her story. Why was Jo so fully invested in promoting Vincent, and how did she guide his works to rise from anonymity into the worldwide adoration we know him today.
How could Jo be so certain that Vincent was an amazing talent when so many art experts said he was not? Here are some fascinating facts about Jo’s background and how she overcame resistance to her late brother-in-law’s artistic vision:
Translated musical concepts to visual appreciation. Jo grew up immersed in music thanks to her industrialist father, Hendrik, who splurged on music lessons for his seven children, and frequently took the family to concerts. In her studies, Jo earned the equivalent of a bachelor’s degree in music. She could draw from this early exposure to music’s abstract concepts when appreciating Van Gogh’s art.
Acquired art knowledge through Theo’s tutelage. After Jo became engaged to Vincent’s brother, Theo van Gogh, they lived apart: Jo in Amsterdam and Theo in Paris. As a result, nearly every day they exchanged letters, discussing several topics but many were on art, reflecting Jo’s keen interest in Theo’s work as an art dealer. Once they married, Jo became a behind-the-scenes confidante to Theo. This was an unofficial apprenticeship for when she had to make decisions on Vincent’s art after Theo’s death, Jo would recall what she had learned from their conversations.
Found personal connection to Vincent through letters. Jo only met Vincent three times in life. A few years after his death, Jo discovered that Theo had hoarded his correspondence with his brother—800+ letters over ten years—and she read them all. The correspondence opened the elusive brother-in-law to her as he shared dreams, hopes, philosophies and commentary on his own art. Vincent’s inner life was revealed to her and she became personally invested in his success instead of relying on Theo’s judgement alone.
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Jo (Johanna) van Gogh-Bonger in 1890 with baby son
Vincent Willem (photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)
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As Jo faced resistance to Vincent’s art, what did she do to overcome it?
Followed counterintuitive marketing instincts. After Theo’s death, Jo inherited all of Vincent’s artwork. Within a few months, she moved to a small town in the Netherlands. She took ten crates of Vincent Van Gogh paintings with her, despite the objection of Theo’s artist friends. They argued that Paris was the epicenter of art trading. Jo had a different idea. Her first strategy was to approach Dutch art dealers to sell and exhibit his works. Vincent’s artwork was already outside the norm; gaining a foothold among his native Dutch countrymen gave her confidence, and was an initial step to his being accepted elsewhere. The plan worked.
Cultivated Van Gogh fandom. Based on her own experience of appreciating Vincent after reading his letters, Jo began to loan the letters to critics. In the process, this turned them into advocates in the process. She ran excerpts of Van Gogh’s letters (along with drawings) in a series of six articles over several months in a Parisian art magazine. This generated curiosity among the art-loving public, bypassing the art dealers and art critics who were gatekeepers when it came to what the public saw.
Drew upon Vincent’s art to support poverty relief. Caring about the impoverished working class was a core value for Jo. As a little girl, she had been dismayed by the risk and dangers of dock workers employed in the shipping trade where her father worked. Vincent also identified with laborers, feeling more at home with them instead of “money men.” Inspired by this shared empathy, Jo broadened access to Vincent’s art by paying entry fees for the poor and discounting or waiving them for students and workers.
Held to ambitious vision. Jo holds the record for staging the largest museum exhibition of Van Gogh art ever: she refused to take no for an answer when she requested an exhibit at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam’s premier art museum dedicated to modern art. On her third try, the museum directors acquiesced. Over seven weeks (July 15 – Aug 30, 1905), Jo rented out seven galleries to display 484 works, drawing an estimated audience of 4,500 people. This strategy proved successful, marking the breakthrough she had sought. As a result, Vincent’s name was cemented alongside Cezanne and Gauguin as a founder of modern art.
Through a combination of innate artistic sensibility, honed through musical education and an unexpected apprenticeship with her art dealer husband, Jo van Gogh developed a unique understanding of Vincent’s work. Driven by a profound conviction forged through his letters and a resolute belief in his genius, she defied conventional wisdom and followed her own counterintuitive marketing ideas despite resistance from the status quo.
What a joy it has been for me to share how Jo’s unwavering ambition catapulted Van Gogh from obscurity to securing a permanent place for him in history. Jo’s extraordinary vision is an inspiration.
Joan Fernandez is a novelist who brings to light brilliant women’s courageous deeds in history. She is a former senior marketing executive and general partner of the financial powerhouse Edward Jones. In 2018, she retired from a 30+ year career to be a full-time writer. She is a member of the Historical Novel Society, the Author’s Guild, and the Women’s Fiction Writers Association (WFWA). In April 2020, she founded a Historical Fiction affinity group within WFWA that grew from a handful of people to nearly two hundred authors. Her short story, “A Parisian Daughter,” is published in the anthology, Feisty Deeds: Historical Fictions of Daring Women. Saving Vincent, A Novel of Jo van Gogh, (April, 2025) is her debut novel. Find her at JoanFernandez.com.
Further reading
Van Gogh Museum (Amsterdam) The Woman Who Made Vincent van Gogh Johanna van Gogh and Vincent’s LegacyThe post Her Vision, His Genius: How Jo van Gogh-Bonger rescued Vincent van Gogh’s Legacy appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.
April 1, 2025
Silvina Ocampo, Argentinian Surrealist Writer & Poet
Silvina Ocampo (July 28, 1903 – December 14, 1993) spent most of her life in Buenos Aires, the cosmopolitan capital of Argentina. Born into wealth and privilege, she developed a unique body of work inspired by the avant-garde art and literary movements of her time, including Surrealism and Magical Realism.
Too often, Silvina Ocampo has been mentioned only in relation to her sister, Victoria Ocampo—an intellectual, activist, and publisher; and her husband, Adolfo Bioy Casares, a successful writer and frequent collaborator with Jorge Luis Borges (the pioneering short story writer and translator who brought Spanish-language literature to global prominence).
Ocampo’s work is has been been translated into English more frequently of late. Her short stories reveal astonishing originality, gifts for humor and vivid descriptions, and subtle commentary on social issues of her time.
Childhood, early influences, and art
Silvina Ocampo was born in Buenos Aires to a prominent, wealthy family with aristocratic roots. She was the youngest of six girls, all extensively educated at home by tutors. From an early age, Ocampo spoke and eventually wrote in Spanish, French, and English.
Ocampo’s knowledge of English gave her access to classic American writers, including Emily Dickinson, Herman Melville, and Edgar Allan Poe—all of whom she would later translate into Spanish. Like Poe, many of her later poems and stories feature foreboding atmospheres, unusual deaths for her characters, and sly commentary on the moral hypocrisy of the bourgeoisie.
While growing up, Ocampo and her large family relocated to San Isidoro in the summers, taking up residence in a picturesque villa inspired by European architecture. Years later, Victoria moved in permanently and hosted some of the most influential artistic and literary personages of the 20th century. Ocampo later wrote that her childhood ended after Victoria married and another sister died unexpectedly: “Children have their own hell.”
