Nava Atlas's Blog, page 32
November 23, 2021
12 Jane Austen-Themed Activity Books: Crafting, Cooking, Coloring, & More
What would Jane Austen (1775–1817), who had challenge enough finding publishers and readers in her lifetime, think of the fierce devotion to her exquisite body of work ever after? There’s even a name for those with an enduring passion for the author — Janeites — and Jane Austen Societies all over the world. Here’s a selection of Jane Austen-themed activity books for the most devoted Janeites on your list — or for yourself!
Here you’ll find gift books featuring activities inspired by Jane Austen’s world and her novels, including sewing, embroidery, crochet, coloring, cooking. You’ll even find an Austen-themed cocktail book, and the ultimate activity — a travel guide to Jane’s places in England.
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Learn more about Jane Austen
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Jane Austen’s Sewing Box
From the publisher: Jane Austen’s Sewing Box opens a window into the lives of Regency women during a beautiful period in arts, crafts and design. Jennifer Forest examines Jane Austen’s novels and letters to reveal a world where women are gripped by crazes for painting on glass and for netting purses, economize by trimming an old bonnet, or eagerly turn to their sewing to avoid an uncomfortable conversation.
Based on Jane Austen’s novels and with illustrated step-by-step instructions for eighteen craft projects, this beautifully presented book will delight Jane Austen fans, lovers of history and literature and craft enthusiasts alike.”
Jane Austen’s Sewing Box: Craft Projects and Stories from Jane Austen’s Novels by Jennifer Forest on Amazon*.
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Jane Austen Embroidery
From the publisher: Jane Austen was as skillful with a needle as she was with a pen, and this unique book showcases rare and beautiful embroidery patterns from her era, repurposed into 15 modern sewing projects … Designs include an evening bag, a muslin shawl, an apron, a floral napkin set and tablecloth, and other pretty and practical items with timeless appeal.
These authentic patterns — many of which have not been reprinted in more than 200 years—are enlivened by vivid glimpses into the world of Regency women and their domestic lives. Fascinating historical features, quotes from Austen’s letters and novels, enchanting drawings, clear instructions, and inspirational project photography trace the patterns’ origins and illustrate their imaginative restoration for modern use.
Jane Austen Embroidery: Regency Patterns Reimagined for Modern Stitchers by Jenny Batchelor and Alison Larkin on Bookshop.org* and Amazon*.
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Embroider the World of Jane Austen
From the publisher: Embroider a beautiful piece of home décor reminiscent of the Jane Austen era!
Learn the traditional art of embroidery with this Jane Austen-themed kit. All the materials you’ll need to make the two featured projects are included: 12 iron-on transfers, embroidery floss, 2 pieces of fabric, 2 pieces of calico backing, 2 needles, and a 6-inch bamboo hoop.
A 64-page instruction book and full-color photos provide step-by-step directions. For fans of Bridgerton and other period dramas, Embroider the World of Jane Austen is the perfect gift to experience the regency era and learn a new craft.
Embroider the World of Jane Austen by Aimee Ray on Bookshop.org* and Amazon*.
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The Best of Jane Austen Knits
From the publisher: Enter the world of Jane Austen through timeless knitting patterns inspired by the places and characters in her beloved novels … The gorgeously evocative pieces include cardigans, knitted shawls, bags and other accessories, and knitted projects for men and children. While the knitting projects are inspired by the fashions of the regency era, they are every bit as relevant today.
Knitters obsessed with Jane Austen as well as stitchers just looking for wonderfully appealing projects will fall in love with the beautiful knitting designs. Essays on fascinating aspects of Austen’s life and the regency era round out this inspiring collection. Topics include the places where Austen lived, knitting in Regency England, the yarns available to Austen and her contemporaries, and dressmaking during the time period.
The Best of Jane Austen Knits: 27 Regency-Inspired Designs by Amy Clarke Moore on Bookshop.org* and Amazon*.
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Austentatious Crochet
From the publisher: Austentatious Crochet presents Austen fans with a unique opportunity to step into the scarf, skirt, or chemise of Elizabeth Bennett, Emma Woodhouse, and a host of other favorite Austen characters.
The book features thirty-six original crochet projects inspired by Austen novels but fabulously brought up to date and wearable today. The designs focus on women’s wear, such as dresses, sweaters, cardigans, and capelets, and also encompass accessories such as handbags, scarfs, and pillowcases and clothing for children … Fully illustrated with evocative photos, Regency-style illustrations, and step-by-step schematics.
Austentatious Crochet: 36 Contemporary Designs from the World of Jane Austen by Melissa Horozewski on Amazon*.
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Jane Was Here
From the Publisher: Jane Was Here is a whimsical, illustrated guide to Jane Austen’s England — from the settings in her novels and the scenes in the wildly popular television and film adaptations, to her homes and other important locations throughout her own life.
Discover the stately homes of Basildon Park and Ham House and the lush landscapes of Stourhead and Stanage Edge. Tread in Jane’s footsteps as you explore her school in the old gatehouse of the ruined Reading Abbey; her perfectly-preserved home in her Chawton cottage, where she spent the last eight years of her life; or her final resting place in Winchester Cathedral.
Whether you want to take this book as your well-thumbed guide on a real Austenian pilgrimage of your own, or experience the journey from the comfort of your own living room, Jane Was Here will take you — with a tone as wry as Jane’s itself — on an enchanting adventure through the ups and downs of the world of Jane Austen.
Jane Was Here: An Illustrated Guide to Jane Austen’s England by Nicole Jacobsen and Devynn MacLennan on Bookshop.org* and Amazon*.
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Jane Austen Wit & Wisdom to Color & Display
From the publisher: Jane Austen is one of the most beloved authors of all time, and her wit and wisdom transcends the classic literature classroom to resonate with women of all walks of life. For everyone who has dreamed of meeting her Mr. Darcy, we present a coloring book featuring Jane’s most profound, witty, and insightful quotes, along with art to color.
This clever and lovely coloring book series combines quotations from beloved wise women with beautiful black-and- white illustrations. In an attractive paperback format with foil embellishments, these books stand on their own as lovely art objects and impressive gifts.
Jane Austen Wit & Wisdom to Color & Display by Kimma Parish on Amazon*.
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Pride and Prejudice Word Search and Color
From the publisher: It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a devoted Janeite in possession of a good pencil, must be in want of a great word search to color. Gather up your coloring pencils and prepare to unwind and relax while searching out favorite words from every chapter of the beloved novel, Pride and Prejudice.
Whether a gift for yourself or that special person in your life, the Pride and Prejudice Word Search and Color is a delightful activity book combining word searches with coloring-in which will provide hours of charming enterprise.
Pride and Prejudice Word Search and Color: Jane Austen Activity Puzzle Book for Adults by K Carpenter on Amazon*.
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Gin Austen
From the publisher: This book celebrates the picnics, luncheons, dinner parties, and glamorous balls of Austen’s world. Learn what she and her characters might have imbibed, and what tools, glasses, ingredients, and skills you simply must possess.
Raise your glass to Sense and Sensibility with a Hot Barton Rum or Elinorange Blossom. Toast Pride and Prejudice with a Salt & Pemberley, Fizzy Miss Lizzie, or Cousin Collins. Brimming with enlightening quotes from the novels and Austen’s letters, beautiful photographs, period design, and a collection of drinking games more exciting that a game of whist, this intoxicating volume is a must-have for any devoted Janeite.
Sample a Gin & Bennet cocktail on this site! Gin Austen: 50 Cocktails to Celebrate the Novels of Jane Austen by Colleen Mullaney on Bookshop.org* Amazon*.
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Tea with Jane Austen
From the publisher: Enjoy a cup of tea and a slice of cake with one of the world’s favorite novelists! Inspired by the novels and letters of Jane Austen, this collection of cakes, bakes, and pastries is based on authentic recipes from the Recency era, which have been fully updated for modern-day cooks … These rolls, buns, tarts, and biscuits will be equally welcome at breakfast, with mid-morning coffee, or for an English afternoon tea.
From Plum Cake and Gingerbread to Ratafia Cakes and Sally Lunns, Tea with Jane Austen has all the recipes you need to create the finest tea time treats, and the original recipes are given alongside, so you can compare them and appreciate modern time-savers such as dried yeast, and electric mixers all the more!
Tea with Jane Austen: Recipes Inspired by Her Novels and Letters by Pen Vogler on Bookshop.org* and Amazon*.
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Dinner with Mr Darcy
From the publisher: Enter Jane Austen’s world through the kitchens and dining rooms of her characters, and her own family. You’ll find updated recipes for authentic Regency dishes, along with some of the originals to give a flavor of what cooking was like in the early 19th century.
Food is an important theme in Jane Austen’s novels—it is used as a commodity for showing off, as a way of showing kindliness among neighbors, as part of the dynamics of family life, and—of course—for comic effect. Dinner with Mr Darcy takes authentic recipes from the period, inspired by the food that features in Austen’s novels and letters, and adapts them for contemporary cooks.
… You will find fully updated recipes using easily available ingredients to help you recreate the dishes and dining experiences of Jane Austen’s characters and their contemporaries.
Dinner with Mr Darcy: Recipes Inspired by the Novels and Letters of Jane Austen by Pen Vogler on Bookshop.org* Amazon*.
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The Jane Austen Cookbook
From the publisher: Jane Austen wrote her novels in the midst of a large and sociable family. One of Jane’s dearest friends, Martha Lloyd, lived with the family for many years and recorded in her “Household Book” over 100 recipes enjoyed by the Austens.
A selection of this family fare, now thoroughly tested and modernized for today’s cooks, is recreated here, together with some of the more sophisticated dishes which Jane and her characters would have enjoyed at balls, picnics, and supper parties.
A fascinating introduction describes Jane’s own interest in food, drawing upon both the novels and her letters, and explains the social conventions of shopping, eating, and entertaining in late Georgian and Regency England. The book is illustrated throughout with delightful contemporary line drawings, prints, and watercolors.
The Jane Austen Cookbook by Maggie Black and Deirdre Le Faye on Amazon*.
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Jane Austen’s Table
From the publisher: A gorgeous collection of more than 50 thematic recipes inspired by the people and places in Jane Austen’s novels. This beautiful collection of more than 50 recipes inspired by the novels of Jane Austen brings readers a sumptuous array of dishes that capture all the spirit and verve of Austen’s world and the Regency era, adapted and reimagined for the modern day.
With recipes such as Charles Bingley’s White Soup, Box Hill Picnic Pies, General Tilney’s Hot Chocolate, and Donwell Abbey Strawberry and Rose Delice, you’ll be able to serve breakfast, prepare tea, go on a picnic, or sit down for a posh dinner in the same style as your favorite characters from Austen’s stories.
Jane Austen’s Table: Recipes Inspired by the Works of Jane Austen by Robert Tuesley Anderson (to be published in March 2022) on Bookshop.org and Amazon*.
The post 12 Jane Austen-Themed Activity Books: Crafting, Cooking, Coloring, & More appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.
November 17, 2021
Charlotte & Arthur by Pauline Clooney: Imagining Charlotte Brontë’s Honeymoon
Charlotte & Arthur by Pauline Clooney (2021) is a richly imagined novel about the wedding and subsequent Irish honeymoon of Charlotte Brontë and Arthur Bell Nichols, the curate who worked with her father at Haworth parsonage.
This illuminating narrative is based on meticulous research by Ms. Clooney, an award-winning short story writer and the founding director of Kildare Writing Centre in Ireland. This is her first full-length novel.
The novel focuses on a little-known time in Charlotte’s life. Though she’s a celebrated author at home and abroad, the siblings she grew up with (Emily, Anne, and Branwell Brontë) all died several years earlier, leaving only Charlotte and her father, the Reverend Patrick Brontë out of a family that once numbered eight members.
Though it’s hard to imagine that Charlotte isn’t still quite bereft and lonely, the Rev. Brontë isn’t enthusiastic about her marriage to his curate. Charlotte herself took many years to warm up to Arthur. But finally, he won her heart, and this is where we pick up the story.
From the publisher (Merdog Books): It is the morning of June 29th, 1854, here is the groom coming up the cobbles in Haworth, for his nuptial appointment with Charlotte Brontë. Only a handful of guests have been invited, and you, dear Reader, are one of them …
Charlotte Brontë has married her papa’s Curate, Irishman, Arthur Bell Nicholls. At thirty-eight years of age, and the unlikelihood of there ever being further proposals, Charlotte’s dread of the lonely life of the spinster has convinced her that this is a calculated risk she must take.
