Nava Atlas's Blog, page 36
August 8, 2021
Mina Loy’s Feminist Manifesto (1914): Foresight and Controversy
Mina Loy’s Feminist Manifesto is considered among her most notable works, though it wasn’t published until well after her death. In this 1914 piece, Loy vehemently asserted women’s need to fight for their selfhood rather than subsuming their personalities and desires to those of the patriarchy.
Mina Loy (1882 – 1966), the English-born modernist poet, playwright, and artist was was lauded by her peers for her dense analyses of the female experience in early twentieth-century Western society. The undercurrent of the Manifesto hints at Loy’s struggles with modernism — the artistic philosophy of her day — and its central aesthetic of impersonality.
Feminist Manifesto was finally published in 1982, in The Last Lunar Baedeker, a posthumous collection of her various works, including essays and poetry.
By writing the Manifesto before women even achieved the right to vote on either side of the Atlantic, it might be tempting to say that Loy was far ahead of her time. In many ways, she was indeed, but truthfully, she was expressing the frustration that legions of women of her day felt at their lack of rights and inferior position.
Why hasn’t the Manifesto stood the test time as a relevant feminist tract? There are at least two fatal flaws. It’s marred by the passage that begins, “Every woman of superior intelligence should realize her race-responsibility …” which has been interpreted as possibly rooted in eugenicist thought.
In addition, Loy argues for “the unconditional surgical destruction of virginity throughout the female population at puberty.” Though this assertion was made due to the value of virginity to the roles of wife and mistress, the suggestion is as abhorrent now as it was back in 1914.
Analyses of Feminist Manifesto
Here are links to two insightful analyses of Mina Loy’s Feminist Manifesto:
“Feminist Manifesto, that now most popular text, is actually shot through with a dilemma: as a feminist and woman writer, Loy wants to claim women’s equality within modernism; yet, she also seems to feel that modernist impersonality, a key aesthetic of the period, is a luxury that women writers cannot afford.” (by Christina Walter, for the Yale Modernism Lab)
“… It is a short work — in fact it can be read in just a couple of minutes — but the striking tone of the manifesto, as well as its highly radical ideas are what make it so memorable. Speaking to women and particularly contemporary feminists rather than patriarchal society, she starts by saying, “The feminist movement as at present instituted is Inadequate.” (“Mina Loy’s Feminist Manifesto” in King’sNews.org)
This pictorial representation just below of the Feminist Manifesto is in the original, modernist style that Loy intended for it to be printed. Following this will be a text version for searchability.
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Feminist Manifesto by Mina Loy (text version)The feminist movement as at present instituted is
Inadequate
Women if you want to realize yourselves-you are on the
eve of a devastating psychological upheaval-all your pet illu-
sions must be unmasked—the lies of centuries have got to go—
are you prepared for the Wrench—? There is no half-
measure—NO scratching on the surface of the rubbish heap
of tradition, will bring about Reform, the only method is
Absolute Demolition
Cease to place your confidence in economic legislation, vice-
crusades & uniform education-you are glossing over
Reality.
Professional & commercial careers are opening up for you—
Is that all you want?
And if you honestly desire to find your level without preju-
dice—be Brave & deny at the outset—that pa-
thetic clap-trap war cry Woman is the
equal of man—
for
She is NOT!
The man who lives a life in which his activities conform to a
social code which is protectorate of the feminine element—
is no longer masculine
The women who adapt themselves to a theoretical valuation of
their sex as a relative impersonality, are not yet
Feminine
Leave off looking to men to find out what you are not —seek
within yourselves to find out what you are
As conditions are at present constituted—you have the choice
between Parasitism, & Prostitu-
tion—or Negation
Men & women are enemies, with the enmity of the exploited
for the parasite, the parasite for the exploited—at present they
are at the mercy of the advantage that each can take of the
others sexual dependence—. The only point at which the
interests of the sexes merge—is the sexual embrace.
The first illusion it is to your interest to demolish is the
division of women into two classes the mistress,
& the mother every well-balanced & developed woman
knows that is not true, Nature has endowed the complete
functions—there are no restrictions on the woman who is
so incompletely evolved as to be un-self-conscious in sex, will
prove a restrictive influence on the temperamental expansion
of the next generation; the woman who is a poor mistress will
be an incompetent mother—an inferior mentality—& will
enjoy an inadequate apprehension of Life.
To obtain results you must make sacrifices & the first &
greatest sacrifice you have to make is of your ”virtue”
The fictitious value of a woman as identified with her physical
purity—is too easy to stand-by rendering her lethargic in
the acquisition of intrinsic merits of character by which she
could obtain a concrete value—therefore, the fist self-
enforced law for the female sex, as a protection against the
man made bogey of virtue—which is the principal instrument
of her subjection, would be the unconditional surgical
destruction of virginity through-out the female population at
puberty—.
The value of man is assessed entirely according to his use or
interest to the community, the value of woman depends
entirely on chance, her success or insuccess in maneouvering
a man into taking the life-long responsibility of her—
The advantages of marriage are too ridiculously ample—
compared to all other trades—for under modern conditions a
woman can accept preposterously luxurious support from a
man (with-out the return of an sort—even offspring)—as a thank
offering for her virginity
The woman who has not succeeded in striking that
advantageous bargain—is prohibited from any but
surreptitious re-action to Life-stimuli—& entirely
debarred maternity.
Every woman has a right to maternity—
Every woman of superior intelligence should realize her race-
responsibility, in producing children in adequate proportion to
the unfit or degenerate members of her sex—
Each child of a superior woman should be the result of a
definite period of psychic development in her life—& and not
necessarily of a possible irksome & outworn continuance of an
alliance—spontaneously adapted for vital creation in the
beginning but not necessarily harmoniously balanced as the
parties to it—follow their individual lines of personal
evolution—
For the harmony of race, each individual should be the
expression of an easy & ample interpenetration of the male &
female temperaments—free of stress
Woman must become more responsible for the child than
man—
Woman must destroy in themselves, the desire to be loved—
The feeling that it is a personal insult when a man transfers
his attention from her to another woman
The desire for comfortable protection instead of an intelligent
curiosity & courage in meeting & resisting the pressure of life
sex or so called love must be reduced to its initial element,
honour, grief, sentimentality, pride and & consequently jealousy
must be detached from it.
Woman for her happiness must retain her deceptive fragility of
appearance, combined with indomitable will, irreducible
courage, & abundant health the outcome of sound nerves—
Another great illusion is that woman must use all her
introspective and clear-sightedness & unbiassed bravery to
destroy—for the sake of her self respect is the impurity of sex
the realization in defiance of superstition that there is nothing
impure in sex—except in the mental attitude to it—will
constitute an incalculable & wider social regeneration than it
is possible for our generation to imagine.
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More about Mina Loy on this site
Mina Loy and “The Crowd” — Modernists in 1920s Paris That is the New Rhythm: Mina Loy and Marianne Moore. . . . . . . . .
Mina Loy page on Amazon*
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*This is an Amazon Affiliate link. If a product is purchased by linking through, Literary Ladies Guide receives a modest commission, which helps maintain our site and helps it to continue growing!
The post Mina Loy’s Feminist Manifesto (1914): Foresight and Controversy appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.
August 7, 2021
Coup De Grâce by Marguerite Yourcenar (1939)
Coup De Grâce by Marguerite Yourcenar is this noted French author’s 1939 novella, her second such work following Alexis (1929). In a 1988 interview in Paris Review, Yourcenar reveals that the novella’s lead female, Sophie, is very close to herself at twenty.
The brief but emotionally devastating story is of the love triangle between three young people affected by the civil war between the White Russians and the Bolsheviks: Erick and Conrad, best friends from childhood; and Sophie, who is burdened with an unrequited love for Conrad.
From the 1957 Farrar, Straus and Cudahy edition: Coup de Grâce is the second of Mme. Yourcenar’s novels to be translated from the French by Grace Frick in collaboration with the author, Memoirs of Hadrian being the first.
Flanking Russia’s outlet to the Baltic Sea lie the countries known before the First World War as the Baltic Provinces, once made up chiefly of vast landed estates controlled by a feudal aristocracy. In the mixture of luxury and primitive living typical of such domains, Erick von L’homond passed the happiest part of his boyhood in the home of Baltic relatives, the family of the Count of Reval.