In her stories, Ocampo rarely described women as naturally maternal or children as charming and innocent. Mothers are often absent and ambivalent; children sense danger close at hand in their sheltered world. In her story “The Prayer,” Ocampo makes this observation: “Children’s crimes are dangerous. Children use any means to reach their ends. They study dictionaries. Nothing gets by them. They know everything.”
When Victoria reviewed her sister’s first story collection, Forgotten Journey, she wrote: “Silvina Ocampo’s stories are memories masked by dreams; dreams of the kind we dream with our eyes open. The friendship or enmity of inanimate things – which cease to be – populate these stories as they populated our childhood or as they populate the lives of savage tribes.”
At the tender age of five, Ocampo made the long journey from Argentina to Paris by ocean liner, and she returned to study art in 1920 when she was seventeen. She studied painting with Giorgio de Chirico and Férnand Leger, both early practitioners of Surrealism. Upon her return to Buenos Aires, she continued painting and frequently participated in exhibitions.
In his preface to Ocampo’s short story collection Leopoldina’s Dream, Borges noted that her artistic skills influenced her writing. “Like Rossetti and Blake, Silvina has come to poetry by the luminous paths of drawing and painting,” he wrote, “and the immediacy and certainty of the visual image persist in her written pages.”
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Silvina in the 1930s (photo courtesy of Wikmedia Commons)
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In 1931, Victoria founded the literary magazine Sur, which, until 1992, published articles by leading writers, philosophers, and intellectuals. Victoria was her sister’s first publisher, and after the latter made her literary debut in Sur, she decided to devote her life to writing.
Ocampo met the aspiring author Adolfo Bioy Casares in 1934, when she was thirty-one and he was twenty. When they married in 1940, they shocked both their families and the bourgeoisie society. Casares was devoted to his wife’s writing and equally admired his sister-in-law’s accomplishments as a publisher and intellectual.
Casares’ support of his wife’s career and their age difference weren’t the only unusual factors of their marriage. He was frequently unfaithful and fathered at least two children by other women. Ocampo adopted his daughter Marta and raised her as her own, and Casares’ extramarital son Fabián was later awarded the right to the estates of both his father and Ocampo.
In her only novel, The Promise, Ocampo wrote: “What is falling in love, anyway? Letting go of disgust, of fear, letting go of everything.” Her writing reveals a hyperawareness that men in Latin American society got away with far more misbehavior than women ever could. Perhaps rejecting societal expectations for marriage was something else Ocampo let go of to remain with a man who took her writing seriously. Casares always returned to Ocampo after his affairs, and they remained married for fifty-three years.
One must read Ocampo’s stories carefully to discern her heroines chafing at the rules that don’t apply to the men in their lives, and how emotional repression and internalized misogyny often lead to acts of violence. Her stories reveal a dedication to depicting the interior monologues of her female characters — often with a shocking disregard for social mores and the intensely Catholic, patriarchal society that foreshadowed that foreshadows the novels of Ukrainian-born Brazilian Clarice Lispector and the bestselling Chilean-American writer Isabel Allende.
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Silvina with Bioy Casares, date unknown
(photo courtesy of Wikmedia Commons)
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Jorge Luis Borges was often published in Sur, and throughout his celebrated career he maintained close friendships with Ocampo, her husband Casares, and Victoria. Between the four of them, they spoke some ten languages. Borges was renowned for his love of Old English and Norse. They critiqued one another’s works, and wrote prefaces for and reviews for each other.
One of their most significant joint projects was Antologia de la literatura fantástica, published in 1940, later translated as The Book of Fantasy It was jointly edited by Ocampo, Borges, and Casares. They selected some eighty stories by familiar writers including Lewis Carroll and James Joyce, as well as obscure authors spanning ancient China and Imperial Rome. Trailblazing science fiction and fantasy writer Ursula K. Le Guin admired the collection and wrote a foreword for the English translation in 1988.
In 1946, Ocampo and her husband co-wrote a subversive detective story that brilliantly broke all the conventions of the genre, titled Los que aman, odian, which was translated in 2013 as Where There’s Love, There’s Hate. The main character is Humberto Huberman, a name strikingly reminiscent of Humbert Humbert, the antihero of Vladimir Nabokov’s infamous novel Lolita, published nine years later. Both characters act as unreliable narrators in their respective stories.
In addition to her numerous translations of foreign literature into Spanish and her poetry, which Borges greatly admired, Ocampo diligently revised her work with the discerning eye of both an author and an artist. Despite her extensive literary output spanning nearly six decades, only a small fraction has been translated into English. Ocampo wrote eloquently about the importance of writing:
“When you write everything is possible, even the very opposite of what you are. I write so that other people can discover what they should love, and sometimes so they discover what I love. I write in order not to forget what is most important in the world: friendship and love, wisdom and art—a way of living without dying, a way of death without dying. On paper, something of us remains, our soul holds onto something in our lives: something more important than the human voice, which changes with health, luck, muteness, and, finally, with age.”
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Short stories, and a novel 25 years in the makingWith the eye of a painter, even in her briefest stories Ocampo takes time to vividly describe the Argentinian scenery in her tales: grim ancestral portraits and spiral staircases in rotting mansions; flamingoes, llamas, and nights “smelling of mint and rain”; groves of eucalyptus, palm, and rubber trees alongside fields of white carnations and orange gladioli.
Amid all the natural beauty in her tales, terror and cruelty hover nearby. The lingering effects of colonialism are present in several of her stories, when fair-skinned and blonde Argentinian women are treated with more respect than pueblos, or indigenous women, and privileged young men are allowed to use various substances, and beat their pets and servants without consequences.
In 1982, Ocampo wrote in a letter to a friend: “I don’t like conventions, that a novel needs to have an ending, for example.” Widely read in multiple languages, along with her astonishing literary connections, she was fully aware of standard literary conventions and traditions. However, she was as determined to break rules in her novel, as she did in her short stories.
Ocampo revised her only novel, The Promise, over a span of twenty-five years, never explicitly stating that she considered her book finished. She revised it most assiduously from 1988–89, after receiving the diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease. In many of her short stories, time is rarely linear but rather something that an author can fold, wrinkle, or smooth at will. The same is true of The Promise.
Like Scheherazade in One Thousand and One Nights, Ocampo’s nameless heroine is acutely aware of her hypnotic storytelling powers: “I told stories to death so that it would save my life.” For the duration of the novel, the heroine is stranded in the ocean and memories of her life flood back to her, and it is not revealed how many of the narrator’s memories are true or false.
Only rarely does the narrator comment on the ocean in which she is slowly drowning, such as observations of flying fish, or pondering if mermaids exist. “Horrible, beautiful, divine?” she asks herself. In this eerie tale, the narrator’s descriptions of the sea around her resemble staccato notes in a piece of music that make sense only to the conductor.
Echoing her earlier collaboration with her husband, a murder mystery is woven through The Promise, but isn’t as essential to the plot as it is to revealing glimpses into the character’s personality and motivations. Like in her stories, Ocampo is less interested in Realism than in chiseling away at the absurdity of reality. She wields elements of Surrealism, Magical Realism, and 19th-century Gothic literature with the self-assurance of a master.