For the month of July, the couple’s itinerary brings them from the castles of Wales to the most popular tourist attractions in Victorian Ireland, spending some time along the way with Arthur’s family in Banagher, on the banks of the River Shannon. Set against the backdrop of the recent famine, their tour exposes the contrasting lives of the poor and the privileged of Irish society.
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Charlotte & Arthur on Amazon US* and Amazon UK*
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Before we got down to chatting about the book itself, I wanted to know from Pauline whether there are any virtual programs coming up that she could share with Literary Ladies readers. She responded:
The book launch is available to view here, and I feature in a program, The History Show, on our national radio station, RTE Radio One, which looks at the Brontës and the Irish connection. It airs on November 21, 2021, and the podcast will be available here.
These programs will be archived and will allow readers to view and hear them at their convenience.
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What drew you to the story of Charlotte Brontë’s honeymoon, a rather brief and specific period in what turned out to be a brief marriage (about 3 years I believe, ending with her death in 1855 from complications arising from her pregnancy)?
The Brontës have held a fascination for me since my first visit to Haworth as a fifteen-year-old in 1979, when I believe a lot of my peers were falling in love with Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights because of Kate Bush’s song and video! And admittedly, at that stage I too was more a fan of the song than the book.
But something lingered with me after that visit; over the following years through my college days and teaching years something kept drawing me back to the Brontës and to Charlotte in particular. Apart from my love of Jane Eyre, as I read more and more biographies, my admiration for Charlotte, her independence, her often very non-Victorian spirit, intrigued me.
In 2006 I returned to college and completed an M.Litt. on her works and life, with Maynooth University, Ireland, and this time the aspect of the story that lingered was the Irish connection; the honeymoon, for the most part in Ireland, and how little it had been documented, either factually or in fiction.
This realization coincided with me beginning to indulge my love of creative writing as I embarked on several courses in writing, culminating in an MA in Creative Writing from University College Dublin (UCD) in 2015. Equipped now with the necessary writing skills, in 2017 I left my teaching career to concentrate on writing, what had been haunting me for far too long, this account of Charlotte Brontë’s marriage to Irish curate, Arthur Bell Nicholls, and their honeymoon. And the result is Charlotte & Arthur.
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Why do you think this aspect of Charlotte’s life is important, and why did you choose to tell it in the form of fiction?
I mentioned earlier that I completed an M. Litt. on Charlotte in 2006. For this thesis the bulk of my research concentrated on the extant letters of Charlotte. Like any epistolary evidence these gave a remarkable insight into the evolving personality of the author. Six letters written by her while on honeymoon survive, and when we compare the content of these with what came before and what she writes after, it is very clear that this stage of her life was a happy one.
It is my belief that these days and the days that followed, although all too brief, were the happiest days of her life. Charlotte Brontë famously said “I’m just going to write because I cannot help it …” and it has always been my conjecture this compulsion was to escape the often grim, harsh realities of her life. Other than a scrap of a novel, which may have been written before the marriage, Charlotte never writes again, and I believe it is because she had no reason to want to escape from her new-found reality.
Why write it as a fictional form? I think the story of her marriage to Arthur is as romantic, and alas, because of the brevity of their time together, as tragic, as the Brontë’s lives and works, and I felt the novel form might do more justice to that mix of romance and tragedy, than the hard facts of non-fiction.
Charlotte resisted the idea of marriage to Arthur Bell Nichols for some time, and then her father was opposed to their marriage. Why do you think Charlotte made the right choice in marrying Arthur? He certainly had his share of both defenders and detractors.
Yes, you are so right, poor Arthur did not have an easy time of it in loving Charlotte as he did. Do I think Charlotte made the right choice in marrying him? As an author, maybe not, considering what I have alluded to above, the fact that we have nothing more from the pen of Currer Bell following the marriage.
But as a woman who had experienced so much tragedy, who lived a lonely life in the parsonage caring for her aged father? I think she most definitely made the right choice and I think we can infer from what she writes in her letters that she knows she made the right choice.
She tells her friend, Margaret Wooler, with regards her marriage to Arthur that to, “…win such a character was better than to earn either Wealth or Fame or Power.” There seems to be a lovely ease in their relationship, evident in the following remark in a letter to Ellen Nussey, when she refers to him, not as Mr Nicholls but as Arthur, “… excuse the name—it has grown natural to use it now.” And again in a letter to Margaret Wooler, in November 1854, “… I have a good, kind, attached husband, and every day makes my own attachment to him stronger.”
And as for what turns out to be her final words on Arthur in a letter to Ellen and her friend, Joe Taylor’s wife, Amelia, when Charlotte herself is grievously ill, “… I find in my husband the tenderest nurse, the kindest support—the best earthly comfort that ever woman had …” and “… As to my husband—my heart is knit to him—he is so tender, so good, so helpful, patient …”
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Learn more about Charlotte Brontë
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I read about Charlotte’s honeymoon in Charlotte Brontë: A Fiery Heart by Claire Harman. Of course, it doesn’t go into nearly as much detail as your novel, but it was evident that traveling with her new husband gave her much solace after the deaths of Emily and Anne, and brother Branwell. Did you see the honeymoon as a time of healing for Charlotte?
Isn’t Harman’s book a treasure? As is her earlier biography. Yes, I think I did see the honeymoon as a healing time. Throughout my book, written from Charlotte’s point of view, I allow her to reflect on her mother’s and siblings’ deaths as she addresses the grief experienced.
In the opening pages of Charlotte & Arthur, which takes place on the morning of the wedding, she laments on how silent the house is as opposed to the great clamor there would be if the girls and her mother were there fussing over things, and this is how I imagined she would have felt.
However, as the book proceeds, I found that the welcome she receives from Arthurs family in Ireland, especially his Aunt Harriette and cousins, Mary Anna and Harriette, as suggested by Charlotte in her letters, coupled with the cheery tone of these letters allowed me to present a Charlotte a lot less burdened by past griefs. Towards the close of the honeymoon her reflections are for their future and less for her past.
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In your novel, as it happened in real life, Charlotte overcame any doubts or hesitancy about Arthur, and he exceeded her expectations as a husband and companion. How did you come to feel about Arthur during your research and writing process?
You know, I think I too fell a little in love with Arthur! Who doesn’t succumb to the charm of having everything done for you? What was so different for Charlotte on her honeymoon was she did not have to organize any of it, Arthur oversaw it all. And rather than see this as controlling I chose to interpret it as indulgent and protective of Charlotte.
After the honeymoon, the following January and February when Charlotte was too unwell to write, it was Arthur who communicated with her friend Ellen Nussey and in this correspondence, we see his protectiveness and love and indeed, anxiety for her health. However, I think we get an even greater sense of these emotions in the letter the Rev. Patrick Brontë writes to Ellen on the eve of Charlotte’s demise: “We are all in great trouble, and Mr Nicholls so much so, that he is not so sufficiently strong, and composed to be able to write—”
Looking beyond the scope of the book, to this time after Charlotte’s death, I think Arthur’s kindness and humanity are evident in how he remained in the parsonage with Patrick Brontë until the latter’s death in 1861. That cannot have been easy, to remain in the place that was the heartbeat of his grief.
He returned to Ireland, failing to secure the incumbency in Haworth, apparently much to the disappointment of the locals who loved Arthur. For the rest of his days Arthur lived in Banagher but he kept up a connection with Haworth through the old servant Martha Brown and there is a collection of his letters to her, entitled Dear Martha, and again what we see in these is the kind, caring gentleman he was.
Arthur married a second time, his cousin Mary Anna Bell, who Charlotte met and described as “a pretty lady-like girl with gentle English manners.” On his return to Ireland he had moved in with his Aunt Harriette and Mary Anna. Remember, he and Mary Anna had grown up together and I imagine the relationship was very close to that of brother and sister.
The story goes that Aunt Harriette told Arthur that Mary Anna had a suitor call and propose to which Arthur answered, “But Mary is mine…” and so he married his cousin.
I believe this marriage was rather a platonic one, if there can be such a thing, and we know that gentle Mary Anna, indulged her husband’s continuing love for Charlotte, allowing their home to be a Brontë shrine and when Arthur died in 1906, she hung the Richmond portrait of Charlotte above where he was laid out in their home, Hill House, Banagher.
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You might also like:
Brontë Fanfiction: Paying Homage to (or Starring) the Brontë Sisters
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What were Charlotte’s favorite locations visited and people encountered on the honeymoon, as depicted in the novel?
Based on her letters I think her favorite places were Banagher and Kilkee and it is for this reason that they both get more than just one chapter in the book. I think Banagher was a delightful surprise to her as she had not realized that Arthur’s background was genteel and in an Irish context almost aristocratic, and of course, the welcome the family gave her, especially his Aunt Harriette, would have put her at her ease.
But also, I believe the fact that here in Ireland, Arthur was the celebrated returned son, taking the spotlight away from her would have pleased her. She makes it clear in her letters that she loathed being lionized, and so, walking in Arthur’s shadow in his hometown would have been a comfortable place for her to be.
They stayed in the West-End Hotel in Kilkee and according to Charlotte it fell rather short of its splendid name, but she says that instead of complaining they laughed because, “…for out of doors there is much indeed to compensate for any indoor short-comings; so magnificent an ocean—so bold and grand a coast—I never yet saw…”
This was enough for me to conclude that here she was happy, this and the story she tells from Kilkee about how Arthur allowed her to sit alone on the cliff top to be with her thoughts as he watched protectively from a safe distance. You know, I think this might have been the moment Charlotte realized that she loved Arthur.
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What were your main sources of research for this novel? Were you able to spend any time at the Brontë Parsonage, given that it has been closed for much of the past year and a half?
The collected letters I have quoted from, all three volumes, were my primary sources to discover Charlotte, and indeed, through her words, Arthur too. I think I have every biography written on her from Gaskell to Harman, and two on Arthur and they were invaluable.
To get a sense of England and Ireland at that time I used contemporary travel guides like James Frasers’ Illustrated guides and of course Thackeray’s Sketches in Ireland and John Forbes, Memorandums made in Ireland. The latter two feature in Charlotte & Arthur.
Yes, lockdown was a bit of a nuisance, especially for the Welsh part of the honeymoon but Google Maps was great as I travelled virtually from Conway to Bangor to Llanberis Pass, Beddgelert and Holyhead. It is rather amazing how much you can see and feel that you are there when in satellite/street view mode, I spent many happy days clicking my way along the roads of Wales.
Thankfully, Ireland opened up, albeit briefly, in summer of 2020 and I did my own grand tour with my husband, staying in every spot they stayed in. Banagher was our favourite too, and a local historian there, James Scully, took us under his wing and squired us around, as if we were the celebrated couple. As we are fortunate enough to have a boat, we even got to recreate their trips on the Shannon.
And you ask if I got to see the parsonage. I have stayed in Haworth eight times since 1979 and have visited the parsonage on each occasion, staying in places on the famous Cobbles Street like the The Old Registry and The Fleece Inn, and our favorite, just outside the town, The Old Silent Inn.
I have not been there since the pandemic struck but as soon as it is safe to do so, I will be found back walking the trails, especially the one to Top Withins, eating the most delicious food in Cobbles and Clay Café, browsing in the Parsonage Museum shop, and roaming through the house and grounds where I believe they still walk invisible.
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What new insights about Charlotte and the Brontë family did you glean in your research for this novel, and what might surprise readers most (without giving spoilers!)?
That is a great question. In my arrogance, I thought I knew it all when I started out on the process, especially because I had previously completed an M.Litt. on Charlotte Brontë. During the research for that thesis, I remembered reading that she had famously said at the age of twelve that she had no intentions of ever marrying, and her disdain for the institution is well documented in the letters and substantiated by the three marriage proposals before Arthur that she turned down.
Setting out on the process of researching and writing this book, I always intended it to be a love story, but honestly, I thought that would be the fiction element of a work of historical fiction. I was wrong.
From the tone and content of her letters after the marriage, and from the fact that she never produced another work, I believe that Charlotte loved being a wife and found it equally, or dare I say, more satisfying and fulfilling, than her role as celebrated author. The former rebellious, feminist Charlotte became a dutiful, conservative, housewife. And I am very aware that there are those who would say this is what was the death of, not just Currer Bell, but Charlotte Brontë.