Called back to Germany for officer’s training before the fall of the Imperial Régime, Erick is too young to fight in the German army before its enforced de-mobilization, but promptly seeks service German generals who volunteer the cause of White Russia against Bolshevism.
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Learn more about Marguerite Yourcenar
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Thus he makes his way to the Reval estate, now ravaged by civil war. Here he rejoins Conrad, the friend of his youth, and Conrad’s sister Sophie, grown beautiful and bitter in the few years of wartime experience.The return of Erick arouses true passion in her, to which he does not respond, but a strange, anguished intimacy grows up between them in the barracks-like existence which the war has forced upon the whole household.
Stunned by the belated revelation of Erick’s feeling for Conrad, Sophie flees to the opposite camp in a desperate attempt at renunciation. Captured after some months by Erick’s troops, she faces death in a scene of brilliant power.
Readers of Memoirs of Hadrian will not be surprised by the quality of Mme. Yourcenar’s prose; they may, however, be unprepared for the swiftness of this narrative in contrast to the meditative pace of those Memoirs.
In both cases a man is speaking, and looking back upon his past, but this time it is a modern
man, outwardly hard and cynical but inwardly tormented by a confusion of emotions. This portrait of a bitter, intelligent young man and an ardent, indomitable girl reflects much of the drama of youth in time of chaos.
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Coup de Grâce on Bookshop.org* and on Amazon*
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“Friendship affords total certitude above all and that is what distinguishes it from love. It means respect as well and total acceptance of another being.”
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“I do not regret having yielded to Sophie as much as it lay in my nature to do; at the first glance I had caught sight of something in her incorruptible, with which one could make a compact as sure, and as dangerous, as with an element itself.”
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“Fire may be trusted, provided one knows that its law is to burn, or die.”
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See also: Memoirs of Hadrian
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*These are Bookshop.org 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 Coup De Grâce by Marguerite Yourcenar (1939) appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.
August 4, 2021
10 Fascinating Facts About Dorothea Lange
Jazmin Darznik, author of The Bohemians, a novel of Dorothea Lange’s early career (Ballantine Books, 2021), presents 10 fascinating facts about this trailblazing American documentary photographer of the early 20th century:
Though she is most known for her iconic Depression-era photograph “Migrant Mother,” Dorothea Lange’s photographs put a face to nearly every major historical event of the twentieth century, including World War II and the Japanese American internment camps.
Her photographs are infused with a deep and abiding dedication to documenting the lives of the have-nots in our country—those banished to the fringes by poverty, hardship, forced migration, and discrimination. She also dedicated herself to documenting environmental degradation, as in her series Death of a Valley.
A California transplant, she died in Berkeley in 1965, months before the first major retrospective of her work at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. She’s one of the photographers whose work is included in the current Met exhibit “The New Woman Behind the Camera.”
Her name wasn’t always Dorothea Lange
She was born Dorothea Nutzhorn, the daughter of first-generation German immigrants, in 1895 and went by that name until she left the East Coast in 1918.
Though she never explained her reasons for taking her mother’s surname, the cross-country move likely afforded her the chance to break free of her painful past, which included her father’s abandonment of the family when she was twelve. Whatever her reasons, once she settled in California, she only ever went by Dorothea Lange.
She nearly died of polio as a childAt age seven, Lange contracted polio, which left her with a weakened right foot and permanent limp. Years later she would remark of the experience: “It formed me, guided me, instructed me, helped me, and humiliated me. I’ve never gotten over it, and I am aware of the force and power of it.”
She spent a year confined at home, and when she finally returned to school, she was mocked by the other children and shamed by her own family. Eventually, she trained herself to walk so that her limp was more or less imperceptible. She also wore long skirts and pants to further disguise it.
Lange’s legendary empathy as a photographer grew from this trauma. She had a particular genius for the language of the body and could suggest a whole story from how people held themselves. Her limp also made her vulnerable in ways she drew upon in her work. When walking into a migrant camp during the Depression, for example, she’d sometimes let people see her disability, which helped her establish a connection with them.
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The Bohemians (a novel of Dorothea Lange’s early career)
on Bookshop.org* and on Amazon*
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After Lange’s father disappeared, her mother went to work as a librarian, then as a social worker. Since the commute took her to New York, she enrolled her daughter in a school on the Lower East Side. Lange would later speak rapturously of the hours she spent ditching school to roam around the city, looking at all different kinds of people.
During this time, she learned to make herself invisible—to carry herself in a way that attracted the least attention—which allowed her greater freedom of movement. This talent would serve her well later when she became a documentary photographer. She knew how to get lost and how to fall in with strangers and felt these were an essential part of creating good pictures.
A thief altered her fate
In 1918, Lange decided to take a trip around the world. She saved up for it for several years, working as a photographer’s assistant in various Manhattan studios. With the US having just entered the war, it was impossible to travel to Europe (the usual destination for a person with an artistic bent), and so she went west intending to travel to Mexico, Hawaii, and the Far East.
Her plans were derailed just as soon as she arrived in San Francisco. A thief stole all her money and she was suddenly stranded in a city where she knew no one. Ever resourceful, she got a job in a five-and-dime shop, where she worked as a photo finisher. A little over a year later, she was running one of the premier portrait studios in San Francisco. California, the place she’d only meant to visit, became the heart of her life’s work—and all on account of a thief.
Before documenting the downtrodden, she did portraits of the rich and famous
While Lange’s name is synonymous with documentary photography, she only started on this path after many years as a portrait photographer. In the 1920s, her clients included the wealthiest families in San Francisco—the Levi-Straus family, the de Youngs, and the Hasses.
It may be hard to reconcile this work with her documentary photography, but Lange never regretted the time she spent in the studio. Portrait photography taught her how to work closely with people, how to draw them out, and how to show them not just as they wished to be seen, but how they truly were. She never stopped making portraits; what changed were the subjects.
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Dorothea Lange in the 1930s
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The reigning figure in photography in Lange’s day, Alfred Stieglitz, advocated for photographs that rose to the level of art. As a single woman from a working-class background, Lange couldn’t indulge such ideals. She kept up with artistic movements and brought an artist’s keen eye to her work, yet she called herself a “tradeswoman” and took true pride in the title.
She wasn’t a solitary genius
San Francisco in the 1920s was a fantastically exciting place for women artists. The 1906 Earthquake and Fires had displaced the photography establishment, which wound up creating opportunities for women.
By 1918, the year Lange came to the city, photographers such as Imogen Cunningham, Anne Brigman, and Consuelo Kanaga were busy doing phenomenal work there. They were Bohemians, bent on living their lives on their own terms. Lange was able to find friends, colleagues, and mentors. This community emboldened and transformed her.
A homeless man pulled her out of the studio and into the street
The Great Depression hit both Lange’s and her painter-husband Maynard Dixon’s businesses hard. It was from the window of her studio on Montgomery Street that she witnessed strikes and the struggles of the unemployed and homeless.
One day she looked up from her work and saw a man who was lost, destitute, and alone. It was a moment of profound reckoning, as she would later reflect: “The discrepancy between what I was working on … and what was going on up the street was more than I could assimilate.”
That was the first time she went into the streets with the aim of taking photographs. Though it took time to dismantle her business, from then on, she knew she had to be part of what was happening in the world.
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One day in 1936, Lange was returning home to the Bay Area after a month alone on the road. She’d been separated from her young sons, which was by then a regular occurrence given the nature of her work. She was tired and frazzled and eager to make it home quickly. When she saw a handwritten sign with the words “Pea Pickers Camp,” she drove past it. A few miles on, she suddenly decided to turn around.
“Migrant Mother,” one of the most iconic and most reproduced images in the history of photography, was taken on that day.
She was regularly censored for her photographs of people of color
When working for the Farm Securities Administration during the Great Depression, she was expressly told to photograph white Americans as this would engender the most support for New Deal programs. Lange regularly flouted these rules, photographing Asian, Latino, and African Americans, as well as Euro-Americans. These pictures were never included in official government pamphlets, but she continued taking them anyway.