“I don’t have a life of my own; I have only feelings,” boldly states her narrator at the beginning of the novel. “My experiences were never important—not during the course of my life nor even on the threshold of death. Instead, the lives of others have become mine.”
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Villa Ocampo in San Isidro
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In her short stories and The Promise, Ocampo often writes movingly of older women, who “always look like they’re in disguise.” She died on December 14, 1993 at the age of ninety after a three-year decline from Alzheimer’s disease. She was buried in her family’s crypt. Casares was laid beside her after his death six years later.
The Ocampo family home was bequeathed by Victoria to UNESCO in 1973, and Villa Ocampo was fully restored in 2003. It is now open to the public as a cultural center. Among the resplendent home’s many attractions are the high-ceilinged music room, with its grand piano, where Igor Stravinsky and Arthur Rubinstein played. The extraordinary library, featuring some 12,000 books, many of which are signed by the greatest authors of the 20th century.
The Hesburgh Libraries at the University of Notre Dame houses an extensive collection of Ocampo’s writings, including “first editions of her short story publications, poetry collections and collaborative works,” and an undated diary, with a section that “tells the story of two intimate, female friends as they travel to Paris in search of adventure.”
In 1979, her literary oeuvre was denied Argentina’s National Prize for Literature because the judges deemed it “demasiado crueles”—too cruel. Victoria had been nominated twice for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1970 and 1974, both times losing to male authors. On the latter occasion, Victoria was one of nine nominated women out of more than one hundred writers, illustrating the vast gulf that women writers faced at the time.
In her lifetime, Ocampo witnessed Borges’ work translated into European languages and English, while her own body of published work received little attention outside of Argentina. In addition, it was often unfavorably compared to the work of Borges. Victoria, Casares, and Borges championed her work; the latter wrote: “Silvina Ocampo is one of our best writers. Her stories have no equal in our literature.”
The Cuban-born Italian writer and journalist Italo Calvino also admired Ocampo: “I don’t know of another writer who better captures the magic inside everyday rituals, the forbidden or hidden face that our mirrors don’t show us.”
Ocampo’s work has being increasingly translated in the 21st century. In 2015, the New York Review of Books Classics published a collection of her poetry as well as Thus Were Their Faces, a collection of short stories. In 2019, City Lights Books published Ocampo’s only novel, The Promise, and Forgotten Journey, her debut collection of short stories first published in 1937.
When The Promise and Forgotten Journey were translated, John Freeman provided a glowing review. “Year after year, more of the great Argentinian writer Silvina Ocampo is restored to us, like the lost work of a luminously dark seer … Lusciously strange, uncompromising, yet balanced and precise, there has never been another voice like hers.”
Ocampo published eleven collections of poetry during her lifetime, but only one has been translated into English—Silvina Ocampo, published by New York Review Books in 2015.
She frequently contributed to children’s story collections and literary anthologies. Still, arguably her most famous—and, as of this writing, the only one translated into English—is Antología de la literatura fantástica (1940), on which she collaborated with Casares and Borges, and which was translated as The Book of Fantasy in 1988.
At one point in The Promise, the narrator exclaims, “If I die before I finish what I’m writing, no one will remember me, not even the person I loved most in the world.” Was this fear Ocampo’s own? Perhaps it haunts every writer, but in her case, she need not have feared.
Thirty years after Silvina Ocampo’s death, there is growing interest in her finely crafted, unsettling tales. For centuries, South America has been renowned for its gold. Today, the testimonies and literary contributions of its women are being unearthed, and their vibrant words shine far brighter than any metal.
Contributed by Katharine Armbrester, a 2022 graduate of the MFA creative writing program at the Mississippi University for Women. She is a devotee of Flannery O’Connor and Margaret Atwood, and loves periodicals, history, and writing.
Further Reading and SourcesNovellas and Novels
Los que aman, odian with Adolfo Bioy Casares (1946,translated in 2013 as Where There’s Love, There’s Hate)La torre sin fin (2007, translated in 2010 as The Topless Tower)La promesa (2011, translated in 2019 as The Promise)
Short Story Collections
Forgotten Journey (1937, translated in 2019)Leopoldina’s Dream (1988), revised and expanded by New York Review of Booksin 2015 as Thus Were Their Faces
More information
John Freeman’s reviews of The Promise and Forgotten Journey ,Los Angeles Review of BooksArticle about the publication of The Promise and Forgotten Journey for NPR UNESCO site dedicated to Villa Ocampo University of Notre Dame Hesburgh Libraries Silvina Ocampo collectionThe post Silvina Ocampo, Argentinian Surrealist Writer & Poet appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.
March 18, 2025
Bearing Witness: the Life of War Correspondent Marie Colvin
Marie Colvin (January 12, 1956 – February 22, 2012) was an American journalist known for her intimate, storytelling reporting style covering conflicts worldwide.
She was best known for her coverage of the Middle East (as well as for her trademark black eyepatch, worn after losing her left eye in Sri Lanka). She died while covering the conflict in Syria in 2012, and the Syrian government has since been held responsible for her death.
Early life and education
Marie Catherine Colvin was born in Astoria, Queens, the eldest of five children. She was raised in the affluent Oyster Bay area, Her parents, Bill and Rosemarie, were both high school teachers. Bill was passionate about literature and Democratic politics and passed both passions on to Marie.
Marie studied anthropology at Yale, and during her four years there she “changed from a regular science major to a science major who only takes English courses (there was no time to change majors).”
She took a class with writer and journalist John Hersey, one of the first practitioners of “New Journalism” — in which storytelling techniques are applied to reporting. She was inspired to begin writing for the Yale Daily News and realized this was her calling.
Beginning a career of global reporting
After graduating in 1978, Marie began working as an editor for the newsletter for Teamsters Local 237 in New York City, then moved to a staff reporter position for United Press International in Trenton, New Jersey. In 1984 UPI had named her Paris Bureau Chief. She was responsible for the international news desk, which gave her the opportunity to cover the Middle East, a region that fascinated her.
Marie was determined to cover the possible outbreak of war in Libya in 1986. New York Times reporter Judith Miller told her to “Just go … Qaddafi is crazy, and he will like you.” She went, and indeed, he liked her; she was summoned to his private chambers.
“It was midnight,” she wrote, “when Col. Muammar Gadhafi, the man the world loves to hate, walked into the small underground room in a red silk shirt, baggy white silk pants, and a gold cape tied at his neck.” She recalled that he had introduced himself, “I am Qaddafi,” and she had responded, “No kidding,” before spending the rest of the night fending off his advances.
It was the first of dozens of interviews she conducted throughout her career with heads of state, world leaders and rebel leaders. These included Yasser Arafat, on whom she wrote and produced a BBC documentary based on over twenty personal interviews. She also accompanied him to the White House when peace talks were being conducted with Yitzhak Rabin. During the 1993 Oslo peace accords she reportedly told him, “Just put the pencil down and sign it already.”
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In extremis: reporting for the Sunday TimesMarie moved to The Sunday Times in London in 1986 and reported on conflicts all over the world, including East Timor, the Balkans, Sierra Leone, Somalia, and Chechnya. She continued to report on the Middle East and covered the Iran–Iraq war in the 1980s, both Gulf Wars, and the Arab Spring of 2011.