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Were the letters in the novel verbatim or close to actual letters Charlotte wrote, for example the one she writes to Ellen Nussey from Conway fairly early on, or did you wholly invent them?
All of the letters are the actual letters, quoted in full. Thank you for this opportunity to feature in Literary Ladies Guide, to chat about my book, Charlotte & Arthur, and share my thoughts on Charlotte Brontë.
Learn more about Charlotte & Arthur From Haworth to Here: The Evolution of Charlotte & Arthur by Pauline Clooney A review by Margaret Scott. . . . . . . . . .
*These are Amazon Affiliate links. If a product is purchased by linking through, Literary Ladies Guide receives a modest commission, which helps maintain our site and helps it to continue growing!
The post Charlotte & Arthur by Pauline Clooney: Imagining Charlotte Brontë’s Honeymoon appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.
November 15, 2021
Scarborough, England: Anne Brontë’s Final Resting Place
How is it that Anne Brontë (1820–1849) was laid to rest in the seaside town of Scarborough, and not in Haworth, the enclave in the Yorkshire moors where the others in her immediate family were buried? Here we’ll explore how Anne came to be connected with Scarborough, and how she came to be buried there.
Anne Brontë, the youngest of the literary Brontë sisters, was often described as the gentlest and quietest of the trio, which included Charlotte and Emily. Unfortunately, the career of this talented writer was cut short, as she didn’t even reach the age of thirty when she died of consumption (pulmonary tuberculosis) in 1849.
Following her brother Branwell’s death in September of 1848 (at the age of thirty-one), Emily, with whom Anne had always been closest, became ill. Wracked with misery, she refused medical attention until it was too late, and died in mid-December of that same year at the age of thirty.
The shock of Emily’s death weakened Anne, and she fell ill, and it was also consumption. Characteristically, she faced the news with courage, though she was disappointed that she would not have the chance to further her ambition as a writer. She wrote to Ellen Nussey, a dear friend she shared with Charlotte:
“I have no horror of death: if I thought it inevitable I think I could quietly resign myself to the prospect… But I wish it would please God to spare me not only for Papa’s and Charlotte’s sakes, but because I long to do some good in the world before I leave it. I have many schemes in my head for future practice — humble and limited indeed — but still I should not like them all to come to nothing, and myself to have lived to so little purpose. But God’s will be done.”
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Learn more about Anne Brontë
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Over the next few months, Anne regained some strength and was even able to travel to Scarborough. The seaside town was a place to which she had traveled with the Robinsons, a family she had served as governess over a few years. The position became the veiled subject of her first novel, Agnes Grey, and though she loathed being a governess, she grew to love the picturesque town.
As Anne sank with the illness, it was hoped that a change of scene and fresh sea air would improve her health. But it was not to be. When death was at hand, she was unable to travel back to Haworth and died in Scarborough on May 28, 1849, at the age of twenty-nine. Supposedly, her last words were, “Take courage, Charlotte, take courage…” Though she had been kept company by their mutual friend, Ellen Nussey, her elder sister made the trip when it was clear that Anne’s end was near.
Anne wasn’t afraid of death and knew it was coming for her. She was, however, disappointed that she wouldn’t have the opportunity to continue her life as a writer. This is the last stanza of one of her last poems, “Last Words“:
Should Death be standing at the gate
Thus should I keep my vow;
But, Lord, whate’er my future fate
So let me serve Thee now.
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Scarborough Cliff Bridge as it looks today (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)
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It’s not completely clear why the decision was made to bury Anne in Scarborough, and not carry her back to be buried where so many of the immediate family had been laid to rest in Haworth (Charlotte and the father, the Reverend Patrick Brontë were the only two of the original family of eight still alive). Though it simply may be because such matters were far more complicated at the time; the decision perhaps hinged on practical matters like transporting a body.
After having her sister buried, Charlotte couldn’t bring herself to return to Scarborough for the next three years. But when she did, she was shocked to find five errors on Anne’s gravestone. The most egregious still stands, etched in the stone— her age at the time of her death. According to AnneBrontë.org:
“These mistakes were presumably a result of the memorial being arranged by Ellen [Nussey], and an indication of Charlotte’s state of mind when it was being prepared. We do not know what four of the mistakes were, as Charlotte paid to have them corrected – the spelling of the name is one obvious mistake that could have been made. One mistake famously remained uncorrected, however. Anne’s gravestone now is weathered and beaten by the salt air, rain, and sea frets …”
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Scarborough Castle (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)
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The following 1914 article from The Boston Globe reflects on Anne Brontë and her time in Scarborough, both in life and as her final resting place.
Anne Brontë at Scarborough:
Youngest of Famous Trio Was Buried There
From the original article in The Boston Globe (Boston, Massachusetts), December 27, 1914: The outstanding feature in Scarborough, the English seashore resort on the Yorkshire Coast, is the old, half-ruined castle on the cliff. From the Grand Hotel nearby the summer visitor, in times of peace, can watch the old gray towers on the high promontory which juts out into the gray North Sea, taking on the colors of the changing sky.
To the north and the south of the castle stretch the curving sands of North Bay and South Bay, and behind the beaches are the broad streets and handsome buildings of the town.
Scarborough is no flimsy summer resort. It is a solid, beautiful, English city. There are parks and promenade piers; there are theatres and museums and a spa with assembly rooms. The high-lying moors and the wooded valleys offer pleasant excursions in every direction.
But aside from these summer attractions, this city has a sturdy, year-round life of its own. The fishing boats run in and out of the harbor in South Bay and fashionable life goes prosperously on in the handsome streets on the southern part of the town.
Much as we may know about Scarborough, we rarely connect it with the Brontë family. Yet in the churchyard of the old parish church of St Mary’s, which stands overlooking the sea on the landward side of the castle, is the grave of Anne Brontë, the youngest of that wonderful family.
To the east of the church, near the wall of the churchyard, stands a headstone with this simple inscription: “Here the remains of Anne Brontë, daughter of the Rev. P. Bronte, Incumbent of Haworth, Yorkshire. She died May 28th, 1849.”
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Scarborough North Bay at dusk (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)
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The place she loved
If Anne Brontë could have chosen, she would have been burled in Scarborough, for, excepting her own home on the Yorkshire moors, she loved no place so well. Three or four times she had been there to stay with the family who employed her as their daughter’s governess.
On the first visit to this cheerful watering place, she had made the solemn record following the brief statement that she disliked her situation. “l have seen the sea and York minister.”
As she came back summer after summer with the Robinson family, she grew to love Scarborough more and more. We can never know all the reasons for Anne, the pretty, delicate, fair-haired. violet-eyed girl, being so happy in Scarborough. Happiness blossoms sometimes on such a slender stalk! But surely she was happy there.
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10 Interesting Facts About the Brontë Sisters
(photo: Anna Fiore)
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The only jocund chapter in her two sober novels is that one near the end of Agnes Grey called “The Sands.”
Agnes Grey had stepped out of the house in the early morning, before the family were awake. “There was a feeling of freshness and vigor in the very streets, and when I got free of the town, when my foot was on the sands and my face toward the broad, bright bay. No language can describe the effect of the deep. clear azure of the sky and ocean, the bright morning sunshine on the semicircular barrier of craggy cliffs, surmounted by green, swelling hills, and on the smooth, wide sands, and the low rocks out at sea, who for two years had been tutor in looking, with their clothing of weeds and moss. like little grass-grown islands … and above all on the brilliant, sparkling waves …
“No living creature was visible besides myself. My footsteps were the first to press the firm, unbroken sands … About 6:30, however, the grooms began to come down to air their masters’ horses … one water cart coming out of town to get water for the baths. In another minute or two the distant bathing machines would begin to move, and then the elderly gentlemen of regular habits, and sober Quaker ladies, would be coming to take their salutary morning walks.”
Anne Brontë, quiet and gentle though she was, had a decided personality of her own, quite different from that of either Charlotte or Emily. The wild flashes of Celtic imagination that light up the somber pages of Wuthering Heights never flicker even for a minute over Anne’s narratives. Anne was a realist, pure and simple.
It is interesting to note that Anne in her mild verses accomplishes one feat her sister Emily did not even attempt. Longing unutterably for the tangled grass, the neglected dooryard of Haworth parsonage, she yet sees clearly and describes justly the things which are around her.
How brightly glistening in the sun
The woodland ivy plays!
While yonder beeches from their barks
Reflect his silver rays.
Emily’s barren room faded away when she wrote of home. She would never have bothered to notice just how the ivy and the beeches in an employer’s park looked in the sunshine.
So it was true of Anne, even though she never left Yorkshire except on that one hurried trip to London with Charlotte, that she saw more of the world than either of her sisters.
Anne never would have made Mr. Rochester’s guests talk in the quite impossible way in which Charlotte did. Her novels lack dramatic power. but her characters stand out clearly and each one speaks in a distinctive, true-to-life manner.
Four Crowded Years
After four years with the Robinson family at Thorp Green near York, the monotony of the situation which she did not like. varied each summer by some weeks at well-loved, cheerful Scarborough. Anne resigned her place and came home.
Shortly after, her brother Branwell, who for two years had been a tutor in the same family, was dismissed. That was in July 1845. Anne was twenty-five, but she wrote in strange contrast to Emily’s buoyant mood. “During my stay [at Thorp Green] I have had some very unpleasant and undreamt-of experiences in human nature.”
The next four years were the years of Branwell’s gradual decay in the midst of wild ravings, of the father’s failing eyesight and successful operation on the eyes. They were the years writing of The Professor, Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, Agnes Grey, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, and the deaths of Branwell, Emily, and Anne Bronte.
What crowded, tragic years were those from midsummer of 1845 to mid-summer of 1849 were in that old stone parsonage standing behind the churchyard on the Yorkshire moors.
Yet Anne’s death. which came in May 1849, within sight of the old castle on the cliff and the dancing waters of the South Bay of Scarborough, watched over by Charlotte and Charlotte’s friend, was peaceful. “Have courage!” were her last words.
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The gravestone with Anne’s incorrect age at time of death
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The gravestone errors
Anne’s gravesite in Scarborough can be visited. Her grave is located in an annex rather than the main part of the churchyard. According to AnneBronte.org:
“Charlotte could not bring herself to return to Scarborough for another three years, and even then she based herself once more in Filey. Upon visiting Anne’s grave, for the first and only time after her funeral, she was shocked to find that there were five mistakes on her gravestone.
These mistakes were presumably a result of the memorial being arranged by Ellen, and an indication of Charlotte’s state of mind when it was being prepared. We do not know what four of the mistakes were, as Charlotte paid to have them corrected – the spelling of the name is one obvious mistake that could have been made.
One mistake famously remained uncorrected, however. Anne’s gravestone now is weathered and beaten by the salt air, rain and sea frets of Scarborough, but you can still make out that it says Anne died aged 28, when she was in fact 29.”
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In 2013, a plaque was installed at the foot of the gravestone
with the error of Anne’s age corrected. Photo: Wikimedia Commons
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November 12, 2021
Brontë Fanfiction: Paying Homage to (or Starring) the Brontë Sisters
The Brontë fanfiction canon isn’t as voluminous as the fanfic genre dedicated to Jane Austen. The Brontë sisters — Charlotte, Emily, and Anne—between them wrote just seven finished novels in their short lifetimes, but the lasting impact they’ve had on world literature can’t be overstated.
For a time, the sisters feared they’d never get published, so arduous was their path to publication. But they, or rather, Charlotte, persevered, on behalf of not only herself, but her sisters.
The sisters lived to see their major works published in the 1840s, though under the pseudonyms Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell to obfuscate their genders. These were Charlotte’s Jane Eyre, Villette, and Shirley; Emily’s Wuthering Heights; and Anne’s Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Charlotte’s first novel written with the intent to publish, The Professor, came out posthumously, in 1857.
Here is a selection of novels featuring the characters in the Brontës’ works — mainly referencing Charlotte’s Jane Eyre and Emily’s Wuthering Heights. Some in this listing star the sisters themselves. In one case (The Brontë Mistress), their wayward brother Branwell is the focus.
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I am Heathcliff:Stories Inspired by Wuthering Heights (2018)
Unlike the other listings in this roundup, this isn’t one novel but a collection of short stories by various authors paying homage to the central characters of Wuthering Heights. What compelling evidence of the lasting impact this novel has had on generations of writers!