Later, when working for the War Department during WWII, she was forbidden from documenting the Japanese internment camps in any way that suggested they were anything other than organized and dignified. She found creative workarounds, such as photographing the shadow of a barbed-wire fence rather than the fence itself.
Lange also smuggled out her more daring pictures, lending them to the efforts to halt the internment. Eventually she was fired, and all her photographs of the camps were impounded. They only became known to the public seven decades after she took them.
Contributed by Jasmin Darznik. Jasmin’s debut novel, Song of a Captive Bird, was a New York Times Book Review “Editors’ Choice,” a Los Angeles Times bestseller, longlisted for the Center for Fiction Prize, and awarded the Writers’ Center’s First Novel Prize. Darznik is also the author of the New York Times bestseller The Good Daughter: A Memoir of My Mother’s Hidden Life. Her books have been published in seventeen countries.
Jasmin was born in Tehran, Iran, and came to America when she was five years old. She holds an MFA in fiction from Bennington College, a JD from the University of California, and a PhD in English from Princeton University. Now a professor of English and creative writing at California College of the Arts, she lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her family. To learn more, visit Jasmin Darznik.
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In 1918, a young and bright-eyed Dorothea Lange steps off the train in San Francisco, where a disaster kick-starts a new life. Her friendship with Caroline Lee, a vivacious, straight-talking Chinese American with a complicated past, gives Dorothea entrée into Monkey Block, an artists’ colony and the bohemian heart of the city.
Dazzled by Caroline and her friends, Dorothea is catapulted into a heady new world of freedom, art, and politics. She also finds herself unexpectedly falling in love with the brilliant but troubled painter Maynard Dixon. Dorothea and Caroline eventually create a flourishing portrait studio, but a devastating betrayal pushes their friendship to the breaking point and alters the course of their lives.
The Bohemians captures a glittering and gritty 1920s San Francisco, with a cast of unforgettable characters, including cameos from Frida Kahlo, Ansel Adams, and D. H. Lawrence. A vivid and absorbing portrait of the past, it is also eerily resonant with contemporary themes, as anti-immigration sentiment, corrupt politicians, and a devastating pandemic bring tumult to the city—and the gift of friendship and the possibility of self-invention persist against the ferocious pull of history.
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*These are Bookshop.org 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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August 2, 2021
Memoirs of Hadrian, Marguerite Yourcenar’s Masterpiece
Memoirs of Hadrian, a novel by Marguerite Yourcenar, the Belgian-born French writer, was first published in France in 1951. Originally written in French, it was published in English in 1954. It was an ambitious project many year in the making; Yourcenar first had the idea for it in the 1920s, then worked on it, on and off, in the 1930s.
Many years in gestation, it was a book that, with the benefit of hindsight, she didn’t think she could have written when she was younger. “There are books,” she said later, “which one should not attempt before having passed the age of forty.”
Considered this author’s masterwork, and the book she’s best remembered for, it was from the start a critical success. The novel, told from a first person person by the Roman Emperor Hadrian, begins with a letter to his adoptive grandson, who became Marcus Aurelius and his successor.
Hadrian continues this imagined memoir with tales of his military conquests. He muses on his penchant for music, philosophy, and poetry and all things artistic and cultural.
The time of Hadrian’s rule is described by him as his personal “age of Gold,” which he attributes to his lover, Antinous. The love they share is more passionate and real makes his marriage to Sabina. As encapsulated from the Modern Library edition:
“At once a psychological novel and a meditation on history, Memoirs of Hadrian is written in the form of a testamentary letter from the Roman Emperor Hadrian (76-138 AD) to his successor, the youthful Marcus Aurelius. A tour de force of scholarship that uses Hadrian’s extant writings and the writings of historians, friends and enemies, It is a vivid reconstruction of the intimate life of the emperor and his entourage.
Hadrian appears as one of the Western world’s greatest liberals, a humanist who based man’s chances of happiness and security on the culture that was Greece and the great organizing power that was Rome. In a prose of epigrammatic brilliance, Marguerite Yourcenar has painted an unforgettable self-portrait of Hadrian, as remarkable for its psychological depth as for its authentic recreation of time and place.”
Yourcenar, who was the first woman to be elected to the Académie Française, assisted in the translation of Memoirs of Hadrian from French to English. The book was was highly praised in any language in which it was published. Here are two samples from American newspapers.
Marguerite Yourcenar’s Classic Novel
From The Capital Times, March 26, 1964: It is cause for wonder that there are relatively few good novels of ancient Rome. Hermann Broch’s The Death of Virgil is. of course, the very best such novel: it has no peer. But certainly Marguerite Yourcenar’s Memoirs of Hadrian come very close to equality with Broch’s novel.
The present edition contains the addition of “reflections” on the composition of the book, translated by Grace Frick in collaboration with the author, and with many illustrations which weren’t in the original first edition published ten years before.
It is a largely psychological novel and a meditation in history. and it is something new in that its approach to a historical figure is in depth. Its form is that of autobiography, presumably written by the Emperor Hadrian (78-138 AD) to his grandson, Marcus Aurelius.
Miss Yourcenar reconstructs the life of the Emperor and his many-faceted character — his wars, and his loves, particularly that one which seems to have been the chief love of his life — that for the handsome youth Antinous, the traumatic effect of his infidelity on the emperor.
Readers who may have missed this remarkable work up to this time will now find it readily. It is enriched by the additions which have been made to it. By any standards, Memoirs of Hadrian is one of the classic masterpieces of the contemporary novel.
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Memoirs of Hadrian on Bookshop* and on Amazon*
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From The Pittsburgh Press, June 21, 1963, reviewed by Mary C. Robb: First published in English in 1954, this edition is enhanced by fine illustrations and a supplementary section entitled “Reflections in the Composition of “Memoirs of Hadrian.” The brilliant translation from the French is the work of Grace Frick and the author.
In a leisurely and deeply probing letter to Marcus Aurelius, his adopted grandson and chosen successor, the dying Hadrian reviews his own life and, more importantly, his understanding of himself and the Roman world he has ruled, and his hopes and fears for the future.
Mme. Yourcenar has described this letter as “a psychological novel and a meditation on history,” but the description, while adequate, hardly includes the remarkable effect she has produced.
Part of this effect is no doubt due to Hadrian himself, an Emperor who ruled at the height of Rome’s territorial expansion, and who believed deeply and firmly in the need for peace and justice. He was a soldier, a scholar, and a man of wide.ranging curiosity and powerful emotions, well worth our study.
Such a person deserves the right to tell his own story in his own way and this Mme. Yourcenar has allowed him to do with complete artistic integrity.
From the first page to the last the reader is aware only of Hadrian as his mind and heart review the past—the years with the legions on the frontiers, the halcyon days with Antinous, the labor of rule, the endless speculations about life and death and immortality, the good and the bad that were himself.
Memoirs Of Hadrian is a rare instance of an author’s mastery of subject so complete that the book seems to have written itself.
More about Memoirs of Hadrian Portrait of Power Embodied in a Roman Emperor Becoming the Emperor Reader discussion on Goodreads
Quotes from Memoirs of Hadrian
“My hunger for power was like the craving for love, which keeps the lover from eating or sleeping, from thinking or even from loving as long as certain rites remain unperformed. The most urgent tasks seemed vain when I was not the free master over decisions affecting the future; I needed to be assured of reigning in order to recapture the desire to serve.”
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“Of all our games, love’s play is the only one which threatens to unsettle our soul, and is also the only one in which the player has to abandon himself to the body’s ecstasy.”
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“Nailed to the beloved body like a slave to a cross, I have learned some secrets of life which are now dimmed in my memory by the operation of that same law which ordained that the convalescent, once cured, ceases to understand the mysterious truths laid bare by illness, and that the prisoner, set free, forgets his torture, or the conqueror, his triumph passed, forgets his glory.”
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“Our great mistake is to try to exact from each person virtues which he does not possess, and to neglect the cultivation of those which he has.”
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“I am not sure that the discovery of love is necessarily more exquisite than the discovery of poetry.”
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“The written word has taught me to listen to the human voice, much as the great unchanging statues have taught me to appreciate bodily motions. On the other hand, but more slowly, life has thrown light for me on the meaning of books.”