She became recognized for her intimate writing style, avoiding the dominant macho language and image of war reporting. She focused instead on the horrific human cost of every conflict. “My job,” she said, “is to bear witness. I have never been interested in knowing what make of plane just bombed a village.” She won several awards, including the Courage in Journalism Award, the British Press Award, and the Foreign Press International’s Journalist of the Year Award.
Publicly, she wasn’t a fan of feminism, quoting her heroine Martha Gellhorn: “Feminists nark me.” In private, however, she was aware that more was demanded of her than of her male colleagues. On the subject of female journalists, she wrote, “Maybe we feel the need to test ourselves more, to see how much we can take and survive.”
While on assignment, her determination to “go in bare and eat what they eat, drink what they drink, sleep where they sleep” often led her to take extreme risks. She went where other journalists would not, and stayed when others left, driven by the knowledge that “what I write about is humanity in extremis, pushed to the unendurable, and that it is important to tell people what really happens in wars…”
This drive was demonstrated in 1999 in East Timor when Marie and two female Dutch journalists chose to stay in a besieged UN compound with hundreds of refugees who were fleeing Indonesian-backed militia forces. UN staff and other journalists (mostly male) were evacuated, leading to Marie’s wry comment that, “They don’t make men like they used to.”
Marie’s determination to stay saved the lives of those refugees when the UN, embarrassed by her powerful reports, returned to the compound to evacuate them. A front-page headline read, “Her courage saved 1,500.”
Photographer Paul Conroy (one of the few photographers she was happy to work with and who was with her in Syria when she died) said of her bravery,
“People called her fearless, but they are absolutely wrong. She was terrified. Her bravery came from going back in even though she was terrified. That’s completely different from being fearless. It was just that curiosity overtook any sense of staying alive.”
Paying the price: PTSD
Marie did not emerge unscathed from so many war zones. In 2001, while covering an upsurge of violence in the Sri Lankan civil war, she lost her left eye in a rocket-propelled grenade attack. She had already seen more combat than most soldiers; the trauma of the injury triggered the full-blown PTSD that she struggled with for the rest of her life.
At her worst times – often back home in London, where there was nothing to distract her from paranoia, panic attacks, and nightmares – she would disappear for days.
After Marie’s death, friends and colleagues recalled her long nights of partying and drinking, but the reality was a serious alcohol problem that she never quite mastered. Pressured by friends and family, she eventually sought help for PTSD, though she said, “I have no intention of not drinking, [but] I never drink when I am covering a war.”
In extremis II: personal life
Marie’s personal life was tumultuous. Not long after joining the Sunday Times she met her first husband, Patrick Bishop. A diplomatic correspondent, he was in Iraq at the same time as Marie to cover the Iran–Iraq war. He recalled wanting to impress her with his knowledge of artillery and the difference between incoming and outgoing fire.
“I explained that the bang we had just heard was outgoing and therefore nothing to worry about. Then there was another explosion. ‘And that one,’ I said, ‘is incoming!’ and threw myself headlong onto the ground. As the shell exploded some distance away, I looked up to see the woman I had been trying to show off to, gazing down at me with pity and amusement.”
They married in August 1989 but Bishop was unfaithful, and the marriage quickly dissolved. After their divorce, Marie married Bolivian journalist Juan Carlos Gumucio in 1996. This time she suffered two miscarriages, and Gumucio proved to be violent and an alcoholic. They divorced, and he took his own life in 2002.
In 1999, Marie reunited with Bishop while covering the conflict in Kosovo, but the relationship didn’t last any longer the second time around. In 2003, she met Richard Flaye, a divorced company director, and was soon introducing him as “the love of my life.” They shared a passion for ocean sailing, and Flaye seemed to give Marie the kind of stability she’d never experienced. Their relationship lasted on and off until Marie’s death in 2012.
The last assignment: Syria, 2012
With her characteristic drive to report on the brutality of war, Marie was determined to cover the hostilities that began in Syria in 2011. Along with photographer Paul Conroy, she crossed into the city of Homs in February 2012, ignoring the Syrian government’s attempts to prevent journalists from covering the conflict. Homs was under direct attack from the Syrian army and foreign reporters were banned.
Along with other foreign journalists who had also made it in, Marie filed her reports from a makeshift media center surrounded by bombed-out buildings. Homs, she wrote, was: “
… the symbol of the revolt, a ghost town, echoing with the sound of shelling and the crack of sniper fire, the odd car careening down the street at speed. Hope to get to a conference hall basement where 300 women and children are living in the cold and dark. Candles, one baby born this week without medical care, little food.”
Marie and Paul left Homs after a few days when the situation rapidly deteriorated, but Marie was determined to return. This time, there was no space for them to carry video equipment, flak jackets, or helmets, and the Syrian army was under orders to kill any journalists found near the besieged area. They had to crawl for hours through a frigid tunnel from outside of the city. Even in such dire circumstances, though, Marie did not lose her sense of humor: she emailed Flaye that night, saying,
“You would have laughed. I had to climb over two stone walls tonight, and had trouble with the second (six feet) so a rebel made a cat’s cradle of his two hands and said, ‘Step here and I will give you a lift up.’ Except he thought I was much heavier than I am, so when he ‘lifted’ my foot, he launched me right over the wall and I landed on my head in the mud!”
Back at the media center, there were few journalists left. In an interview with CNN broadcast the night before she died, Marie said, “It’s a complete and utter lie they’re only going after terrorists. The Syrian Army is simply shelling a city of cold, starving civilians.”
Marie was killed on February 22, when direct rocket fire hit the media center. French photographer Rémi Ochlik also died in the attack, while Conroy – along with Syrian translator Wael al-Omar and French journalist Edith Bouvier – was severely injured.
The aftermath of Marie Colvin’s death
Marie’s death triggered an outpouring of tributes from friends and colleagues around the world. Questions were raised as to why she went back into Homs when it was so clearly too dangerous. There was a huge backlash against the Sunday Times for “allowing” her to continue in Syria.
According to Vanity Fair journalist Marie Brenner, there was “rage” among foreign staff members at the paper at “what they considered the danger they now faced in the paper’s frenzy for press awards.”
Concerns were also raised about Marie’s mental state and the level of support she had received from her superiors. However, as Marie’s executor, Jane Wellesley, pointed out, “If the Sunday Times had not allowed Marie to continue the work she loved, it would have destroyed her.”
In 2016, a civil suit was filed against the Syrian government by Marie’s family. Three years later, a US court found that the government, led by Bashar al-Assad, was responsible for Marie’s death: Judge Amy Berman Jackson ruled that it had been an “extrajudicial killing” and ordered Damascus to pay over $300 million in damages for the “unconscionable crime.”
Later, the Marie Colvin Memorial Foundation was established at Stony Brook University to honor Marie’s legacy of supporting victims of conflict and the journalists who report on it. The foundation focuses on education, aid, and raising global awareness of conflict.