From the publisher: 16 modern fiction superstars shine a startling light on the romance and pain of the infamous literary pair Heathcliff and Cathy.Short stories to stir the heart and awaken vital conversation about love. Curated by Kate Mosse and commissioned for Emily Brontë’s bicentenary year in 2018, these fresh, modern stories pulse with the raw beauty and pain of love and are as timely as they are illuminating. I am Heathcliff on Bookshop.org* and Amazon*
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Edward Rochester: The Master of Thornfield Hallby R.Q. Bell (2017)
From the publisher: Edward Rochester endlessly searched the world for love … In a bitter, disappointed frame of mind he at last returns home to England, believing that true love will never be his. But an unexpected encounter with destiny in the shape of the remarkable young woman, Jane Eyre, upends his world.
One fateful night, Jane’s daring and courage snatch him from the ravages of a mysterious fire. In the intimacy of the aftermath, Edward’s feelings will be denied no longer: he is desperately in love with her. But can he resist, knowing the terrible secret of his past must keep them forever apart? Edward Rochester on Amazon*.
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Mr. Rochester by Sarah Shoemaker (2017)
From the publisher: A deft and irresistible retelling of Charlotte Brontë’s beloved classic Jane Eyre—from the point of view of the dashing, mysterious Mr. Rochester himself. Edward Fairfax Rochester has stood as one of literature’s most complex and captivating romantic heroes. Sometimes cruel, sometimes tender, Jane Eyre’s mercurial master at Thornfield Hall has mesmerized, beguiled, and, yes, baffled fans of Charlotte’s masterpiece for generations. Mr. Rochester on Bookshop.org* and Amazon*.
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H.— The Story of Heathcliff’s Journey Back to Wuthering Heightsby Lin Haire-Sargeant (2012)
From the publisher: In Emily Brontë’s masterpiece Wuthering Heights Heathcliff overhears Cathy in a conversations with Nelly Dean say, “It would degrade me to marry Heathcliff now…” Devastated Heathcliff runs away without hearing the rest of Cathy’s sentence, “…Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same; and Linton’s is as different as a moonbeam from lightning, or frost from fire.” Heathcliff’s misunderstanding will set him on a journey that changes him.
Heathcliff will return to Haworth three years later, transformed into a gentleman with money. But, what happened in those intervening years to turn him from a wild creature into that gentleman? Emily Brontë left that part of her story a mystery. Lin Haire-Sargeant ingeniously fills in Heathcliff’s missing years. H.— on Bookshop.org* and Amazon*.
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Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys (1966)
Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys is such a fine work of literature in its own right that it seems not quite accurate to call it fanfiction. Considered a prequel and response to Jane Eyre, it presents the perspective of Antoinette Cosway, the sensual Creole heiress who wound up as Mr. Rochester’s wife who came to be known as Bertha, the “madwoman in the attic.”
The W.W. Norton edition introduces the slim novel by describing how Antoinette is “sold into marriage to the coldhearted and prideful Rochester, succumbs to his need for money and his lust. Yet he will make her pay for her ancestors’ sins of slaveholding, excessive drinking, and nihilistic despair by enslaving her as a prisoner in his bleak British home.” Learn more about Wide Sargasso Sea on this site. Wide Sargasso Sea on Bookshop.org* and Amazon*.
Following are novels in which the Brontës are the characters, drawn from real-life events or, in the case of The Brontë Mysteries, imagined.
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Charlotte & Arthur by Pauline Clooney (2021)
From the publisher: It is the morning of June 29th, 1854, here is the groom coming up the cobbles in Haworth, for his nuptial appointment with Charlotte Brontë. Only a handful of guests have been invited, and you, dear Reader, are one of them … Charlotte Brontë has married her papa’s Curate, Irishman, Arthur Bell Nicholls. At thirty-eight years of age, and the unlikelihood of there ever being further proposals, Charlotte’s dread of the lonely life of the spinster has convinced her that this is a calculated risk she must take.
For the month of July, the couple’s itinerary brings them from the castles of Wales to the most popular tourist attractions in Victorian Ireland, spending some time along the way with Arthur’s family in Banagher, on the banks of the River Shannon. Set against the backdrop of the recent famine, their tour exposes the contrasting lives of the poor and the privileged of Irish society. Charlotte & Arthur on Amazon*.
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Brontë’s Mistress by Finola Austin (2020)
From the publisher: The scandalous historical love affair between Lydia Robinson and Branwell Brontë, brother to novelists Charlotte, Emily, and Anne, gives voice to the woman who allegedly brought down one of literature’s most famous families.
Yorkshire, 1843: Lydia Robinson has tragically lost her precious young daughter and her mother within the same year. She returns to her bleak home, grief-stricken and unmoored. With her teenage daughters rebelling, her testy mother-in-law scrutinizing her every move, and her marriage grown cold, Lydia is restless and yearning for something more.
All of that changes with the arrival of her son’s tutor, Branwell Brontë, brother of her daughters’ governess, Miss Anne Brontë and those other writerly sisters, Charlotte and Emily. Branwell has his own demons to contend with—including living up to the ideals of his intelligent family—but his presence is a breath of fresh air for Lydia. Brontë’s Mistress on Bookshop.org* and Amazon*.
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The Vanished Bride (The Brontë Mysteries)by Bella Ellis (2019)
The Vanished Bride is the first in a series of charming mysteries that cast the Brontë sisters as amateur detectives. This first installment is followed by The Diabolical Bones and The Red Monarch.
From the publisher: “Yorkshire, 1845. A young wife and mother has gone missing from her home, leaving behind two small children and a large pool of blood. Just a few miles away, a humble parson’s daughters— the Brontë sisters—learn of the crime. Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Brontë are horrified and intrigued by the mysterious disappearance.
These three creative, energetic, and resourceful women quickly realize that they have all the skills required to make for excellent ‘lady detectors.’ Not yet published novelists, they have well-honed imaginations and are expert readers. And, as Charlotte remarks, ‘detecting is reading between the lines—it’s seeing what is not there.’” The Vanished Bride on Bookshop.org* and Amazon.*
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Without the Veil Between: Anne Brontë, a Fine and Subtle Spiritby D.M. Denton (2017)
Rejoice — a novel about Anne Brontë, the sister all too often overlooked!Without the Veil Between follows Anne through the last seven years of her life. It begins in 1842 while she is still governess for the Robinson family of Thorpe Green, away from Haworth and her family most of the time, with opportunities to travel to York and Scarborough, places she develops deep affection for.
Although, as with her siblings, circumstances eventually bring her back home, she is not deterred in her quest for individual purpose and integrity. She stands as firm in her ambitions as Charlotte does and is a powerful conciliator in light of Emily’s resistance to the publication of their poetry and novels. Read an excerpt from Without the Veil Between here. Without the Veil Between on Bookshop.org* and Amazon*.
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The Secret Diaries of Charlotte Brontëby Syrie James 2009)
From the publisher: Though poor, plain, and unconnected, Charlotte Brontë possesses a deeply passionate side which she reveals only in her writings … Living a secluded life in the wilds of Yorkshire with her sisters Emily and Anne, their drug-addicted brother, and an eccentric father who is going blind, Charlotte Bronte dreams of a real love story as fiery as the ones she creates.
But it is in the pages of her diary where Charlotte exposes her deepest feelings and desires—and the truth about her life, its triumphs and shattering disappointments, her family, the inspiration behind her work, her scandalous secret passion for the man she can never have . . . and her intense, dramatic relationship with the man she comes to love, the enigmatic Arthur Bell Nicholls. The Secret Diaries of Charlotte Brontë on Bookshop.org* and Amazon*.
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November 9, 2021
The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith (1956)
The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith is a 1956 novel introducing Thomas Ripley, the sociopathic anti-hero who went on be the central character of four subsequent books. The five novels came to be known as “the Ripliad.” The first installment was followed by Ripley Under Ground, Ripley’s Game, The Boy Who Followed Ripley, and Ripley Under Water.
Like many of Highsmith’s characters, Tom Ripley is a con artist and murderer. Highsmith described him as “suave, agreeable, and utterly amoral.” He’s cultured, charming, and often portrayed as likable, which puts the reader in a moral bind — just as the author intended.
The following synopsis from Amazon is by Patrick O’Kelley:
“One of the great crime novels of the 20th century, Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley is a blend of the narrative subtlety of Henry James and the self-reflexive irony of Vladimir Nabokov.
Like the best modernist fiction, Ripley works on two levels. First, it is the story of a young man, Tom Ripley, whose nihilistic tendencies lead him on a deadly passage across Europe. On another level, the novel is a commentary on fiction-making and techniques of narrative persuasion. Like Humbert Humbert, Tom Ripley seduces readers into empathizing with him even as his actions defy all moral standards.
The novel begins with a play on James’s The Ambassadors. Tom Ripley is chosen by the wealthy Herbert Greenleaf to retrieve Greenleaf’s son, Dickie, from his overlong sojourn in Italy. Dickie, it seems, is held captive both by the Mediterranean climate and the attractions of his female companion, but Mr. Greenleaf needs him back in New York to help with the family business.
With an allowance and a new purpose, Tom leaves behind his dismal city apartment to begin his career as a return escort. But Tom, too, is captivated by Italy. He is also taken with the life and looks of Dickie Greenleaf. He insinuates himself into Dickie’s world and soon finds that his passion for a lifestyle of wealth and sophistication transcends moral compunction. Tom will become Dickie Greenleaf—at all costs.
Unlike many modernist experiments, The Talented Mr. Ripley is eminently readable and is driven by a gripping chase narrative that chronicles each of Tom’s calculated maneuvers of self-preservation. Highsmith was in peak form with this novel, and her ability to enter the mind of a sociopath and view the world through his disturbingly amoral eyes is a model that has spawned such latter-day serial killers as Hannibal Lecter.”
The Ripley novels were highly successful and well-reviewed (see a typical review from 1956 below). Some of the Ripley novels were made into feature film, the most notable of which was the 1999 adaptation starring Matt Damon as the title character.
A 2021 reconsideration ofThe Talented Mr. Ripley in the New York Times Magazine (a highly recommended read!) observed: “The task of making a heinous character sympathetic is the real work of many novels. Think of the criminal Humbert Humbert in Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita.” The novel was also known for its homoeroticism, which was rather bold for the era in which it was published.
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1999 film adaptation of The Talented Mr. Ripley
can be streamed on Amazon*
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From the original review of The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith in the Bridgeport Telegram, February 1956. Tom Ripley, hero of this story by Patricia Highsmith, is indeed talented, in peculiar ways.
His are the talents which make a successful criminal ingenuity, a flair for luxury, the ability to turn any situation to his own benefit. A chance meeting in a New York bar becomes for him an avenue to easy living in Italy — on someone else’s money.
Curiously enough, he has few gifts beside the aforementioned, and few real interests. He has no friends of either sex; he is a completely self-centered individual who believes in taking what he can get.
Italian mission
As his Italian mission draws to a close, unaccomplished, Ripley soon sees that it has become necessary to turn to murder to secure a continuation of his very pleasant position. He is not one to blanch at such a necessity. Soon he is involved in the precarious business of covering up his tracks.
Having brought all his ingenuity into play, our hero is on the verge of safety when an unlucky break forces him to murder again. The Italian police are soon scouring the country for the criminal. But, due to some clever planning, they are now searching for the wrong man.
A manipulative sociopath
As the suspense swiftly mounts, Ripley boldly manipulates the principals in the dangerous plot to secure his skin. Painstakingly he builds up his proofs of innocence, adapting his actions to quick changes in the situation.
With great success the author builds up the tension which surrounds a hunted man. Readers of Highsmith’s other well-known novels of suspense will not be disappointed by The Talented Mr. Ripley.
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The Talented Mr. Ripley on Bookshop.org and Amazon*
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“He loved possessions, not masses of them, but a select few that he did not part with. They gave a man self-respect. Not ostentation but quality, and the love that cherished the quality. Possessions reminded him that he existed, and made him enjoy his existence.”
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“If you wanted to be cheerful, or melancholic, or wistful , or thoughtful, or courteous, you simply had to act those things with every gesture.”
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“Mr Greenleaf was such a decent fellow himself, he took it for granted that everybody else in the world was decent, too. Tom had almost forgotten such people existed.”
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“He liked the fact that Venice had no cars. It made the city human. The streets were like veins, he thought, and the people were the blood, circulating everywhere.”