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“Like everyone else I have at my disposal only three means of evaluating human existence: the study of self, which is the most difficult and most dangerous method, but also the most fruitful; the observation of our fellowmen, who usually arrange to hide secrets where none exist; and books, with the particular errors of perspective to which they inevitably give rise.”
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“He had reached that moment in life, different for each one of us, when a man abandons himself to his demon or to his genius, following a mysterious law which bids him either to destroy or outdo himself.”
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“The memory of most men is an abandoned cemetery where lie, unsung and unhonored, the dead whom they have ceased to cherish. Any lasting grief is reproof to their neglect.”
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“I knew that good like bad becomes a routine, that the temporary tends to endure, that what is external permeates to the inside, and that the mask, given time, comes to be the face itself.”
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“Laws change more slowly than custom, and though dangerous when they fall behind the times are more dangerous still when the presume to anticipate custom.”
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*These are Bookshop.org 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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July 30, 2021
Summer by Edith Wharton (1917)
This analysis of Summer by Edith Wharton, a 1917 novella of the coming of age of Charity Royall, a small-town girl, is excerpted from Girls in Bloom: Coming of Age in the Mid-20th Century Woman’s Novel by Francis Booth, reprinted by permission.
The slim novel was one of Wharton’s personal favorites. She called it the “hot Ethan,” referring to her 1911 novella, Ethan Frome. It’s unclear if she was speaking of the book’s setting in the summer season, Charity’s sexual awakening, or both.
Unusually for Edith Wharton (1862–1937), best known for her novels of patrician Gilded-Age New York like The House of Mirth and The Age of Innocence, this novella is set in a tiny New England town close to ‘the Mountain,’ from which Charity Royall has been brought down as a baby by lawyer Royall, as he is universally known, and his wife, who is dead before the story begins.
Feeling trapped
Charity and Mr. Royal now live alone together in the ‘red house.’ ‘Charity was not very clear about the Mountain; but she knew it was a bad place, and a shame to have come from;’ she knows that she should be grateful to lawyer Royall for saving her.
Still, Charity, like many other adolescent girls in fiction, feels trapped in her small and small-minded remote town; ‘How I hate everything!’ she thinks regularly to herself. She has only once in her life been to even a medium-sized town, and that only for one day.
In the course of that incredible day Charity Royall had, for the first and only time, experienced railway-travel, looked into shops with plate-glass fronts, tasted cocoanut pie, sat in a theatre, and listened to a gentleman saying unintelligible things before pictures that she would have enjoyed looking at if his explanations had not prevented her from understanding them. This initiation had shown her that North Dormer was a small place, and developed in her a thirst for information that her position as custodian of the village library had previously failed to excite.
Two afternoons a week, Charity sits at her desk in the library, ‘her prison-house,’ which was founded by a long dead author, ‘and wondered if he felt any deader in his grave than she did in his library.’
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Girls in Bloom by Francis Booth on Amazon*
Girls in Bloom on Amazon UK*
Girls in Bloom in full on Issuu
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When Mrs. Royall had died, there had been talk of sending Charity to a boarding school, initiated by the kindly Miss Hatchard, but lawyer Royall will not let her go. Charity understands that this is because he does not want to let her go and be on his own.
He was a dreadfully ‘lonesome’ man; she had made that out because she was so ‘lonesome’ herself. He and she, face-to-face in that sad house, had sounded the depths of isolation; and though she felt no particular affection for him, and not the slightest gratitude, she pitied him because she was conscious that he was superior to the people about him, and that she was the only being between him and solitude.
Miss Hatchard seems to understand that Royall’s feelings for his teenage ward may be other than what they seem. She tells Charity that she is too young to understand; Charity replies, ‘Oh no, I ain’t,’ but in fact she is. It is only later that she realizes that her guardian wants to become something like Mr. Rochester to her Jane Eyre.
She was awakened by a rattling at her door and jumped out of bed. She heard Mr. Royall’s voice, low and peremptory, and opened the door, fearing an accident. No other thought had occurred to her; but when she saw him in the doorway, a ray from the autumn moon falling on his discomposed face, she understood.
For a moment they looked at each other in silence; then, as he put his foot across the threshold, she stretched out her arm and stopped him.
‘You go right back from here,’ she said, in a shrill voice that startled her; ‘you ain’t going to have that key tonight.’
‘Charity, let me in. I don’t want the key. I’m a lonesome man,’ he began, in the deep voice that sometimes moved her.
Her heart gave a startled plunge, but she continued to hold him back contemptuously. ‘Well, I guess you made a mistake, then. This ain’t your wife’s room any longer.’
She was not frightened, she simply felt a deep disgust; and perhaps he divined it or read it in her face, for after staring at her a moment he drew back and turned slowly away from the door.
An unwelcome proposal
In the cold light of day he asks her to marry him. ‘As he stood there before her, unwieldy, shabby, disordered, the purple veins distorting the hands he pressed against the desk, and his long orator’s jaw trembling with the effort of his avowal, he seemed like a hideous parody of the fatherly old man she had always known.’
She mocks him. ‘How long is it since you’ve looked at yourself in the glass?’ She tells him she assumes, miser that he is, that he only wants to marry her because ‘it would be cheaper to marry me that to keep a hired girl’. Charity insists that if she is to stay in the house there must be another woman; Royall gives in to her and brings in an old woman from the poorhouse as a kind of maid.
Charity knew that what had happened on that hateful night would not happen again. She understood that, profoundly as she had despised Mr. Royall ever since, he despised himself still more profoundly. If she had asked for a woman in the house it was far less for her own defense than for his humiliation. She needed no one to defend her; his humbled pride was her surest protection … Nothing now would ever shake her rule in the red house.
Enter Lucius
Soon after this, a young man comes to the village: Miss Hatchard’s cousin Lucius Harney, an architect come to write a booklet on the local abandoned houses. He comes into the library and dazzles Charity with his knowledge.
‘Never had her ignorance of life and literature so weighed on her as in reliving the short scene of her discomfiture.’ That night she sees herself marrying him. ‘A clumsy band and button fastened her unbleached night-gown about the throat. She undid it, freed her thin shoulders, and saw herself a bride in low-necked satin, walking down an aisle with Lucius Harney. He would kiss her as they left the church.’
But Lucius tells Miss Hatchard what a mess the library is in; Charity takes it as a personal insult and is devastated that ‘the first creature who had come toward her out of the wilderness had brought her anguish instead of joy.’ But soon he makes up with her and they start to spend time together, he seeming genuinely affectionate towards her.
Royall is of course jealous and tells Lucius what Charity herself has never known: she is ‘the child of a drunken convict and of a mother who wasn’t “half human,” and was glad to have her go.’ This does not seem to put Lucius off and they start to spend most of their time together until suddenly Lucius says he is leaving town.
Charity decides she will not beg him, and that if he wants her he must come to her, but the night before he is due to leave she sits outside his bedroom. She does not go in. But Harney does not go at this time and she does eventually give way.
‘With sudden vehemence he wound his arms about her, holding her head against his breast while she gave him back his kisses. An unknown Harney had revealed himself, a Harney who dominated her and yet over whom she felt herself possessed of a new mysterious power.’
Lawyer Royall comes around
Royall realizes what has happened. ‘You – damn – whore!’ he calls her. But Charity does not see things that way. ‘She had always thought of love as something confused and furtive, and he made it as bright and open as the summer air.’ But Harney has been deceiving her and soon after, he really does go, leaving her on a very weak pretext; she later finds out that he prefers one of her friends.
‘She had given him all she had – but what was it compared to the other gifts life held for him? She understood now the case of girls like herself to whom this kind of thing happened. They gave all they had, but their all was not enough: it could not buy more than a few moments.’
Naturally, Charity is pregnant.
‘Charity, till then, had been conscious only of a vague self-disgust and a frightening physical distress; now, all of a sudden, there came to her the grave surprise of motherhood.’
Everyone has abandoned her; even the doctor to whom she goes for a pregnancy test tricks her. She journeys by herself up the Mountain and meets her mother who, in a melodramatic twist untypical of Wharton, is dying. Charity thinks for a while that she might go to live there but it turns out to be far too wild for her. When she comes down from the Mountain, the repentant Mr. Royall turns out to be an ally and comes to take her home.