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A Private War and Marie Colvin’s LegacyIn 2018, two films and a biography were released about Marie’s life. A Private War is perhaps the best-known. Starring Rosamund Pike as Marie and with Paul Conroy as a consultant, it received positive reviews from critics as well as Marie’s family and friends.
The level of realistic detail in the film was remarkable. Director Matthew Heineman was also a documentary film maker, and ensured that all the extras cast had actually lived through the events being recreated: they were Syrians who had been shelled in a basement in Homs, they were Libyans who had been shaken by the traumas of war.
A documentary film called Under the Wire was also produced, based on Paul Conroy’s memoir about his time with Marie, and Syria in particular.
A biography titled In Extremis: The Life of War Correspondent Marie Colvin was written by her longtime friend and colleague Lindsay Hilsum, International Editor for Channel 4 News in the UK. Based on hundreds of interviews with Marie’s family, friends, and other colleagues, as well as Marie’s extensive private journals going back to her childhood, it was a remarkably rounded biography. It won the 2019 James Tait Black Award as well as being shortlisted for the Costa Biography Award.
Hilsum later said, “Part of me thinks Marie is looking down saying, ‘Hey, what’s all the fuss, this is what we do’. But I also think she would be glad that people were talking about Homs again, and hope that maybe some of the attention would be focused on Yemen and other under-reported conflicts and the people suffering in them.”
Contributed by Elodie Barnes. Elodie is a writer and editor with a serious case of wanderlust. Her short fiction has been widely published online and is included in the Best Small Fictions 2022 Anthology published by Sonder Press. She is Books & Creative Writing Editor at Lucy Writers Platform, she is also co-facilitating What the Water Gave Us, an Arts Council England-funded anthology of emerging women writers from migrant backgrounds. She is currently working on a collection of short stories, and when not writing can usually be found planning the next trip abroad, or daydreaming her way back to 1920s Paris. Find more of her writings here and on Literary Ladies Guide.
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Further reading
In Extremis: The Life of War Correspondent Marie Colvin by Lindsay Hilsum, 2018A Private War: Marie Colvin and Other Tales of Heroes, Scoundrels and Renegades by Marie Brenner, 2019On the Front Line: The Collected Journalism of Marie Colvin by Marie Colvin, 2012The post Bearing Witness: the Life of War Correspondent Marie Colvin appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.
March 14, 2025
Nikki Giovanni: An Appreciation of the Esteemed Poet
Some years before her death, renowned poet, professor, and activist Nikki Giovanni wrote, “I hope I die warmed by the life I tried to live.”
Giovanni’s hope and vision have been realized. When she passed away on December 9, 2024, she was surrounded by the boundless love of her wife, Virginia Fowler, her son Thomas, and her granddaughter Kai.
Nikki Giovanni was eighty-one years old when she died of complications from cancer, her third diagnosis of the disease. Despite this tremendous physical challenge, Ms. Giovanni continued to write, speak, teach, and publish throughout the last decade of her life.
For nearly sixty years, Giovanni was the quintessential people’s poet. She used deceptively simple language to explore the complexities at the intersection of race, politics, gender, love, loneliness, and creativity.
Giovanni’s friend and fellow poet and author Renee Watson described her as “one of the cultural icons and of the Black Arts and Civil Rights movements. She became friends with Rosa Parks, Aretha Franklin, James Baldwin, Nina Simone, and Muhammad Ali, and inspired generations of students, artists, activists, musicians, scholars and human beings, young and old.”
A turbulent early lifeBorn Yolanda Cornelia Giovanni Jr., her parents were Yolande (Watson) Giovanni and Jones Giovanni, on June 7, 1943. Her older sister, Gary Ann, nicknamed her Nikki. Shortly after she was born, the family moved to Cincinnati, Ohio, where her parents worked as grade school teachers.
The Giovanni home was turbulent. Her father abused her mother physically and psychologically. Nikki grew to despise her father’s violence and her mother’s acceptance of the situation.
When she was fifteen, Giovanni decided to save herself and moved into her grandparents’ home in Knoxville, Tennessee. She attended Austin High School, where her grandfather taught Latin, and graduated early.
University studiesHer next stop was Fisk University (an HBCU) in Nashville, Tennessee. Giovanni later commented that Fisk, with its sorority sisters dominating the campus in the early 1960s, was “an odd fit.” The Women’s Dean was especially punitive towards her. When she left campus overnight for Thanksgiving break without permission, she was expelled from the university.
A year later, after Giovanni had returned to Knoxville and worked in a local Walgreens. The new Dean of Women from Fisk University, Blanche McConnell Cowan, went to Knoxville and urged her to return to her studies. Giovanni agreed. She helped to rebuild Fisk University’s chapter of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and began to study with John Oliver Killens, a founder of the Harlem Writers World. She graduated with honors in 1967.
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Learn more about Nikki Giovanni
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Giovanni attended the University of Pennsylvania’s School for Social Work for a brief time, but realized that her calling to write was all-consuming. Shortly after she graduated from Fisk, her grandmother, Louvenia Watson, passed away and Giovanni began to write poetry to cope with her grief.
For the next several years, Giovanni wrote and was a frequent guest on Soul!, the PBS Black culture program. She had a son in 1969 and ignored comments regarding her unmarried status. She explained her decision to Ebony magazine with great emphasis:
“I had a baby at 25 because I wanted to have a baby and I could afford to have a baby. I didn’t get married I didn’t want to get married and I could afford not to get married.”
Giovanni held teaching positions at Rutgers University and Queens College until 1987, when Virginia Fowler recruited her to be a visiting professor at Virginia Tech University. Giovanni earned tenure, and she and Ms. Fowler became a couple.
Poetry as truth-tellingGiovanni’s poetry was naturally averse to pretension and artifice. She perceived poetry as a vehicle for truth-telling, dispelling the myths perpetuating an inequitable, racist society. One of her early poems, “Ego-Tripping,” which has been performed for generations by young African American women, exudes pride and power in recognizing themselves in their ancestors:
Ego Tripping (there may be a reason why)
I was born in the congo
I walked in the fertile crescent and built
The sphinx
I designed a pyramid is tough that a star
That glows every one hundred years falls
Into the center giving divine perfect light
I am bad.
Read the full poem here.
In the 1970s, Giovanni wrote poetry that explored nature, intimacy, beauty, and the comforts of home:
My House (an excerpt; this is the third verse)
I mean it’s my house
And I want to fry pork chops
And bake sweet potatoes
And call them yams
Cause I run the kitchen
And I can stand the heat
Read the full poem here.
Giovanni delighted her readers with unexpected bursts of joy, such as the self-deprecating worries of one lover — feeling undeserving of the love given by their new lover:
I Take Master Card
I’ve heard all the stories
‘bout how you don’t deserve me
‘cause I’m so strong and beautiful
And wonderful and you could
never live up to what you know I should have
I want you to know
I take Master Card
Read the full poem here.
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Nikki Giovanni in a live talk; honoring TupacAttending a live talk by Nikki Giovanni was one of the most motivational gifts anyone could receive. As Maya Angelou famously remarked, what you remember about people is how they made you feel. Giovanni had a gift for making people feel good.