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“Beyond Sicily came Greece. He definitely wanted to see Greece. He wanted to see Greece as Dickie Greenleaf with Dickie’s money, Dickie’s clothes, Dickie’s way of behaving with strangers. But would it happen that he couldn’t see Greece as Dickie Greenleaf? Would one thing after another come up to thwart him—murder, suspicion, people? He hadn’t wanted to murder, it had been a necessity.”
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“He hated becoming Thomas Ripley again, hated being nobody, hated putting on his old set of habits again, and feeling that people looked down on him and were bored with him unless he put on an act for them like a clown, feeling incompetent and incapable of doing anything with himself except entertaining people for minutes at a time.”
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You might also like: Strangers on a Train by Patricia Highsmith
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More about The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith
Wikipedia Reader discussion on Goodreads A Close Reading of The Talented Mr. Ripley. . . . . . . . . .
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November 7, 2021
Laura — the 1944 Film Based on the Novel by Vera Caspary
Laura, the 1944 film based on the 1943 novel of the same name by Vera Caspary, has earned a secure place among the finest of the film noir genre.
The novel remains Caspary’s best-known work, and its even better-known film version has been preserved in the U.S. National Film Registry of the Library of Congress for its significance. It was also named as one of the 10 best mystery films of all time by the American Film Institute.
Produced and directed by Otto Preminger, Laura starred Gene Tierney in the title role. The three men involved in Laura’s life and subsequently purported death are Dana Andrews as detective Mark McPherson, Vincent Price as Laura’s playboy fiancé, and Clifton Webb as newspaper columnist Waldo Lydecker, a Svengali figure who is possessive of his protege.
Plot summary
Laura Hunt, a beautiful and successful New York City advertising executive, has been murdered in her apartment, her face rendered unrecognizable by a direct shotgun blast. The NYC police department has assigned detective Mark McPherson to investigate the case.
He sets out to grill the people in Laura’s life — Waldo Lydecker, the pompous columnist who could boast of using his clout to launch Laura’s career in its early stages; her ineffectual fiancé, Shelby Carpenter, who is also might be construed as a gigolo for her wealthy aunt, Ann Treadwell; and Bessie, Laura’s loyal housekeeper.
Reading Laura’s letters, getting to know her through her friends, and gazing at the portrait of her in her lovely Manhattan apartment, Detective McPherson seems to be falling in love with the dead woman. The twist comes as he rests and ponders one night after poking around in her apartment — in walks Laura, very much alive.
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The Ultimate Caspary Woman: Laura by Vera Caspary
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Who was the murder victim, then? Why was she in Laura’s apartment wearing Laura’s robe, and who was she with?
It’s quickly revealed (and this is not a spoiler, as this is still about mid-film) that the victim was Diane Redfern, a down-on-her-luck model whose height and coloring match Laura’s. She was using the apartment with Laura’s permission, and as it seems, was likely canoodling with Shelby.
Laura quickly goes from presumptive murder victim to prime suspect. She is even arrested by McPherson, who is struggling to remain unbiased given his growing feelings for her. Shelby, who possesses a gun, and Lydecker, with his overbearing personality, remain under suspicion.
To say any more would be to reveal spoilers; if the gist of storyline intrigues you, the movie is available to watch on various streaming platforms. But do read the book first. What can’t be captured on film is the book’s shifting perspective between the main characters. Each tells their version of what happened in the first person, a device that inspired Caspary from Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White.
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One of several posters for the 1944 film
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Though Laura is sometimes classified in the femme fatale genre, this isn’t accurate. The eponymous heroine is a smart, hardworking, independent woman (her dicey taste in men aside), and the prototype for what Francis Booth calls “the ultimate Caspary woman.”
The following insights into how Laura went from page to screen is excerpted from the forthcoming No One Named Vera Can Ever Tell a Lie: The Novels of Vera Caspary by Francis Booth (reprinted by permission):
Caspary had intended to try to get Laura staged as a play, having given up on Hollywood, and did in fact write the script with collaborator George Sklar. Then Otto Preminger came along. It didn’t go well. Caspary told her side of the story in an article for The Saturday Review of June 26, 1971, called “My ‘Laura’ and Otto’s.’’
Hollywood’s indifference did not break my heart, as I was working on the play at the time. The first draft had been a play that I had buried for almost two years before I wrote the novel. The book was constructed like a play, its scenes dramatically structured, the characters exposed in action, so I thought it a natural for the stage.
Meanwhile, my agent, Monica McCall, who was handling the dramatic rights, had given a typescript of the book to a Broadway producer and director. He liked the story and wanted not only to produce it but to collaborate with me on the revised play. I was flattered because he had a Broadway reputation, because he offered all of his Middle European charm along with an elegant lunch of blinis and caviar. His name was Otto Preminger.
But Preminger “wanted to make it a conventional detective story; I saw it as a psychological drama about people involved in a murder. We fell out over this, and I asked my old friend and collaborator George Sklar to work with me.”
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Lydecker, Detective McPherson, and Laura’s portrait
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Preminger also wanted Marlene Dietrich to play Laura, which Caspary disagreed with. In the end, despite all the work she and Sklar had put into the play, she rang George one night to say she had decided what to do: “I’m going to offer Laura as a movie and be done with the bitch.”
As part of the contract, she handed over all creative responsibilities to Preminger. When she saw the first version of the script, she wished she hadn’t. She was nowhere near done with the bitch yet. Caspary continues the story in her autobiography.
Ordinarily, authors of books, plays, and original stories are not allowed to read screenplays. Perhaps because I was working for the studio and came twice a week to talk to my producer, Preminger gave me the first draft to read; perhaps because he wanted to show me how he had improved the story.
I had signed away the right to be indignant, but I forgot this and stormed into Preminger’s office. Preminger and the first writer had made it into exactly what I had objected to when Preminger had first offered to write the play with me.
“A commonplace detective story,” I ranted, “and how you’ve dulled the characters, especially Laura.” “In the book,” said Otto, “Laura has no character. She’s nothing, a nonentity.” I raged like a shrew.
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Dana Andrews and Gene Tierney in Laura
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His “well-publicized conquests had taught Mr. Preminger little about women, nothing about the maternal instinct, nothing of a woman’s satisfaction in consoling a troubled man.” Preminger had no appreciation of the qualities of a Caspary girl; probably no one in Hollywood did. “Naturally I resented Preminger’s turning her into the Hollywood version of a cute career girl.”
Caspary is, perhaps disingenuously, astonished at a top Hollywood producer’s lack of understanding of the strong, self-sufficient woman. “Couldn’t Otto understand that a woman could be generous, find jobs, lend money to a man without thought of paying for his sexual services?” No, he couldn’t.
But this was not the end of the matter: before shooting, the script was extensively revised, without Caspary’s knowledge or help, and ended up as something that even she liked.
He would never admit that the script was rewritten after our fight, but to me, this was obvious since the charm, the gaiety, the brilliant humor of the finished film (lacking in the version I read) could only have been the work of Samuel Hoffenstein, distinguished as a wit long before he came to Hollywood. This was not the end of my battle with Preminger.
It wasn’t. Preminger would reappear later, involved in The Murder at the Stock Club. But he hadn’t changed his mind about women.
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Laura (the 1943 novel) by Vera Caspary
on Bookshop.org* and Amazon*
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Contributed by Francis Booth,* the author of several books on twentieth-century culture:
Amongst Those Left: The British Experimental Novel 1940-1960 (published by Dalkey Archive); Everybody I Can Think of Ever: Meetings That Made the Avant-Garde; Girls in Bloom: Coming of Age in the Mid-Twentieth Century Woman’s Novel; Text Acts: Twentieth Century Literary Eroticism; and Comrades in Art: Revolutionary Art in America 1926-1938.
Francis has also published several novels: The Code 17 series, set in the Swinging London of the 1960s and featuring aristocratic spy Lady Laura Summers; Young adult fantasy series The Watchers; and Young adult fantasy novel Mirror Mirror. Francis lives on the South Coast of England. He is currently working on High Collars and Monocles: Interwar Novels by Female Couples.
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*These are Bookshop Affiliate and Amazon Affiliate links. If a product is purchased by linking through, Literary Ladies Guide receives a modest commission, which helps maintain our site and helps it to continue growing!
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November 4, 2021
Discovering Hazel Hall, “The Emily Dickinson of Oregon”
Hazel Hall (1886 –1924) was an American poet much beloved in her adopted state of Oregon. She was often referred to, for various reasons, as “The Emily Dickinson of Oregon.” Though she has been widely anthologized on both sides of the Atlantic, she’s no longer well known, yet deserves another look.
>By 1910, the city of Portland, Oregon was a lively city of commerce and community. An active population of well over 207,000 established it as the largest city in the Pacific Northwest. From the port side along the Ocean-accessible Columbia River to the West Bank of the roaring Willamette, people spent their days working in factories, window-shopping, strolling hand-in-hand, riding trolleys, and bustling about in all the ways that folks in large cities have always done.
Though Portland was host to much lively activity and trade, young Hazel Hall couldn’t take part in any of it. Being confined to a wheelchair from the age of twelve, she sat in the upper room of her home watching life in its myriad of shapes and sizes parade before her.
With her limited mobility, Hazel couldn’t stand up to peer out her window, so she fashioned a hand-mirror in such a way as to be able to view the streets below in the reflection of the glass.
Hazel Hall was born on February 7, 1886 in St. Paul, Minnesota to Montgomery and Mary Garland Hall. She had two sisters, Ruth and Lulu. The family moved to Portland, Oregon when Hazel was yet a toddler. Though young Hazel romped and played just as exuberantly as any other child, she fell ill with scarlet fever at age twelve. She was disabled ever afterward and confined to a wheelchair.
Not to be discouraged by her strict confinement, Hazel spent her days under the light of her window sewing and adorning fine linens and bridal robes, baby clothes, lingerie, Bishop’s cuffs, and christening gowns. These items were so beautifully embroidered that she became one of the favorite seamstresses of many of Portland’s social elite in the West Hills, bringing her money enough for her to earn her keep.
Hazel’s sister, Ruth, a librarian in the Portland School District, borrowed numerous books for Hazel to read. From classics to science, Hazel read everything that her sister brought home for her, but developed a particular interest in poetry. Emily Dickinson, who passed away the same year of Hazel’s birth, was counted among her favorite poets, along with Robert Frost and Edna St. Vincent Millay.
Hazel had always occupied herself by writing and by the age of 30, her work was published in the Boston Evening Transcript. Her poem, To An English Sparrow is a cadent piece of rhyme and meter deep in feeling. The life of the poem resembles the life of a sewing needle, which Hall knew the ins and outs of very well.
To an English Sparrow (excerpt)
Little feathered tufts of gray,
Skipping blithely through the day —
Never resting,
Yet protesting
In your querulous, quick way —
Little sparrow;
You who would the woodland spurn —
Bird-prized haunts of leaf and fern —
Ever grace the crowded street,
Seeking man’s companionship
With your chippy-chip chip chirp—
On your wing or tripping feet —
Ever lightly
Always sprightly
Comes your note so nearly sweet,
English sparrow
Following the success of having a poem published in The Boston Evening Transcript, Hazel Hall’s poems appeared in such prestigious magazines as The Century Magazine, Harpers Magazine, The New Republic, The Nation, Yale Review, and Literary Review.
In 1920, Hazel’s poem, Three Girls, was chosen as one of the five best poems of the year by critic William Stanley Braithwaite.
Three Girls
Three school girls pass this way each day,
Two of them go in the fluttery way
Of girls, with all that girlhood buys:
But one goes with a dream in her eyes.
Two of them have the eyes of girls
Whose hair is learning scorn of curls,
But the eyes of one are like wide doors
Opening out on misted shores,
And they will go as they go today
On to the end of life’s short way;
Two will have what living buys,
And one will have the dream in her eyes.
Two will die as many must,
and fitly dust will welcome dust;
But dust has nothing to do with one—
She dies as soon as her dream is done.
Acquiring only a fifth grade education before becoming fettered to a wheelchair failed to prevent Hazel Hall from reaching out to a world in which she couldn’t fully participate. With her poetry, she managed to inspire not only poetic appreciation, but also admiration for the simpler things that life brings one’s way.
Hazel’s interest in philosophy inspired her to think deeply about humanity and helped her to resist the temptation to become overwhelmed by her circumstances. In many ways it was her circumstances which she considered to be advantageous to writing poetry, for the solitude that she experienced aided in not only thinking through iambs and meters, but also in creating artistic presentations of the seemingly routine.