‘Mr. Royall seldom spoke, but his silent presence gave her, for the first time, a sense of peace and security. She knew that where he was there would be warmth rest, silence; and for the moment they were all she wanted.’
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Summer on 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 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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July 26, 2021
Hitty: Her First Hundred Years by Rachel Field (1929)
Among the works Rachel Field (1894 – 1942) created for children, the most celebrated and enduring is Hitty: Her First Hundred Years, published in 1929. Written in the voice of a 100-year-old doll telling her life story, it gave Field the distinction of being the first woman to win a Newberry Medal (1930). It also received the acclaimed Lewis Carroll Shelf Award.
Hitty enjoyed a long life in print. The 1959 MacMillan Company edition, retaining the original illustrations by Dorothy P. Lathrop, describes the book as follows:
“Hitty is a doll of great charm and real character. It is a privilege to be able to publish her memoirs which, besides being full of the most thrilling adventures on land and sea, also reveal a personality which is delightful and forceful.
One glance at her portrait will show that she is no ordinary doll. Hitty, or Mehitable, as she was really named, was carved from a piece of white ash by a peddler who was spending the winter in Maine. Phoebe Preble, for whom Hitty was made, was very proud of her doll and took her everywhere, even on a long sailing trip in a whaler.
In this way, Hitty’s horizon was broadened and she acquired ample material to make her memoirs exciting and instructive. Hitty is a real doll, over one hundred years old, and now belongs to both Miss Field and Miss Lathrop. Recently she has done more traveling all over America in special exhibits to get acquainted with the young readers who love her story.”
How Rachel Field was inspired to write this book is a story in itself. She and her friend Dorothy Lathrop, an illustrator, had been eyeing a tiny wooden doll in a New York City antique shop. No larger than six inches, the calico-clad brown-skinned doll seemed to have so much character. At twenty-five dollars, quite a tidy sum back then, she was out of their budget. Finally, the two friends agreed to pool their money to purchase her, and at once, little Hitty stirred their imaginations.
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Hitty: Her First Hundred Years on Bookshop.org* and on Amazon*
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In The Field House, a biography of Rachel Field, Robin Clifford Wood writes of the book’s inception:
“The following summer Dorothy came to visit Rachel on Sutton Island, along with their friend Abbie Evans. Rachel wrote to her friend Prentiss: ‘Dorothy Lathrop, Abbie Evans and I had a grand week together, mapping out the adventures of Hitty, the wooden doll. That is to be a real book, if it ever gets on paper and it must.
After her week on Sutton, Rachel’s excitement about her Hitty book grew daily. ‘It was a real snowball of a book,’ she told one reporter, recounting how a great idea of her historical research and family recollections found their way in to Hitty’s story, the narrative account of the adventures of a one-hundred-year old doll.”
In 1999, Rosemary Wells and illustrator Susan Jeffers brought out an adaptation titled Rachel Field’s Hitty: Her First Hundred Years. Cathryn M. Mercier, a children’s literature scholar, wrote that “the adaptation removes some of the more archaic and problematic language found in Field’s novel, but that Hitty loses some of her distinct characterization.”
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Today, the original Hitty doll is displayed in the Stockbridge Library Association in Stockbridge, MA, where Rachel spent the first ten years or so of her life.
Following are two original reviews of Hitty: Her First Hundred Years from 1929, the year it was first published.
Adventures of Doll Carved by Sea Captain Are Told in Prize Book
From The Evening Express (Los Angeles), November 8, 1929: One of the most talked-about books for children this year is a doll story, published by the MacMillan Company of New York.
Hitty: Her First Hundred Years is the title of the story which began over 100 years ago when a sea captain in Maine really did carve a doll for his daughter out of good, stout mountain ash wood.
In 1928 Miss Rachel Field, the author, and Miss Dorothy Lathrop, the artist, found this doll in an antique shop In New York, her name plainly embroidered on her antiquated garments. She became their joint property, and they were so proud of her story as it developed in prose and pictures that at one time it looked as though only the old Anderson Galleries could contain and control the auctioning off of this manuscript among their many publishing friends.
Hitty, born in Maine, goes to sea on a whaling vessel, is lost in a temple on a South Sea Island, has poetry written to her In Philadelphia by Mr. Whittier, sees some exciting life on the Mississippi, and fills out her long career with periods of “going into camphor.”
She is the sort of biographer highly appreciated by elders who read aloud, and beloved by children who read to themselves. The book is beautifully bound and illustrated with color inserts and artistic black and whites.
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You might also enjoy:
The Field House by Robin Clifford Wood: Rediscovering Rachel Field
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From the Mansfield, Ohio News-Journal, November 17, 1929: Hitty, Her First Hundred Years is the engaging title of the new children’s book by a distinguished author and an equally distinguished artist, who have contributed many beautiful volumes to American publishing.
Rachel Field, author of Eliza and the Elves, Little Dog Toby, Polly Patch-work, and many other books successful with younger children, has written the adventures of Hitty.
Dorothy Lathrop, whose first illustrating success was with the beautiful de la Mare books and who has illustrated George MacDonald’s and other unusual fairy tales, has made the most beautiful pictures of her career for the story. The Macmillan Company, famous for its attractive children’s books, is the publisher.
Hitty is a doll of great charm and real character. One glance at her portrait will show that she is no ordinary doll. Hitty, or Mehitable. as she was really named, was carved from a piece of white ash by a peddler who was spending the winter in Maine. Phoebe Preble, for whom Hitty was made, was very proud of her doll and took her everywhere, even on a long sailing trip in a whaler.
In this way, Hitty’s horizon was broadened and she acquired ample material to make her memoirs exciting and instructive.
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21 Fascinating Facts About Rachel Field
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July 20, 2021
Jean Webster, Author of Daddy-Long-Legs
Jean Webster (July 24, 1876 – June 11, 1916) was an American author best known for her enduring girls’ novel, Daddy-Long-Legs (1912), which was successfully dramatized two years after its publication. Her fiction reveals her dedication to social welfare and her characters often triumph over destitution and injustice.
Born Alice Jane Chandler Webster in Fredonia, New York, the name Jean was acquired later, as a young woman. Her parents, Charles Webster and Annie Moffett Webster, were married in 1875; Alice was their firstborn.
A childhood as Alice
Alice didn’t brag about her great-uncle, Samuel Clemens, who was becoming famous as author Mark Twain — Pamela, in the photograph, being his sister, Jane his mother.
Unsurprisingly, Alice’s childhood was an artistic one. Her grandmother had been a music teacher and “from her earliest childhood, books, and those of the best” surrounded Alice.
Twain established the publishing house Charles L. Webster and Company and appointed Alice’s father as its business manager in 1884 out of frustration with his previous publishers’ delays and royalties. Also in 1884, Alice’s brother Samuel was born, the family’s youngest of three; there were eight years between Samuel and Alice, five years between her and William.
The firm found tremendous success with The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) and The Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant, which Charles was instrumental in soliciting, having previously met Grant while working as an engineer out west.
The extended family now lived in New York City during the year and Long Island in the summer. But Charles’ work was increasingly demanding; networking with the firm’s agents required lengthy and frequent travel.
His health declined in concert with the firm’s fortunes, and although Twain reinvested profits, in 1888, he severed his working relationship with Charles. When Alice was fifteen, in 1891, her father committed suicide.
Public and boarding school, and becoming Jean
After Alice graduated from Fredonia Normal School in 1894, she boarded at Lady Jane Grey School in Binghamton for two years where she was aught academics, music, art, letter-writing, diction, and manners.
Here, she became “Jean” to distinguish herself from her roommate Alice, and had many of the experiences she would immortalize in her Patty stories.
In 1896, she returned to Fredonia Normal School for one year, before attending Vassar College in 1897 — class of 1901. There, she met Adelaide Crapsey, also her roommate and a poet, who became the model for Patty (and, later, Judy).
At Vassar, Jean studied English and Economics, including welfare and penal reform, which led her to work at the College Settlement House; observing class inequities indelibly marked her literary pursuits.