Giovanni had a gift for connecting with her audience (students were a particular favorite of hers), leaving them with confidence that they too, could write poetry that could change their lives — and perhaps even the world.
I was fortunate to be in an audience of Giovanni’s in November 1996. The San Francisco Book Festival hosted her as one of their major speakers; living in San Francisco then, I was able to attend and experience her magic. She spent some time talking about the murder of rapper Tupac Shakur (which occurred three months before this gathering), angry that many young Black men would not live to reach maturity; still, she expressed mood of moving forward. She had the audience actively engaged and absorbing every word without descending into collective despair.
In honor of Tupac, THUG LIFE, the tattoo that Tupac Shakur had emblazoned on his chest, was adapted to a much smaller size and tattooed on Ms. Giovanni’s wrist. Ms. Giovanni stated that she would “rather be with the thugs than the people talking about them.” In 1997, Giovanni published her book Love Poems, a remembrance of Tupac. That night, the audience heard part of the poem All Eyes on U:
All Eyes on U (for 2Pac Shakur 1971-1996)
if those who lived by lies died by lies there would be nobody on wall street
In executive suites in academic offices instructing the young
don’t tell me he got what he deserved he deserved a chariot and
The accolades of a grateful people
he deserved his life
Read the rest of the poem here.
Nikki Giovanni speaking at Emory University, 2008
Photo by Brett Weinstein, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
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Nikki Giovanni wrote thirty books in her lifetime: poetry, prose, and children’s books. Although she never sought accolades, she was honored to accept the NAACP Image Award, the Langston Hughes Medal, the Caldecott Medal, and the Children’s Book Award. She held twenty-seven honorary degrees from various colleges and universities, and was given the key to more than two dozen American cities.
Perhaps Giovanni’s most unusual recognition was by scientist Robert James Baker, a devoted fan who named a species of a South American bat after her: the Micronycteris giovanniae.
Giovanni retired from Virginia Tech in 2022 and, despite her health challenges, wrote until the end of her life. The Last Book, her fittingly titled final poetry collection, will be published in late 2025.
Poet Renee Watson, a close friend of Giovanni’s, wrote a praise poem for Giovanni’s eightieth birthday. It encapsulates her place in history and the arts:
Ever year on the seventh of June
Heaven throws a birthday party
for Nikki.
Coretta is there. She’s protective of Aiyana and Hadiya.
She introduces them to Sandra and Breonna, keeps them close.
And surely Harriet and Fannie and Rosa are swapping stories of how
They got over.
And Lucille and Gwendolyn and Margaret recite sonnets, teach them to Betty.
And Toni and Maya are writing jubilees for the angels to sing.
Read more about this poem (along with Watson’s conversation with Nikki Giovanni here)
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Further reading and sources
Poetry Foundation Nikki Giovanni’s personal website Remembering the Fierce and Lyrical Voice of Nikki Giovanni (video) In Memoriam: Nikki Giovanni Nikki Giovanni, Poet Who Wrote of Black JoyContributed by Nancy Snyder, who retired from the City and County of San Francisco and as a union officer for SEIU Local 1021/790. She writes about books and women writers to understand the world and her place in it.
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March 10, 2025
Mary Wollstonecraft’s Letters from Scandinavia (1796)
The work of feminist writer and philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft’s (1759–1797) has endured, despite attempts of critics of her time to bury her legacy after her death. A year after she died, her husband, William Godwin, published Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman, unwittingly turning the public against the love of his life.
Two generations later, however, women rediscovered Mary Wollstonecraft’s writing — breathing new life into a historical figure who might have been forgotten along with other notable women whose words were lost to the patriarchy.
William Godwin meant no harm when he published his memoir of Mary Wollstonecraft in 1798. Mired in grief, he wanted the world to know Mary the way he did— as a compassionate, brilliant woman.
His mistake was putting her personal life on display by including her private letters to her former lover, Gilbert Imlay, an American businessman, in the appendix of the memoir. Mary had lived with Imlay and had their daughter, Fanny, out of wedlock. The public scorned Mary, judging her to be immoral. The public turned on Godwin as well; his stature in the literary and political establishment plummeted.
What could he have been thinking? If Godwin wanted people to know the real Mary Wollstonecraft, he could have simply directed them to her 1796 travel narrative: Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark is a highly personal account of Mary’s journey to Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. She traveled to these Scandinavian countries in 1795 on Gilbert Imlay’s behalf, hoping to recover a missing shipment of silver.
Mary’s ultimate goal: to win Imlay back from the actress he had taken up with. Bereft over his infidelity, she tried to take her own life by drinking laudanum.
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Solitary Walker: A Novel of Mary Wollstonecraft by N.J. Mastro
is available on Bookshop.org*, Amazon*, and wherever books are sold
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Mary met Gilbert Imlay in France in 1793, where she had moved to write about the French Revolution. Imlay, an American, was there on “business.” Perhaps seeing an independent, adventuresome spirit akin to her own (they both resisted the idea of marriage), they embarked on an affair.
After a time, Imlay pulled away from Mary. When he moved to London for his shipping enterprise and left her in Paris with their child, Mary plunged into an emotional abyss. A few months later, when France declared war on Great Britain, she was in danger. As a British national, the authorities could arrest her at any moment. Making matters worse, her once revolutionary writing had suddenly marked her as an anti-revolutionary under Maximilien Robespierre’s new regime. To be on the safe side, she and Imlay pretended to be married. Her status as his wife, Imlay assured her, would ward off the authorities.
Mary didn’t foresee the trap she was stepping into — the kind that ensnares women who are blinded by love. When she and Imlay faked their marriage certificate with the help of the American ambassador, Gouverneur Morris, they never spoke of how the lie might end. Imlay’s sudden abandonment of Mary and their daughter forced the question.
Persistent and determined, Mary knew her reputation (and thus her livelihood) would be ruined if it were to come out that she and Imlay weren’t married. Thus, in the spring of 1795, she would have done anything to keep him. That included traveling to Scandinavia to find the shipment of missing silver — which, to Mary’s horror, Imlay had stolen.
It was audacious to travel alone to Scandinavia with only her daughter Fanny and the child’s nursemaid as companions. Scandinavia was a remote, rugged land in the far northern reaches of the hemisphere. Mary hired no guide and carried no pistol for protection. She wrote frequently to Imlay, expressing the intense sadness she felt:
“How am I altered by disappointment! — When going to [Lisbon] ten years ago, the elasticity of my mind was sufficient to ward off weariness — and the imagination could dip her brush in the rainbow of fancy, and sketch futurity in smiling colours. Now I am going towards the North in search of sunbeams! — Will any ever warm this desolated heart? All nature seems to frown — or rather mourn with me. — Every thing is cold — cold as my expectations! … I have lost the little appetite I had; and I lie awake, till thinking almost drives me to the brink of madness — only to the brink for I never forget, even in the feverish slumbers I sometimes fall into, the misery I am labouring to blunt …”
In addition to documenting the journey in letters, Mary kept notes of her travels. Prior to leaving London, she had secured an advance from her publisher, Joseph Johnson, for a travel narrative to be written upon her return.