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The Collected Poems of Hazel Hall on Bookshop.org* and Amazon*
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Many of her poems were included in numerous anthologies, gaining her popularity even in England. Her first book, Curtains, was published in 1921, her second book, Walkers, in 1923. In 1928 her third book, Cry of Time, would be published posthumously by her sister, Ruth. A group of her needlework poems within the pages of Curtains gained Hall the Young Poets Prize from Poetry magazine.
When Hazel’s eyesight began to fail her, she no longer wrote poetry about sewing, as she did in Curtains, but instead began to write more about the things she spied from the confines of her room. Thus, Walkers, came to be.
The editors of The Bookman literary journal gave Hazel’s newest book much praise within its pages of the August 1923 issue, calling the poems “genuine, individual, and very lovely,” including in their review a quote from her poem, Protection:
I have envied, I have pitied
Wrapped their sorrows over me
Like a shawl, to keep from knowing
Cold that is colder than the sea.
At the age of thirty-eight, Hazel Hall succumbed to an illness and passed away in the family home. Within eight short years, from 1916 to 1924, she had managed to touch the hearts of many readers with her poems. Upon her death on May 11, 1924, her obituary was on the front page of the Oregonian newspaper with the headline:
“SWEET VOICE OF HAZEL HALL IS HUSHED BY DEATH.”
Yet, it wasn’t hushed for good, thanks to John Witte, English Professor at the University of Oregon. In 2000, Witte collected all three of Hazel Hall’s books into one volume and published (Northwest Readers) The Collected Poems of Hazel Hall, making it possible for her voice to continue ringing out loud, strong, and sweet, teaching us all how to live life as fully as we are able.
The Oregon Book Award for poetry is named for Hazel Hall and William Stafford (the Stafford/Hall Award for Poetry). The award’s sponsor, Literary Arts, referred to her as “The Emily Dickinson of Oregon.”
Hazel Hall’s home at 106 NW 22nd Place in Portland is listed on the National Register of Historic Places as the Hazel Hall House. In 1995 the Oregon Cultural Heritage Commission built a memorial park, or poetry garden, next to the Hazel Hall House. The park is home to three of her poems carved in granite; Light Sleep, Things That Grow, and The Listening Macaws.
Contributed by Tami Richards. This post was originally published on HerRhetoric. Reprinted with permission.
More about Hazel Hall Oregon Encyclopedia Re-reading Hazel Hall Academy of American Poets. . . . . . . . . . .
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Sometimes You Have to Lie: The Life and Times of Louise Fitzhugh, Renegade Author of Harriet the Spy by Leslie Brody
It’s still so relevant—a writer with her mouth “open in horror all the time” at “the state of the world” and all the “social injustice, prejudice, and poverty” around her. That’s how Louise Fitzhugh describes feeling in the mid-1970s—toward the end of her life, in a letter to a friend—in Sometimes You Have to Lie: The Life and Times of Louise Fitzhugh, Renegade Author of Harriet the Spy (2020), a biography by Leslie Brody.
In the five years following its publication in 1964, Harriet the Spy sold about 2.5 million copies; that number nearly doubled by 2019. Decades have passed, but she remains relevant: readers continue to freshly fall for—and renew their acquaintance with—Harriet.
Leslie Brody did not grow up with Harriet; she “met” her when she was commissioned to adapt the novel for the stage in 1988: “I read it through several times, stunned at how lucky I was—after all this time, and the many ways our rendezvous might have gone awry—to find her.”
Louise Fitzhugh herself, conceived of Harriet in 1963, in the wake of disappointment after a gallery showing of her artwork: that’s when she started work on a children’s book featuring “a nasty little girl who keeps a notebook on all her friends.”
This disclosure is also from one of Louise Fitzhugh’s letters; Leslie Brody’s access to the author’s personal correspondence (and Brody’s own correspondence with Fitzhugh’s friends) fuels readers’ senses of intimate knowledge and understanding. It makes this biography feel revelatory and authentic, like Leslie Brody has peeked inside Harriet’s—I mean, Louise’s—notebook.
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More about Louise Fitzhugh
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In the novel, even at eleven years old, Harriet was insistent on being Harriet: “Harriet was just so about a lot of things.” Her nursemaid Ole Golly introduces her to writers like Cowper, Emerson, James, and Wordsworth with his “inward eye which is the bliss of solitude” and encourages Harriet’s writing habit. But it’s a fine line between being alone and being lonely and, when the subjects of Harriet’s notebook discover its contents, Harriet must broaden her understanding of perspective.
In the 50th anniversary edition of Harriet the Spy, novelist Rebecca Stead explains Harriet’s enduring relevance: “What Harriet learns—painfully, necessarily—is that she can’t let every thought or observation escape onto the page. Some truths, Ole Golly explains … are just for ourselves. In other words, there are some kinds of loneliness we must learn to live with.” It’s challenging, it’s relatable.
Judy Blume is more succinct: “She had secrets; I had secrets. She was curious; I was curious.” Brody’s curiosity about Fitzhugh and her secrets fuels her biographical explorations; her gratitude for Harriet’s complexity infuses her research with enthusiasm. It’s both detail-oriented and narrative-driven.
It’s my favorite aspect of Sometimes You Have to Lie: the Harriet-ness of it all. Additional details are available in the endnotes and any readers with specific interests can employ the index, but Brody’s familiarity with—and respect for—Fitzhugh’s work adds a layer of satisfaction for Harriet fans.
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Sometimes You Have to Lie on Bookshop.org* and Amazon*
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In describing Fitzhugh’s younger years, for instance, Brody notes: “One of her favorite habits was sitting at the top of the stairs to listen in on the grown-ups at cocktail hour.” Biography devotees might find this interesting; Harriet fans will thrill to the glimpse of Harriet-in-young-Louise.
But I might have guessed this volume would prove fascinating for its Harriet-ness: the evolving relationships with agents and publishers, details about character names and journal-keeping and collaboration, other influential reading in Fitzhugh’s stacks (Harper Lee I might have anticipated, but Yeats?!), and decisions to pursue/abandon manuscripts featuring other characters in Harriet’s circle.
What I did not expect were the dedicated excavations of Louise Fitzhugh’s own circle of friends and colleagues (and lovers, both male and female), her privileged upbringing and parents’ personal histories, and the diverse nature of her creative pursuits.
Brody also devotes chapters to both Louise’s father (Millsaps Fitzhugh) and his privileged youth in Memphis, Tennessee, and her mother (Mary Louise Perkins) of Clarksdale, Mississippi. The court proceedings surrounding their divorce were concluded while Louise was very young, but they were so dramatic and scandalous that she would later learn all the details via archival newspaper coverage.
Even as a young reader, I understood that Harriet’s family possessed a status that mine did not, but I did not connect that to her author’s experiences.
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More about Harriet the Spy by Louise Fitzhugh
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The Fitzhugh family’s wealth created ample educational and social opportunities for Louise; although as she grew up, her interest in the former grew, she opted out of the latter. Her studies at Bard College “in the remarkably pretty Hudson River Valley” were as significant for providing “a radically different perspective on race, sex, and class” as for being “a peaceful refuge.” There, “the women of Bard wore ‘pants and jackets, lounging and smoking as men.’”
Before attending Bard, and “encountering some truly gifted poets” beginning with Jimmy Merrill, Louise herself had considered writing poetry. “It was never easy for her to dislodge her father’s acid observation that any literary work that wasn’t Tolstoy was hardly worth the trouble.”
She believed that “painting and poetry were at the top of the art pyramid, and that other forms of design and literature somehow counted for less.” (Even though I knew that Fitzhugh illustrated Harriet the Spy, Brody’s biography reveals how important drawing was for her.)
By 1950, Louise was living in Greenwich Village, “part of a bohemian enclave” as Brody describes it, which included people like writer Djuna Barnes, photographer Berenice Abbott, literary critic Anatole Broyard, playwright Lorraine Hansberry, and her particularly close friends Marijane Meaker and Sandra Scoppettone.
Much of the group, as the playwright and author Jane Wagner characterized it, was a network of “successful, creative, pleasure loving, ambitious, knowledgeable lesbians.” There, Fitzhugh “felt a safety in numbers against the judgment of the world.”
In 1961 she illustrated Suzuki Beane, a story that Sandra Scoppettone wrote, in an “age when sophisticated take-offs and spoofs were in fashion,” a response to characters like Kay Thompson’s Eloise. Fitzhugh also tinkered with one-act plays, like “The Butcher Shop” and “The Luncheonette,” which were also titles of paintings that she had exhibited at the Hudson Park branch of the New York Public Library in 1956.
Over time, Brody observes that Fitzhugh “became increasingly interested in surrealism” and created “more overtly satirical and political drawings with pioneers and cowboys to comment on the ‘national infatuation with violence and acquisition.’”
Creating power on the page
Brody’s observation about Fitzhugh’s reading while she wrote Harriet the Spy seems a suitable summary of Fitzhugh’s writing overall: “What these works ‘all have in common is their investigation into how the powerful connive to take advantage of defenseless individuals or marginalized groups.’”
When Fitzhugh read up on her parents’ divorce proceedings, she persistently returned to the idea that she was an afterthought, relegated to the margins in a situation that fundamentally shaped her future.
In contrast, Harriet creates her own power on the page (although it’s unexpectedly reflected against herself as the story unfolds). She consistently struggles to be an individual and to maintain her truth. “Kids who felt they were different could read parts of their secret selves in Harriet, relate to her refusal to be pigeonholed or feminized, and cheer her instinct for self-preservation,” Brody writes.
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Playing Town: Revisiting Louise Fitzhugh’s Harriet the Spy
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I’m reminded of Michaela Coel’s Misfits (2021), which was in my stack alongside this biography. When she describes how a “misfit is one who looks at life differently” and also someone whom life looks at differently—not only do I think of Harriet but, now, also her author. (Who, ironically, was compelled to keep many secrets from public view, even as she expressed herself boldly in her personal life.)
Coel’s idea of a “misfit” is “cross-generational and crosses concepts of gender or culture,” and it’s characterized “by a desire for transparency, a desire to see another’s point of view.” It’s Harriet all over, as she peers from a place of safety to observe people’s lives unfolding around her, scribbling her observations in her notebook.
Throughout Fitzhugh’s books, she makes the case for “children’s liberation” most obviously in Nobody’s Family Is Going to Change. Along the way, as Brody observes, she provides “life-preserving strategies that children may employ in their power struggle with adults.”
It’s not just truth-telling, it’s truth-building: “Lying is one time-honored tactic; self-reliance is another.” Brody provides both insight and understanding, in focusing on the struggles and triumphs that fuelled Fitzhugh’s artistic career and infused her art and literature. While Harriet is recording the truths she observes around her, learning when and how to articulate them, she is shaping her unique understanding of the world and making a space for misfits, like her, in it.
Joan Williams said Louise believed “writing for children gave her a wonderful sense of doing good.” This sense is as evident in Leslie Brody’s biography as it is in Fitzhugh’s writing. I’m as much of a Harriet fan as I ever was.
Contributed by Marcie McCauley, a graduate of the University of Western Ontario and the Humber College Creative Writing Program. She writes and reads (mostly women writers!) in Toronto, Canada. And she chats about it on Buried In Print and @buriedinprint.
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November 2, 2021
The Ultimate Caspary Woman: Laura by Vera Caspary
Laura, a detective novel/murder mystery published in 1943, has remained Vera Caspary’s best-known work, partially thanks to the well-regarded film adaptation that followed. The slim yet action-packed story was first serialized in Collier’s magazine in 1942 as Ring Twice for Laura.
In the excellent afterword for the 2005 Feminist Press edition of this book, A.B Emrys writes:
“Caspary’s fairy tale for working women takes place in a world of men who use women for advancement and self-reflection. The potential darkness of this world places Laura into the noir category and shadows even Caspary’s non-crime fiction … ‘Who can you trust’ was a game working women had to play frequently, and Laura makes evident that women might be labeled femmes fatales because they worked in the male-dominated business world.”
Though Laura is sometimes classified in the femme fatale genre, this isn’t accurate. The eponymous heroine is a smart, hardworking, independent woman (her dicey taste in men aside), and the prototype for the ultimate Caspary woman. The following discussion of Laura is excerpted from the forthcoming No One Named Vera Can Ever Tell a Lie: The Novels of Vera Caspary by Francis Booth:
Laura turned detective fiction on its head. In most mid-twentieth century women’s crime novels, the central character is a male detective: Marjorie Allingham’s Albert Campion; Margaret Millar’s Paul Prye, Inspector Sands and Tom Aragon; Dorothy L. Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey; Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot (Miss Marple is an exception); Ngaio Marsh’s Inspector Alleyn.