Embarking on the writing life
In the course of publishing short works at Vassar, Jean concealed her connection to Twain, relying on her own merits in approaching an editor at the Poughkeepsie Sunday Courier during her sophomore year. She proposed a weekly Vassar-themed column:
“He looked me over dubiously, and asked if I knew how to write. I told him I did, and that my roommates were pretty good spellers; and I thought between us we could turn out a column a week of chatty news, and that I could go home and try, and he would see how he liked it. I cut my classes more or less during the next week, and succeeded in producing quite a chatty column.”
She describes this in the Vassar Quarterly, along with their unanticipated follow-up discussion about rates, during which Jean hastily suggested $3/week (based on a figure she’d heard was equal to a servant’s weekly wages). She and her roommates celebrated at the Smith Brothers restaurant next door.
The Courier columns developed Jean’s work ethic: she prioritized truthfulness, avoided abbreviations, and elaborated on ordinary stories to make deadlines.
During her junior year, she continued with the Courier, but also spent a semester in Europe: briefly in the UK and France, and extensively in Italy, where she developed her thesis “Pauperism in Italy” and researched for fiction. While traveling with two other Vassar students, she also met and established enduring friendships with Ethelyn McKinney and Lena Weinstein there.
After graduation, she wrote for magazines and assembled her school stories into a manuscript. “Much of her writing was no more than a magazine editor, in search of a Christmas story or of a trifle for a hammock on a sunny day, would pay for—a romance, a melodrama or a detective story,” according to biographers Alan and Mary Simpson.
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Jean Webster page on Amazon*
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After securing a publisher for When Patty Went to College (1903), Jean visited Italy again with her mother. His first was the only book of Jean’s that her great-uncle read; Twain described it as “limpid, bright, sometimes brilliant; it is easy, flowing, effortless, and brimming with girlish spirits … Its humour is genuine, and not often overstrained.” (“Jean Webster.” Twentieth-Century Romance and Historical Writers)
In Italy, Jean worked casually on short stories (which would appear in 1909’s Much Ado about Peter), concertedly on The Wheat Princess (1905), and deepened her attachment to the country, also the setting for her romance, Jerry Junior (1909), about Americans in Italy.
Jean Webster and her friends believed The Wheat Princess contained her best writing, according to Elizabeth Cutting. EMD’s review in the Vassar paper says: “The book is rapid and interesting reading, not once throughout does the attention wander or flag.”
The next year, Jean traveled with Ethelyn and Lena again, to Ireland — with Ethelyn’s older brother. Jean and Glenn concealed their romantic attachment because Glenn was married to, and had a son with, Annette Raynaud; Annette’s frequent hospitalizations for manic depression complicated their divorce.
Jean spent winters in New York City apartments, occasionally attending literary events, and summers in New England farmhouses. Her literary reputation grew, culminating in 1912, when Daddy-Long-Legs, which began the previous summer in Tyringham, MA was serialized in the Ladies’ Home Journal. It was then published as a novel.
Daddy-Long-Legs and Dear Enemy
This story about an orphan who writes letters to her anonymous gentleman benefactor, complete with hand-drawn illustrations and a sense of humor, was a grand success. The following summer, Jean began to dramatize Judy’s story for Henry Miller, who produced it for Broadway in the fall of 1914. Jean’s friend Adelaide became ill and died from tuberculosis during that October.
The show ran for 300 performances in New York City with more than 175,000 attendees. After its run ended in May 1915, it toured widely throughout the U.S. and included the sale of Judy dolls, which funded the adoption of orphans into families.
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Later, would purchase the film rights and star on-screen; many other screen and stage productions succeeded: most notably in 1955 with Fred Astaire and Leslie Caron, and most recently in 2015, off-Broadway.
Dear Enemy (1915) built on that success. Ruth Danenhower’s review in the May 1916 Vassar Quarterly acknowledges that some might object that Sallie is “simply Judy of Daddy Long-Legs fame over again” but she was “glad to meet Judy again under any other name, and hope she will have many more reincarnations.”
The next September, Jean married Ethelyn’s brother, Glenn Ford McKinney — son of John Luke McKinney, a co-founder of Standard Oil. Glenn was a high-school valedictorian who later studied law at Princeton but wasn’t close with his father. Even so, after his death, Glenn’s estate was valued at more than a million dollars in 1934. Glenn practiced law and the couple first lived together in a New York City apartment, overlooking Central Park, but soon settled on Tymor Farm, Union Vale.
The following June, Jean with her friends Ethelyn and Lena — attended Sloan Hospital for Women in New York City; Glenn was recalled from his Princeton reunion and arrived ninety minutes before Jean gave birth to their daughter. She was named Little Jean in honor of her mother, who died the next morning at 7:30, of “childbirth fever.”
Legacy
A room at the Girls’ Service League in NYC and a bed at the county branch of the New York Orthopedic Hospital (near White Plains), were endowed in Jean Webster’s memory. (American Dictionary of Biography)
In June 1927, a bronze statue called “The Awakening” was erected in Greenwich’s Putnam Cemetery, when Little Jean lived with her aunt, Miss Ethelyn McKinney, described in the New York Times as “slightly larger than life, recumbent figure of a woman, her right arm raised as though to lift a veil, on a pedestal of polished black Swedish granite, with delicate drapery and wreath of laurel about the head.”
In 1977, Jean Webster McKinney Connor donated fifty-two boxes to Vassar College. The Jean Webster Papers included “some correspondence to friends and family, college notebooks, travel journals, as well as later notebooks filled with story ideas, suggestions, and drafts.” In 1981, the Jean Webster Faculty Salary Fund was established, which would later develop into the Jean Webster Chair.
In March 2014, the Vassar Quarterly reported that Daddy Long-Legs inspired Yoshimi Tamai to establish a children’s charity: “And the novel immensely popular in Japan — was greatly inspiring to Ashinaga founder Yoshiomi Tamai, who created the organization to provide education and psychological support to children around the world who have lost one or both parents. The foundation runs programs in Japan for those who have lost parents in the earthquake and tsunami that struck the region in 2011, and in Uganda for those who have lost parents to HIV/AIDS.
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.
More about Jean WebsterMajor Works
When Patty Went to College (1903)Wheat Princess (1905)Jerry Junior (1907)The Four Pools Mystery (1908)Much Ado About Peter (1909)Just Patty (1911)Daddy-Long-Legs (1912)Dear Enemy (1915)More information
Union Vale’s Jean Webster House Holds Place in Literary History V assar College Encyclopedia Reader discussion on Goodreads Wikipedia Recovering 19th-Century Women AuthorsRead and listen online
Jean Webster’s works on Project Gutenberg Audio editions on Librivox. . . . . . . . .
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July 15, 2021
Charlotte Lennox, English Novelist, Playwright, and Poet
Charlotte Lennox (c. 1730 – 1804), née Barbara Charlotte Ramsay, was an English novelist, playwright, and poet best remembered for her 1752 novel, The Female Quixote. This introduction to her life and work is excerpted from Killing the Angel: Early Transgressive British Woman Writers by Francis Booth ©2021, reprinted by permission.
Charlotte had a peripatetic early life. Born in Gibraltar, the daughter of a Scottish captain in the British Army, she lived her first ten years in England before moving to Albany in New York, where her father was Lieutenant Governor.
After her father’s death in 1742, Charlotte remained in New York with her mother until, at age thirteen, she was sent to London to a companion to her aunt. Her aunt, however, seems to have been mentally unstable, so Charlotte became companion to the unmarried courtier Lady Isabella Finch, cousin of the poet Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea.
The Countess lived in a splendid, newly built townhouse in Berkeley Square in the fashionable heart of London. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu was a visitor, as was Horace Walpole.
Poems on Several Occasions (1747)
Lennox’s first published volume of poetry, Poems on Several Occasions (1747) was dedicated to Lady Isabella.
Charlotte was preparing to be a courtier herself, but instead married Alexander Lennox, who had very little money. She turned to stage acting on the stage to earn her own living — a very transgressive thing to do. She had some success, but after Poems was published she turned her focus to writing; ‘The Art of Coquetry’ was published in The Gentleman’s Magazine.