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Learn more about Mary Wollstonecraft
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Mary’s mission to recover Imlay’s silver fell short, but not before turning over every possible lead in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark — all to no avail. Upon her return to London, she and Imlay parted for good. Distraught, Mary attempted to drown herself by jumping into the Thames. Watermen rescued her downstream.
As she had always done, Mary turned to her pen as an antidote to despair. During her physical and emotional recovery, she realized that the letters she’d written to Imlay (which he had returned to her) were the perfect the framework for her travel narrative. In a matter of months, she penned Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark, an epistolary travel narrative addressed to an unnamed individual.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, an Enlightenment philosopher Mary favored, may have influenced the structure of her travel narrative. Rousseau’s Reveries of a Solitary Walker (1782), an autobiographical account of his walks in France in the final years of his life, revealed his state of disenchantment. Mary likely felt some affinity with Rousseau as she traveled alone with her daughter in the verdant taiga in the summer of 1795.
Mary had been more discrete than her future husband William Godwin, who put her words before a harsh public after her death. For example, she wrote to Imlay that summer from Gothenburg, Sweden, on July 1:
“I labor in vain to calm my mind — my soul has been overpowered by sorrow and disappointment. Every thing fatigues me — this is a life that cannot last long … we must either resolve to live together, or part for ever, I cannot bear these continual struggles.”
But in her travel narrative, she tempered her expression, pulling a thin veil over her distressed feelings, yet baring her soul as she confessed how sadness enveloped her in this foreign land:
“How frequently has melancholy and even misanthropy taken possession of me, when the world has disgusted me, and friends have proved unkind.”
Mary admitted that she carried deep wounds — a daring move for a writer, especially a woman. In a later passage in Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark, she became more direct:
“You have sometimes wondered, my dear friend, at the extreme affection of my nature. But such is the temperature of my soul. It is not the vivacity of you, the heyday of existence. For years I have endeavoured to calm an impetuous tide, labouring to make my feelings take an orderly course. It was striving against the stream. I must love and admire with warmth, or I sink into sadness. Tokens of love which I have received have wrapped me in Elysium, purifying the heart they enchanted.”
Who is “you?” Mary doesn’t tell the reader, but those in her circle knew she was writing to Imlay, whom they also believed was her husband. Mary didn’t care. Using Imlay as a prop to tell her story, projecting him as cold and unfeeling, she gave herself the last word in their failed love affair.
Scandinavia wasn’t a complete loss for Mary. Her travel narrative conveyed how time spent in nature improved her lagging spirits, and she seemed to have gotten a modicum of relief from her melancholy. Glimmers of the Mary of old began to resurface, and she charmed readers with frankness and sincerity.
So smitten was William Godwin upon reading Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark, he remarked, “If ever there was a book calculated to make a man in love with its author, this appears to me to be the book.” He and Mary first met at a dinner held by her publisher, Joseph Johnson, where they traded fiery words. Four years later, they reconnected. In Memoirs, Godwin described their renewed acquaintance:
“When we met again, we met with new pleasure, and, I may add, with a more decisive preference for each other … It was friendship melting into love. Previously to our mutual declaration, each felt half-assured, yet each felt a certain trembling anxiety to have assurance complete.”
In Memoirs, Godwin adopted some of Mary’s candor, writing that he’d never loved a woman until he met her. Godwin was a confirmed bachelor who avoided marriage. Mary did as well, so they were, in that sense, a perfect match … that is, until she became pregnant. With Imlay back in France, she had a decision to make. Knowing that she’d be ostracized if it were to come out that she and Imlay had never been wed, she married Godwin. For with him, she’d finally found a union of love based on mutual respect and adoration.
The Godwins delighted in redefining the institution of marriage and did things their way. People who are ahead of their time, Mary asserted, must be willing to face censure; yet surprisingly, they got away with most of their bold actions.
William Godwin woefully miscalculated the public’s reaction when he paid tribute to Mary Wollstonecraft upon her death. His revelations resulted in the very damage to her reputation she had managed to circumvent during her unorthodox life.
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A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: An Appreciation
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As the 19th century unfolded, suffragists in America and Great Britain resurrected Mary Wollstonecraft’s writings. They turned to A Vindication of the Rights of Woman for inspiration in their quest to secure equal rights. For these reformers, it wasn’t just about the vote; they wanted educational equality, the opportunity to work in any chosen occupation, and the ability to enter the political sphere. In short, they wanted agency and freedom.
“I do not wish them [women] to have power over men;” Mary wrote in her now-famous treatise, “but over themselves.”
Today, historians widely refer to Mary Wollstonecraft as the mother of feminism. William Godwin holds the distinction of being known as the founder of philosophical anarchism, a political philosophy that promotes self-government and progressive rationalism, including benevolence to others. Both are tremendous gifts to humanity.
Another was the child born to William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft. Mary Godwin grew up to be Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein or, The Modern Prometheus, the 1818 novel that launched the genre of science fiction. Mary Shelley never knew her mother, but clearly, Mary Wollstonecraft’s revolutionary spirit resided in her.
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Contributed by N.J. Mastro, the author of Solitary Walker: A Novel of Mary Wollstonecraft, a biographical novel about Mary Wollstonecraft’s incredible rise as a writer and philosopher and her ill-fated forays into love. Set against the backdrop of 18th-century London, the French Revolution, and the remote shores of Scandinavia, this well-researched novel captures the timeless story of a woman in search of herself.
*These are Bookshop.org and Amazon.com affiliate links. If a product is purchased after linking through, Literary Ladies Guide receives a modest commission, which helps us to keep growing.
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March 6, 2025
The Little-Known Writings of Zelda Fitzgerald
Zelda Fitzgerald was an American author, artist, and socialite. Although she is best remembered as the wife of F. Scott Fitzgerald, she was a talented writer and artist in her own right, which caused the couple a great deal of conflict.
Zelda wrote one novel (Save Me the Waltz) and an unstaged play, Scandalabra. What is less known is that she wrote various articles for periodicals, including College Humor, Harper’s Bazaar, and the New York Tribune. Here, we’ll take a closer look at five of these little-known features.
Zelda Fitzgerald’s life in brief
Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald (1900 – 1948) was born into to an affluent family in Montgomery, Alabama. In 1920, she married F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940), and the couple moved to New York City, where they became known for their hard-drinking and party-centric lifestyle. Zelda became known as a flapper—the word coined for free-spirited young women living on their own terms.
Zelda’s work wasn’t successful in her lifetime. Save Me the Waltz sold poorly, earning only about $120 in royalties, according to the F. Scott Fitzgerald Society. In comparison, F. Scott Fitzgerald earned approximately $17,055 for various writings in the 1920s.
The Collected Writings of Zelda Fitzgerald compiles most of Zelda’s work in one volume. It includes her novel and play. Zelda was also a visual artist, though her few gallery exhibitions weren’t successful. Reproductions of her work can be seen here.
The Fitzgerald’s marriage eventually fell apart, and Zelda was institutionalized for various mental illnesses, including depression and possible schizophrenia. Zelda began work on a second novel, Caesar’s Things, after Scott’s death, but it remained unfinished due to her various challenges. Repeated electroshock treatments, among others, greatly affected her quality of life and memory.