They were all working in a tradition started in 1878, ten years before Sherlock Holmes first appeared, by Anna Katharine Green, the “mother of detective fiction” with her series of detective Ebenezer Bryce novels. If Philip Marlowe is the Chandler man, Laura introduces the Caspary woman.
“She is carved from Adam’s rib, indestructible as legend, and no man will ever aim his malice with sufficient accuracy to destroy her.”
This is from the final sentence of Laura, Vera Caspary’s fifth novel, her first major commercial success. It has remained her most famous and popular work, as a novel and as well as the 1944 film adaptation.
Enter the Caspary Woman
Laura is the first of a series of thrillers in which the Caspary woman appears, bursting onto the page here as a fully formed heroine for her time. Caspary much later described this woman in her autobiography:
“I’d given Laura a heroine’s youth and beauty but had added the strength of a woman who had, in spite of the struggle and competition of success in business, retained the feminine delicacy that allowed men to exercise the power of masculinity.”
Laura Hunt, as the first Caspary woman, would have several successors in Caspary’s works but very few in the works of other writers, even female ones; Laurel Grey in Dorothy B. Hughes’ 1947 In a Lonely Place is an exception. Laurel (as filtered through the viewpoint of the male anti-hero) was “a dream he had not dared dream, a woman like this. A tawny-haired woman; a high-breasted, smooth-hipped, scented woman; a wise woman.”
Laura is groundbreaking for its title, which unambiguously points to a woman as being the focus of the novel rather than the solving of a crime. Very few mid-twentieth century novels of any genre had just a woman’s name as the title – Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca (1938), though the title character is dead and doesn’t appear in the novel in person.
The genesis of Laura
Caspary had never written a murder mystery in the form of a novel before Laura and had not been particularly inclined to do so because character has to give way to plot in a crime novel.
“Mysteries had never been my favorite reading. The murderer, the most interesting character, has always to be on the periphery of action lest he give away the secret that can be revealed only in the final pages.”
A murder mystery as a screenplay was an easy thing for her but a novel was something completely different. In her 1979 autobiography, The Secrets of Grown-Ups, Caspary talks about the genesis of Laura:
“Most of my originals had been murder stories, but I never thought of them in the same class as a novel. The novel demands a full development of each character. This was my problem. Every character in the story, except the detective, was to be a suspect—particularly the heroine, with whom the detective was to fall in love.
If her innocence was in doubt, how could her thoughts be made clear to the reader? I did not want to cheat. If she and the other characters were to be made more than detective-story stereotypes, I had to find a way to show them alive and contradictory while keeping secret the murderer’s identity.
The story fascinated my friend Ellis St. Joseph, who suggested that I try the Wilkie Collins method of having each character tell his or her own version, revealing or concealing information according to his or her own interests. Night after night Ellis and I sat up talking about Waldo Lydecker, the impotent man who tries to destroy the woman he can never possess.
We developed his background, imagined his youth, analyzed the causes of his frustrate masculinity, considered his taste, his talent, his idiosyncrasies. I enjoyed the trick of writing in his style, contrasting his florid mannerisms with the direct prose of the detective and, through the girl’s version, showing the vagaries of the female mind. After all those barren mechanical years, I worked with the zest of a young writer with a first novel.
Sometime in October it was finished. In order to see the story objectively I needed time away from obsession. Paramount offered a job and I went to work on a story about a night plane to Chungking. War interrupted. . .
I returned happily to reworking my mystery. On Christmas morning I wrote ‘The End’ and, on the title page, Laura. At dinner my friends toasted the book. Indeed it was a splendid holiday, the start of a new career and a year that was to change my life. I had come to California for three months; I stayed twenty-four years.”
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Laura by Vera Caspary on Bookshop.org* and Amazon*
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Laura does indeed employ multiple points of view, being narrated at first by the effete aesthete Waldo, who we initially assume is going to be the central character.
Waldo’s first-person narration is followed by a section of narration in the third person with Waldo as the informing intelligence, and then by sections narrated by the detective Mark McPherson, an interlude of stenographic reports of interviews at the police station and narrations by Laura herself.
But, hang on, how can Laura speak? She’s dead? Isn’t she?
No, she isn’t, as it turns out. At first, we are meant to think that Laura Hunt is like Rebecca, the absent titular heroine who overshadows everything and everyone from beyond the grave.
But, after “her” funeral, Laura returns and we find out that the dead body lying in the doorway of Laura’s apartment with her face blown away by the shotgun was not Laura at all but Laura’s friend Diane, wearing her robe; she had been staying in Laura’s apartment while Laura was away.
Not that Diane was much of a friend anymore: she had stolen Laura’s boyfriend Shelby, making Laura the prime suspect in her murder. This is quite a twist: the murdered woman is not the murdered woman but the putative murderer of another woman.
From echoing Rebecca, Laura suddenly turns into Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White, 1859, with which it has many deliberate parallels, including the name of its title character. In Collins’ novel, the two young women Anne and Laura’s identities are switched after Laura refuses to give up her marriage settlement of twenty thousand pounds. Anne then dies of her long-term illness and is buried as Laura; Laura is considered mad for claiming to be Laura and is locked up.
Waldo Lydecker
Caspary’s physical description of Waldo Lydecker came straight from Count Fosco in The Woman in White; this sentence describing Fosco could just as well be in Laura.
“Fat as he is and old as he is, his movements are astonishingly light and easy. He is as noiseless in a room as any of us women, and more than that, with all his look of unmistakable mental firmness and power, he is as nervously sensitive as the weakest of us. He starts at chance noises as inveterately as Laura herself.”
Everything in the description of Waldo that Caspary worked so hard on with Ellis St. Joseph – his exquisite taste, his apartment, his cane, his Filipino houseboy, his erudite, witty, and rather camp writing style – scream to the contemporary reader, and perhaps to the sophisticated reader in 1945, that Waldo is gay.
But, as we saw, according to Caspary’s much later description in her autobiography, Waldo is intended as an “impotent man who tries to destroy the woman he can never possess,” namely, Laura. Waldo is a beautifully drawn character: a famous reviewer, columnist and essayist, waspish and withering, a society butterfly.
If we have not read Caspary’s autobiography, we will assume that Waldo loves Laura, with whom he has had a close relationship for several years, in a nonsexual way, that it is good for him as a gay man to be seen about town with a beautiful young woman – lavender marriages were very common at the time in high society, especially in Hollywood
For her part, Laura is happy to be in the company of somebody much older, a wealthy, cultured man who is no threat, intended to keep away the attention of younger, eligible men. It does strike rather a sour note when, towards the end, we find out that Waldo’s love for Laura was nowhere near platonic, though we may remember that at the beginning of the book Waldo has said, “I offer the narrative, not so much as a detective yarn as a love story.”
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The sensationalized pulp cover
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But, despite her affection for Waldo and the amount of time she spends with him, Laura does have a boyfriend, the rogue Shelby Carpenter, a louche lounge lizard and something of a playboy.
We are not too surprised to find out later that Shelby has been having an affair with the late Diane and possibly even with Laura’s wealthy aunt Susan – a Caspary woman herself, with no man in sight, a summer place on Long Island and a big house on Fifth Avenue – despite Susan’s northerner’s snobbery about southern men.
Laura works in advertising, in a role not entirely unlike Caspary’s own jobs in copywriting. She is very successful at it – the Caspary woman is always a success in business and Laura does very well financially, much better than Shelby, who has a very loose work ethic. Caspary women tend to be more ambitious and earn more than the men they associate with; the men tend to have something of a problem with this.
Laura’s career and earning potential are also contrasted to those of the detective Mark, who says to Waldo, “I’m a workingman, I’ve got hours like everyone else. And if you expect me to work overtime on this third-class mystery, you’re thinking of a couple of other fellows.”
Also contrasting with Laura is the now-deceased Diane, who is not at all the typical Caspary woman. Her shabby downtown apartment is starkly contrasted with Laura’s swanky but discreet place up on East 66th Street in Manhattan.
Despite the exorbitant rent on her remodeled third-floor apartment with a garden, unheard of in Manhattan (though Caspary woman Sara in Murder at the Stork Club has one; she also has a PI husband who earns a lot less than she does), Laura “had lived here, she told me, because she enjoyed snubbing Park Avenue’s pretentious foyers.”
She has her own key to the door at street level, which is essential to the plot: if she had lived in a doorman apartment, the killer would have been seen. In Diane’s very different fourth floor apartment in the West Village there is the added subtle class distinction that Diane paid cash in stores rather than having an account, as any true Caspary woman would.
Detective Mark’s turn
Mark inspects her apartment, trying to pin down her character. He does, as superbly and succinctly encapsulated in Caspary’s writing:
“There were no bills as there had been in Laura’s desk, for Diane came from the lower classes, she paid cash. The sum of it all was a shabby and shiftless life. Fancy perfume bottles, Kewpie dolls, and toy animals were all she brought home from expensive dinners and suppers in night spots. The letters from her family, plain working people who lived in Paterson, New Jersey, were written in night-school English and told about layoffs and money troubles. Her name had been Jennie Swobodo.”
As Laura is one of Caspary’s alter egos, so Diane is the other. Caspary talked in her autobiography of the “skinny girl” of her imagination, the girl who represents the other side to her public persona.
Detective Mark, speaking in his hard-boiled, noir mode says of the deceased, purely based on seeing her apartment, “I had known girls like that around New York. No home, no friends, not much money. Diane had been a beauty, but beauties are a dime a dozen on both sides of Fifth Avenue between Eighth Street and Ninety-Sixth.”
Both apartments are contrasted with the elegance and refinement of Waldo’s, filled as it is with the most refined and exquisite antiques.
“Everything he owned was special and rare. His favorite books had been bound in selected leathers, he kept his monogrammed handkerchiefs and shorts and pajamas in silk cases embroidered with his initials. Even his mouthwash and toothpaste had been made up from special prescriptions.”
Laura claims, when suspected of murdering Diane out of jealousy, not to have been upset by Diane’s relationship with ostensibly perfect Kentuckian gentlemen Shelby, even though Laura and Shelby were to have been married just a few days after the murder. Laura herself claims to have come from a poor background, though this seems unlikely in light of her aunt’s Fifth Avenue brownstone.
“I’m not so different. I came to New York, too, a poor kid without friends or money. People were kind to me . . . and I felt almost an obligation toward kids like Diane. I was the only friend she had. And Shelby.”
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The 1944 film poster
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In a Caspary woman gender reversal, Laura has given Shelby an extravagant cigarette case, “fourteen-karat gold, as a man might buy his wife an orchid or a diamond to expiate infidelity.” Normally the giver is the unfaithful one, but not Laura. Shelby has given the precious object to Diane – surely not something a true southern gentleman would do.
Diane has pawned it and Laura has found out, giving her ample motive for the murder of Diane. Meanwhile, Mark the detective has developed more than a professional interest in Laura – and vice versa. Waldo is outraged, he tries to make Laura understand how a man like Mark sees women: he cannot truly appreciate them.
“Do you know Mark’s words for women? Dolls. Dames.” Waldo, connoisseur of women as of all things aesthetic, sneers to her, “What further evidence do you need of a man’s vulgarity and insolence? There’s a doll in Washington Heights who got a fox fur out of him—got it out, my dear, his very words. And a dame in Long Island whom he boasted of deserting after she’d waited faithfully for years.”
Waldo also tries to persuade Mark that he is mad to pursue Laura, who is completely out of his league. But Mark’s obsession makes him blind to the fact that any true Caspary woman will always be beyond his reach.
Laura is indeed no dope and is not at all bound by the shackles of romance, but, “going on thirty and unmarried, I had become alarmed,” and bought Shelby the cigarette case, “pretending to love him and playing the mother game.”
For Laura, as a true Caspary woman, gender roles are inverted: the handsome, debonair Shelby was to be a trophy husband; the fact that her friend pursued her fiancé simply reinforced the triumph of the trophy.
Laura thinks of Shelby as a child, exactly in the way a stereotypical male character in a novel by a male writer might think of his stereotypical trophy wife. “I was afraid because I had always been weak with a thirty-two-year-old baby.”