Ye lovely maids! whose yet unpractis’d hearts
Ne’er felt the force of Love’s resistless darts;
Who justly set a value on your charms,
Pow’r all your wish, but beauty all your arms
Who o’er mankind wou’d fain exert your sway
And teach the lordly tyrant to obey;
Attend my rules, to you alone addrest
Deep let them sink in every female breast.
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Killing the Angel
on Amazon US*
Killing the Angel
on Amazon UK*
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Although the women of the Bluestockings seemed to dislike her, Samuel Johnson was an admirer of Lennox and introduced her to all the leading members of the London literary scene; he threw a party to celebrate the publication of her first novel The Life of Harriot Stewart, Written by Herself.
Johnson, Henry Fielding, and Samuel Richardson favorably reviewed her second and most famous novel, The Female Quixote, or, The Adventures of Arabella (1752) which was published anonymously, though its authorship was an open secret. It is a picaresque, a parody of Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes, clearly influenced by Fielding’s slightly earlier Tom Jones, 1749.
Fielding had published a play Don Quixote in England in 1734 and the title page of his 1742 Joseph Andrews said it was ‘written in imitation of the manner of Cervantes.’ It’s a precursor to Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759 onwards) with its ‘Cervantic humour.’ Like theirs, Lennox’s novel has absurdly long, ironic chapter titles such as:
CHAPTER IV. A Mistake, which produces no great Consequences — An extraordinary Comment upon a Behaviour natural enough — An Instance of a Lady’s Compassion for her Lover, which the Reader may possibly think not very compassionate.
CHAPTER VI. In which the Adventure is really concluded; tho’, possibly, not as the Reader expected.
The Arabella of the title (Arabella is the name of the title character’s older sister in Richardson’s Clarissa, 1748) is something of an idealised woman, educated and cultured, perhaps representing Lennox’ own idealized view of herself.
Nature had indeed given her a most charming Face, a Shape easy and delicate, a sweet and insinuating Voice, and an Air so full of Dignity and Grace, as drew the Admiration of all that saw her. These native Charms were improved with all the Heightenings of Art; her Dress was perfectly magnificent; the best Masters of Music and Dancing were sent for from London to attend her. She soon became a perfect Mistress of the French and Italian Languages, under the Care of her Father; and it is not to be doubted, but she would have made a great Proficiency in all useful Knowledge, had not her whole Time been taken up by another Study.
From her earliest Youth she had discovered a Fondness for Reading, which extremely delighted the Marquis; he permitted her therefore the Use of his Library, in which, unfortunately for her, were great Store of Romances, and, what was still more unfortunate, not in the original French, but very bad Translations.
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Translations, literary criticism, and playsLike her character Arabella and some other female writers of the time, Lennox herself learned Italian and translated several Italian works. And, like Elizabeth Montagu, Lennox published a lengthy critical work on William Shakespeare, Shakespear Illustrated, 1753, arguably the first feminist work of literary criticism.
Lennox is mostly concerned with Shakespeare’s sources, but she is also concerned with his female characters; she accuses Shakespeare of ‘taking from them the power and the moral independence which the old romances and novels had given them.’
Her major plays were Philander (1758), The Sister (1769), and Old City Manners (1775).
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Lennox published four other novels: Henrietta, 1758 (Lennox also wrote a stage play, The Sister based on the novel); Sofia, 1762; Eliza, 1766 and Euphemia, 1790, but during 1761 and 1762 her main literary output was as the editor of and main contributor to the periodical The Lady’s Museum, The Trifler, advertised as being ‘by the author of The Female Quixote.’ The introduction to the first issue runs:
AS I do not set out with great promises to the public of the wit, humour, and morality, which this pamphlet is to contain, so I expect no reproaches to fall on me, if I should happen to fail in any, or all of these articles.
My readers may depend upon it, I will always be as witty as I can, as humorous as I can, as moral as I can, and upon the whole as entertaining as I can. However, as I have but too much reason to distrust my own powers of pleasing, I shall usher in my pamphlet with the performance of a lady, who possibly would never have suffered it to appear in print, if this opportunity had not offered.
If her sprightly paper meets with encouragement enough to dispel the diffidence natural to a young writer, she will be prevailed upon, I hope, to continue it in this Museum; I shall therefore, without any farther preface, present it to my readers.
More about Charlotte Lennox Rediscovering Charlotte Lennox Charlotte Lennox and the Disciplining of the Female Reader 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 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 Lennox, English Novelist, Playwright, and Poet appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.
Charlotte Lennox, English Novelist, Playwright, and Poet: An Introduction
Charlotte Lennox (c. 1730 – 1804), née Barbara Charlotte Ramsay, was an English novelist, playwright, and poet best remembered for her 1752 novel, The Female Quixote. This introduction to her life and work is excerpted from Killing the Angel: Early Transgressive British Woman Writers by Francis Booth ©2021, reprinted by permission.
Charlotte had a peripatetic early life. Born in Gibraltar, the daughter of a Scottish captain in the British Army, she lived her first ten years in England before moving to Albany in New York, where her father was Lieutenant Governor.
After her father’s death in 1742, Charlotte remained in New York with her mother until, at age thirteen, she was sent to London to a companion to her aunt. Her aunt, however, seems to have been mentally unstable, so Charlotte became companion to the unmarried courtier Lady Isabella Finch, cousin of the poet Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea.
The Countess lived in a splendid, newly built townhouse in Berkeley Square in the fashionable heart of London. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu was a visitor, as was Horace Walpole.
Poems on Several Occasions (1747)
Lennox’s first published volume of poetry, Poems on Several Occasions (1747) was dedicated to Lady Isabella.
Charlotte was preparing to be a courtier herself, but instead married Alexander Lennox, who had very little money. She turned to stage acting on the stage to earn her own living — a very transgressive thing to do. She had some success, but after Poems was published she turned her focus to writing; ‘The Art of Coquetry’ was published in The Gentleman’s Magazine.
Ye lovely maids! whose yet unpractis’d hearts
Ne’er felt the force of Love’s resistless darts;
Who justly set a value on your charms,
Pow’r all your wish, but beauty all your arms
Who o’er mankind wou’d fain exert your sway
And teach the lordly tyrant to obey;
Attend my rules, to you alone addrest
Deep let them sink in every female breast.
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Killing the Angel
on Amazon US*
Killing the Angel
on Amazon UK*
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Although the women of the Bluestockings seemed to dislike her, Samuel Johnson was an admirer of Lennox and introduced her to all the leading members of the London literary scene; he threw a party to celebrate the publication of her first novel The Life of Harriot Stewart, Written by Herself.
Johnson, Henry Fielding, and Samuel Richardson favorably reviewed her second and most famous novel, The Female Quixote, or, The Adventures of Arabella (1752) which was published anonymously, though its authorship was an open secret. It is a picaresque, a parody of Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes, clearly influenced by Fielding’s slightly earlier Tom Jones, 1749.
Fielding had published a play Don Quixote in England in 1734 and the title page of his 1742 Joseph Andrews said it was ‘written in imitation of the manner of Cervantes.’ It’s a precursor to Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759 onwards) with its ‘Cervantic humour.’ Like theirs, Lennox’s novel has absurdly long, ironic chapter titles such as:
CHAPTER IV. A Mistake, which produces no great Consequences — An extraordinary Comment upon a Behaviour natural enough — An Instance of a Lady’s Compassion for her Lover, which the Reader may possibly think not very compassionate.
CHAPTER VI. In which the Adventure is really concluded; tho’, possibly, not as the Reader expected.
The Arabella of the title (Arabella is the name of the title character’s older sister in Richardson’s Clarissa, 1748) is something of an idealised woman, educated and cultured, perhaps representing Lennox’ own idealized view of herself.
Nature had indeed given her a most charming Face, a Shape easy and delicate, a sweet and insinuating Voice, and an Air so full of Dignity and Grace, as drew the Admiration of all that saw her. These native Charms were improved with all the Heightenings of Art; her Dress was perfectly magnificent; the best Masters of Music and Dancing were sent for from London to attend her. She soon became a perfect Mistress of the French and Italian Languages, under the Care of her Father; and it is not to be doubted, but she would have made a great Proficiency in all useful Knowledge, had not her whole Time been taken up by another Study.