While sedated, Zelda died at Highville Hospital in Asheville, North Carolina in an arson fire. She was inducted into the Alabama Women’s Hall of Fame in 1992, and in recent times her work has been reconsidered, especially for her honest, sometimes biting commentary about being a woman in the early decades of the twentieth century.
5 Published Featurs by Zelda Fitzgerald
Zelda sold her first article to Metropolitan Magazine in 1922, commenting on the phenomenon of 1920s flapper culture—essentially, outspoken women who rejected cultural norms and repressive attitudes of the time.
Her writings were sometimes credited alongside her husband, though it’s now believed she did most of the writing. Scott is likely to have taken some passages from her diaries to use in his own work.
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“Eulogy on the Flapper” (Metropolitan Magazine, June 1922)Zelda’s article, “Eulogy on the Flapper” (1922, Metropolitan Magazine), delved into the popular subculture. comments on what it was like to be an influential, outspoken woman of the time.
The piece starts with Zelda’s disillusionment about popular culture and party life, expressing her growing dissatisfaction with life, only two years into her marriage.
“The Flapper is deceased. Her outer accoutrements have been bequeathed to several hundred girls’ schools throughout the country, to several thousand big-town shopgirls, always imitative of the several hundred girls’ schools, and to several million small-town belles always imitative of the big-town shopgirls via the ‘novelty stores’ of their respective small towns.”
The piece continues, describing the idealistic enthusiasm with which young women opposed conservative 1920s culture:
“’Out with inhibitions,’ gleefully shouts the Flapper, and elopes with the Arrow-collar boy that she had been thinking, for a week or two, might make a charming breakfast companion.”
Zelda ends “Eulogy on the Flapper” with irony, implying that flapper culture wasn’t dead but deliberately suppressed — instead of being naïve, as they were commonly perceived, she writes that flappers teach young women to think for themselves:
“And yet the strongest cry against Flapperdom is that it is making the youth of the country cynical. It is making them intelligent and teaching them to capitalize their natural resources and get their money’s worth. They are merely applying business methods to being young.”
“Friend Husband’s Latest” (New York Tribune, April 1922)
Zelda’s influence on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s work is unmistakable. According to multiple sources, Zelda was the inspiration for several characters in his novels and stories—including Rosalind in his debut novel This Side of Paradise.
The feature Friend Husband’s Latest is a review of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Beautiful and Damned, from Zelda’s perspective. She begins with a simple, sarcastic description:
“I note on the table beside my bed this morning a new book with an orange jacket entitled The Beautiful and Damned. It is a strange book, which has for me an uncanny fascination. It has been lying on that table for two years. I have been asked to analyze it carefully in the light of my brilliant critical insight, my tremendous erudition, and my vast impressive partiality. Here I go!”
According to this feature, Scott had appropriated several passages from Zelda’s diaries and inserted them into the book—presumably without her permission.
“Mr. Fitzgerald—I believe that is how he spells his name—seems to believe that plagiarism begins at home.”
Some modern scholars believe that Zelda’s co-written pieces were entirely her own, though many were credited to both she and Scott. Similarities in their writing styles have also made some suspect that Scott had plagiarized from her work more than once.
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“Looking Back Eight Years” (College Humor, June 1928)“Looking Back Eight Years” presents a disillusioned take on Zelda’s life over an eight-year period. In Zelda’s words, quoted from the book Zelda Fitzgerald: Her Voice in Paradise below:
“It is not altogether the prosperity of the country and the consequent softness of life which have made them unstable… It is a great emotional disappointment resulting from the fact that life moved in poetic gestures when they were younger and has now settled back into buffoonery…”
At this point, Zelda may have looked back to the optimism of her youth and compared it with her mounting dissatisfaction:
“Sensitive young people are haunted and harassed by a sense of unfulfilled destiny.”
“Who Can Fall in Love After Thirty” (College Humor, October 1928)
“Who Can Fall in Love After Thirty” explored Zelda’s thoughts on love, passion, and how one’s perception might change with age.
“The one passion that does not exist for the men of forty is the bombastic, reckless, uncalculated, uncompromising one mostly responsible for adolescent marriages. Their horizon has broadened, their energies are spread over a wider field, they have learned to discipline and weigh their impulses toward adventure.”
She implies further dissatisfaction with, and seeking different things from, a relationship after age thirty. When she wrote this piece, her relationship with Scott was extremely strained, and compared it with a wine that’s costly and intoxicating.
“It seems to us that at thirty, the haze of youth having lifted a little, emotions are stronger for their clarity, more definite for the fact that by then they have a category, a place where they belong — for the same reasons that wine in a bottle with a year is better than wine on tap; and if it is more costly and intoxicating, well, maybe that’s why people drink less of it!”
She continued writing for College Humor until 1931, when her last piece, “Poor Working Girl,” was published.
“The Changing of Park Avenue” (Harper’s Bazaar, January 1928)
“The Changing of Park Avenue” described one of New York City’s most prestigious locations at the height of the 1920s Jazz Age.
“Beginning in the pool of glass that covers the Grand Central tracks, Park Avenue flows quietly and smoothly up Manhattan. Windows and prim greenery and tall, graceful, white facades rise up from either side of the asphalt stream, while in the center floats, impermanently, a thin series of water-color squares of grass—suggesting the Queen’s Croquet Ground in Alice in Wonderland.”
She praises its beauty but also criticizes its opulence:
“There has never been a faded orchid on Park Avenue. And yet this is a masculine avenue. An avenue that has learned its attraction from men—subdued and subtle and solid and sophisticated in its understanding that avenues and squares should be a fitting and sympathetic background for the promenades of men.”
Zelda’s criticism of Park Avenue can also be viewed as being part of a larger critique aimed at a dissolute society as a whole:
“There is a lightness about these mornings. Nobody has ever asked a geographical question on Park Avenue. It is not ‘the way’ to anywhere. It exists, apparently, solely because millionaires have decided that life on the grand scale in a small space is only possible with as tranquil and orderly a background as this long, blond, immaculate route presents.”
Zelda frequently drew from her own life and experiences, including the 1931 story “Poor Working Girl ” (College Humor) that was inspired by her life with Scott in New York.
Perhaps expressing her own thoughts about criticism, the story ends with the line: ”[…] perhaps Eloise wasn’t destined for Broadway after all.”
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Contributed by Alex J. Coyne, a journalist, author, and proofreader. He has written for a variety of publications and websites, with a radar calibrated for gothic, gonzo and the weird. His features, posts, articles and interviews have been published in People Magazine, ATKV Taalgenoot, LitNet, The Citizen, Funds for Writers, and The South African, among other publications.
Further ReadingA complete list of Zelda and Scott’s publications in newspapers and magazines can be found here. Zelda Fitzgerald Papers (Princeton) Britannica: Zelda Fitzgerald Cambridge Dictionary: Flapper Alabama MomentsThe post The Little-Known Writings of Zelda Fitzgerald appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.