Interestingly, since Caspary says in her autobiography that she enjoyed playing with the different styles of narration it is surely not a coincidence that the sections narrated by Laura are better written, with finer, more “novelistic” writing than the others.
But, though only Laura and no one else appears to have a motive for murdering Diane, Shelby also has a motive for murdering Laura. Mark and everyone else assume that Diane was shot by mistake when she answered the door in Laura’s robe while staying at Laura’s apartment, but what if she wasn’t? What if Laura was the target?
In a gender-reversed pre-echo of the plot driver in Bedelia there is a twenty-five thousand dollar insurance policy that Laura has made over to him. Shelby has a shotgun, as any southern gentleman would, so he has means as well as motive and opportunity.
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See also:
Is Vera Caspary’s Bedelia the Wickedest Fictional Anti-Heroine?
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Was it then Laura, the Caspary woman who expects the same rights as men, who wanted sex from a relationship, and Waldo who was unable to give it? Did she turn to Shelby to satisfy her physically?
And was Shelby driven to Diane because he was scared of Laura, unable to satisfy a woman who was smarter than him and earned five times as much as he did? None of these things could be said out loud in 1942.
And then, what happens after the ending of the novel? Does Laura go ahead and marry Shelby, or does Mark take his place? We have to hope not: Mark would never cope with her, she would destroy him. Mark, with his dolls and dames and police cronies, would never understand the Caspary woman.
More information
Hardboiled Feminism Wikipedia (1943 novel) Wikipedia (1944 film) Reader discussion on GoodreadsContributed by Francis Booth,* the author of several books on twentieth-century culture:
Amongst Those Left: The British Experimental Novel 1940-1960 (published by Dalkey Archive); Everybody I Can Think of Ever: Meetings That Made the Avant-Garde; Girls in Bloom: Coming of Age in the Mid-Twentieth Century Woman’s Novel; Text Acts: Twentieth Century Literary Eroticism; and Comrades in Art: Revolutionary Art in America 1926-1938.
Francis has also published several novels: The Code 17 series, set in the Swinging London of the 1960s and featuring aristocratic spy Lady Laura Summers; Young adult fantasy series The Watchers; and Young adult fantasy novel Mirror Mirror. Francis lives on the South Coast of England. He is currently working on High Collars and Monocles: Interwar Novels by Female Couples.
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*These are Bookshop Affiliate and Amazon Affiliate links. If a product is purchased by linking through, Literary Ladies Guide receives a modest commission, which helps maintain our site and helps it to continue growing!
The post The Ultimate Caspary Woman: Laura by Vera Caspary appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.
November 1, 2021
Unearthing the Secret Garden by Marta McDowell
In Unearthing the Secret Garden, Marta McDowell pays homage to the enduring classic by Frances Hodgson Burnett that has enthralled generations of readers. Through the universal metaphor of garden cultivation, The Secret Garden conveys a message of hope, and the renewal of the life as well as the self.
The Secret Garden introduced the reader to an unlikely heroine, Mary Lennox, a sickly and neglected 10-year-old born to wealthy British parents in colonial India. After a cholera epidemic kills her parents, Mary is sent to England to live with her uncle in a mysterious house.
The story follows the spoiled and sulky young girl as she slowly sheds her sour demeanor after discovering a secret locked garden on the grounds of her uncle’s manor. She befriends Dickon, a free spirit who can communicate with animals, and Colin, her uncle’s son, a neglected and lonely invalid.
Unearthing the Secret Garden is Marta McDowell’s gorgeous, deeply felt tribute to the timeless tale. Filled with photographs of the flowers, plants, and gardens that inspired Burnett, it also presents vintage illustrations from several editions of The Secret Garden, a book that has never gone out of print.
The following excerpt is from Unearthing the Secret Garden: The Plants & Places That Inspired Frances Hodgson Burnett. @2021 by Marta McDowell, Timber Press. Reprinted by permission; all rights reserved.
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Unearthing the Secret Garden is available on Bookshop.org*, Amazon*,
and wherever books are sold
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THE SECRET GARDEN is revealed scene by scene through Mary’s eyes. Only the robin, “who had flown to his treetop,” accompanies her. “It was the sweetest most mysterious-looking place any one could imagine,” the narrator tell us.
Mary sees stone seats in evergreen alcoves and tall moss-covered urns—formal elements softened by age. The remains of grassy paths meander here and there. The garden’s high walls are thick with leafless stems of climbing roses. Frances Hodgson Burnett infused her nostalgia for Maytham’s rose garden into the atmosphere of the abandoned garden:
… Their thin gray or brown branches and sprays looked like a sort of hazy mantle spreading over everything, walls, and trees, and even brown grass, where they had fallen from their fastenings and run along the ground. It was this hazy tangle from tree to tree which made it all look so mysterious. Mary had thought it must be different from other gardens which had not been left all by themselves so long; and indeed it was different from any other place she had ever seen in her life.
Now it was to be hers, her own.
If you have ever stepped into a garden and felt a shiver of something—recognition? awe?—you have had your own secret garden moment. Nature and a gardener have conspired to make a place that resonates at the same harmonic frequency as your spirit. A mystery. Some combination of light, color, plant, and place causes it, like the golden mean employed by ancient architects. It is an effect to which every gardener aspires.
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Mary clears around the “sharp little green points;”
Illustration by Nora S. Unwin
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Mary is uneasy. Is the secret garden dead? Ten years is a long time to be neglected. The grass is brown, the rose plants look gray and brittle—something that never happened in India. But then she notices “sharp little pale green points” sticking out of the earth.
“Yes, they are tiny growing things,” she whispers to herself, “and they might be crocuses or snowdrops or daffodils.” She starts to clear around them with a pointed piece of wood, by instinct wanting to give them more room to breathe.
Back in her room, she can’t stop thinking about the garden. She is struck with a desire to see all the things that will grow in England, plant lust being common to most gardeners, new or old. “I wish—I wish I had a little spade,” she tells Martha that afternoon. Worried that she will give away her secret, Mary quickly adds that she would like to make a little garden somewhere.
For the acquisition of the spade, Martha promises to employ her brother, Dickon. Mary sends along a written request with some money on Martha’s next day off so that he can buy it in the village.
“In the shop at Thwaite they sell packages o’ flower-seeds for a penny each, and our Dickon he knows which is th’ prettiest ones an’ how to make ’em grow,” Martha informs Mary in her broad Yorkshire. “Our Dickon can make a flower grow out of a brick walk. Mother says he just whispers things out o’ th’ ground.”
Like the Greek god Pan, Dickon is at home in nature. Frances once referred to him as a sort of faun, and in the book, he is described as “a sort of wood fairy,” red-cheeked and blue-eyed. He is slightly older than Mary—about twelve.
In Dickon, Burnett created a character to embody her own connection with the animal world. She was convinced that in past incarnations she had been animals, especially birds. “I am such friends with them and I understand them so and they are so sure of it and are such friends with me,” she had once said. And so it is with Dickon Sowerby.
Mary first comes upon Dickon in person sitting under a tree in the woods adjoining Misselthwaite’s gardens. He is playing his wooden pipe. Wild creatures are keeping him company. A crow named Soot. Captain the fox cub. Dickon unwraps a package for Mary. There is a miniature spade, plus a small rake, a garden fork, a hoe, a trowel, and some packets of flower seeds.
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Mary and Dickon discuss their garden plans surrounded by
his rescued animals; illustration by M.L. Kirk
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After a long conversation about flowers and growing things, Mary decides to share her secret with Dickon, sneaking him through the ivy-hidden door. His reaction doesn’t disappoint. “Eh!” he gasps in an almost whisper. “It is a queer, pretty place! It’s like as if a body was in a dream.” Frances had gauged her friends’ reactions to Maytham’s rose garden in much the same way.
Over the weeks that follow, Mary and Dickon work in the garden—pruning, weeding, and avoiding detection. He teaches her about gardening. Perennials like lily-of-the-valley need to be divided. Biennials require patience, growing green one year in order to bloom the next.
Dickon reassures Mary that most of the roses are “wick,” that is, very much alive. They make an unusual pair: a poor but much-loved boy in tune with the natural world and a stunted rich girl who grew up without affection.
Dickon is Mary’s teacher at Misselthwaite in the same way that Frances’s friends—and vicars—at Maytham had been generous with gardening lessons and advice. To make plants thrive, Dickon knows that one must “be friends with ’em for sure.”
Like his tame animal friends, garden plants need attention. “If they’re thirsty give ’em a drink and if they’re hungry give ’em a bit o’ food.” It’s good advice for any gardener. Mary absorbs his lessons like a thirsty plant.
The two children decide to cultivate a different sort of garden. Unlike Misselthwaite’s formal borders—tended by head gardener Mr. Roach and his staff—theirs will be a tad untamed. “I wouldn’t want to make it look like a gardener’s garden, all clipped an’ spick an’ span, would you?” Dickon asks.
“It’s nicer like this with things runnin’ wild, an’ swingin’ an’ catchin’ hold of each other.” Mary agrees. “It wouldn’t seem like a secret garden if it was tidy.” Like the rose garden at Maytham Hall, the secret garden is to be in the spirit of the Arts and Crafts movement.
With her new interest and activities, Mary’s disposition improves as does her appetite. Then reality intervenes. Archibald Craven comes home to roost, and so does Mary’s guilty conscience.
In a tense interview with her uncle, she reverts into a plain fretful child, worried that he will ban her from the outdoors in general or the secret garden in particular. But he provides a chance opening when he asks if there is anything she wants. He meant a toy or a book.
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Mary approaches her uncle to ask for her “bit of earth,”
illustration by Nora S. Unwin
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Omitting the particular space she has in mind, Mary asks her uncle if she might have “a bit of earth [t]o plant seeds in—to make things grow—to make them come alive.”
Archibald Craven is stunned, reminded of Lilias, his dear wife, who had also loved to garden. “When you see a bit of earth you want[,] take it, child, and make it come alive,” he responds, full of emotion. That was all Mary needed to hear. Craven leaves the next day for yet another tour of the Continent, and the secret garden is hers.
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Contributed by Marta McDowell: Marta McDowell lives, gardens, and writes in Chatham, New Jersey. She consults for public gardens and private clients, writes and lectures on gardening topics, and teaches landscape history and horticulture at the New York Botanical Garden, where she studied landscape design.
Marta’s particular interest is in authors and their gardens, the connection between the pen and the trowel. In 2018, she was the Emily Dickinson Museum’s Gardener-in-Residence, and she was the 2019 winner of the Garden Club of American’s award for outstanding literary achievement. Her books include Unearthing the Secret Garden, Beatrix Potter’s Gardening Life, The World of Laura Ingalls Wilder, Emily Dickinson’s Gardening Life, and All the President’s Gardens. Visit her at Marta McDowell.
MORE BY MARTA MCDOWELL ON THIS SITE
Emily Dickinson’s Gardening Life
Beatrix Potter’s Gardening Life
Beatrix Potter’s Letters to Children: The Path to Her Books
Laura Ingalls Wilder: Late-Blooming Author with a Passion for Nature
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You may also enjoy: Quotes from The Secret Garden
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The Secret Garden is indisputably one of the most beloved children’s classics. Published in 1911, it has never been out of print, selling millions of copies worldwide.
What many readers don’t know, however, is that its author, Frances Hodgson Burnett was one of the most popular and prolific writers of her time. Unsurprisingly, she was also a lover of flowers and gardens—but the path to her literary triumph was a long one, beset with personal tragedy and illness.
In Unearthing The Secret Garden, Marta McDowell starts by chronicling Burnett’s childhood and early life, with a focus on her growing interest in gardens and her development as a writer. McDowell also shares details of the three gardens Burnett created in England, Long Island, and Bermuda. A guide to the plants featured in The Secret Garden will delight gardeners.
In addition, McDowell transcribes the complete text of three of Burnett’s garden-themed stories, which help to deepen our appreciation of Burnett’s love and knowledge of gardening. McDowell complements her delightful text with period illustrations and contemporary photographs that bring Burnett’s world vividly to life for the reader.
Just as The Secret Garden continues to enchant readers of all ages, so Unearthing The Secret Garden draws us into a richly textured account of the fascinating professional and gardening life that gave us one of literature’s greatest treasures.
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See also: 4 Classic Books by Frances Hodgson Burnett
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*These are Bookshop Affiliate and Amazon Affiliate links. If a product is purchased by linking through, Literary Ladies Guide receives a modest commission, which helps maintain our site and helps it to continue growing!
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