From her earliest Youth she had discovered a Fondness for Reading, which extremely delighted the Marquis; he permitted her therefore the Use of his Library, in which, unfortunately for her, were great Store of Romances, and, what was still more unfortunate, not in the original French, but very bad Translations.
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Translations, literary criticism, and playsLike her character Arabella and some other female writers of the time, Lennox herself learned Italian and translated several Italian works. And, like Elizabeth Montagu, Lennox published a lengthy critical work on William Shakespeare, Shakespear Illustrated, 1753, arguably the first feminist work of literary criticism.
Lennox is mostly concerned with Shakespeare’s sources, but she is also concerned with his female characters; she accuses Shakespeare of ‘taking from them the power and the moral independence which the old romances and novels had given them.’
Her major plays were Philander (1758), The Sister (1769), and Old City Manners (1775).
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Lennox published four other novels: Henrietta, 1758 (Lennox also wrote a stage play, The Sister based on the novel); Sofia, 1762; Eliza, 1766 and Euphemia, 1790, but during 1761 and 1762 her main literary output was as the editor of and main contributor to the periodical The Lady’s Museum, The Trifler, advertised as being ‘by the author of The Female Quixote.’ The introduction to the first issue runs:
AS I do not set out with great promises to the public of the wit, humour, and morality, which this pamphlet is to contain, so I expect no reproaches to fall on me, if I should happen to fail in any, or all of these articles.
My readers may depend upon it, I will always be as witty as I can, as humorous as I can, as moral as I can, and upon the whole as entertaining as I can. However, as I have but too much reason to distrust my own powers of pleasing, I shall usher in my pamphlet with the performance of a lady, who possibly would never have suffered it to appear in print, if this opportunity had not offered.
If her sprightly paper meets with encouragement enough to dispel the diffidence natural to a young writer, she will be prevailed upon, I hope, to continue it in this Museum; I shall therefore, without any farther preface, present it to my readers.
More about Charlotte Lennox Rediscovering Charlotte Lennox Charlotte Lennox and the Disciplining of the Female Reader 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.
. . . . . . . . . .
*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 Lennox, English Novelist, Playwright, and Poet: An Introduction appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.
July 13, 2021
The Literary Friendship of Poets Anne Sexton and Maxine Kumin
Anne Sexton and Maxine Kumin were significant twentieth-century poets who provided deep friendship and support for one another as they developed and mastered their craft. Literary Ladies Guide has offered fascinating musings and insights into several significant literary friendships between women writers:
George Eliot and Harriet Beecher Stowe Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West Lillian Hellman and Dorothy Parker Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings and Zora Neale HurstonBut none of these compare in intensity to the literary friendship of Anne Sexton and Maxine Kumin, a relationship brought to life in The Equivalents (2020) by Maggie Doherty, an exploration of the first group of poets and artists to be part of the Institute for Independent Study at Radcliffe College (later the Bunting Institute, and now the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study).
Initial meeting
Kumin and Sexton met in 1957 when both women took a poetry workshop at the Boston Center for Adult Education. They had much in common — both were slender, dark-haired, and attractive; both came from upper-middle-class backgrounds; both lived in Newton, a wealthy Boston suburb; and both were married with children.
But the two women also differed in some ways. Sexton had never gone to college and had been told throughout her life that she was “dumb.” She was emotionally fragile. She had attempted suicide the year before and had been institutionalized for mental illness. She began writing poetry after she happened on a public television program called A Sense of Poetry.
Kumin, on the other hand, had earned both a bachelor’s and a master’s degree from Radcliffe College. She “kept her temper in check and steered away from instability,” according to Doherty. She regularly published poetry in outlets such as the Christian Science Monitor, the Wall Street Journal, Ladies’ Home Journal, and the Saturday Evening Post.
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Anne Sexton
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Her initial reaction to Sexton, who joined the workshop after Kumin had been attending for a while, was a mixture of fear and fascination. And as the weeks progressed and Sexton shared her poems about her suicide attempts and experiences in a mental institution, Kumin was repulsed and decided to avoid Sexton.
Over time, however, convenience overcame her initial disinclination. The two women lived near one another, and it was practical for them to commute to the Boston workshop in the same car. The conversations during the drive broke down Kumin’s dislike. Soon the two saw each other often, attending and sharing impressions of readings by poets such as Marianne Moore and Robert Graves.
They turned to one another between workshop sessions to discuss their own writing as well. One of them would call the other, read a couple of lines, and wait for feedback. As their children demanded attention, the two women struggled to focus on one another’s work. Sometimes they left the phone line open for hours as they worked and took turns reading to one another.
Their differences inspired one another and deepened their writing: Doherty writes that Kumin “offered Sexton the knowledge she’d gleaned from college, and Sexton showed Kumin how to write from a place of feeling rather than thought.”
The Radcliffe Institute
Kumin and Sexton’s friendship was well established by November of 1960, when the latter read about the plan to form a new institute at Radcliffe, the women’s college of Harvard University, in the Sunday paper.
Intended as a center for “intellectually displaced women” the institute was meant to revive the intellectual lives of women who had achieved advanced degrees “or the equivalent” success in the arts but whose careers had been side-tracked by domestic responsibilities. Women chosen for the program would receive workspace, access to Harvard’s resources, and a stipend.
By then, Sexton had published her first book of poetry, To Bedlam and Part Way Back. She and Kumin both applied to be among the first group of scholars and artists. When Kumin received her acceptance letter, she immediately called Sexton to celebrate. Sexton shared her friend’s delight, but when she checked her own mail, there was no letter of acceptance.
Crushed, Sexton took to her bed. But three days later, Sexton received her acceptance and ran through the streets of her suburban neighborhood, knocking on doors and announcing, “I got it!” to anyone who answered. Both women were thrilled that they would be sharing the opportunity and the honor of being in the first group of women at the newly formed Institute for Advanced Study when it opened in September 1961.
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Maxine Kumin (photo: Georgia Litwack)
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Over the years, the two poets supported one another’s poetry and collaborated on four children’s books. The daily phone calls continued after the two poets were both fellows at the institute. Both continued to work from their home offices: A typical workday started with a phone call. They often gave each other a series of twenty-minute interludes in which to write or revise a line of poetry before turning to one another for feedback.
They continued in this manner until it was time to make lunch for their children. On warm days, all five children gathered at Sexton’s backyard pool. The two mothers dangled their feet in the water and passed a portable typewriter back and forth as they worked on a children’s book.
Kumin and Sexton gave the first seminar for the group of twenty-four women who comprised the initial class at the Radcliffe Institute. They had promised to read from their poems and discuss their composition process.
Typically, Kumin was calm and well-prepared, having written out her planned remarks. Sexton, on the other hand, was anxious. A natural performer, she would rely on instinct and impulse. By agreement, the two women had kept their collaborative working style (the daily phone calls, the close feedback) secret.
They worried that others might try to turn their collaboration into a rivalry or would doubt the authenticity of their work. But when someone in the audience asked Sexton how she knew a poem was finished, Sexton confessed: “I call up Maxine and I ask her.” She went on to explain that she and Kumin had known each other for years and described their daily phone calls.
The secret collaboration was a secret no more, and the scholars were charmed by the revelation. It was, after all, exactly the sort of supportive relationship the institute had been created to foster.
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The Equivalents on Bookshop.org*
The Equivalents on Amazon*
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When Sexton and Kumin met in the poetry workshop, people saw Kumin as Sexton’s teacher. Kumin and Sexton saw her that way, too. Kumin’s education and success in publishing made her the more advanced poet at the time that they met. But as the years passed, Sexton became the better-known writer. She published a book before Kumin did.
Both women were awarded a second year at the Radcliffe Institute, and Sexton published a second collection, All My Pretty Ones, in 1962. In 1963, in the final month of her second year at the Institute, Sexton received a traveling fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the first of its kind. In 1967, Sexton won a Pulitzer Prize for her book Live or Die. There was now no thought of Kumin as Sexton’s teacher. Kumin never craved fame the way Sexton did, so the latter’s success posed no threat to their friendship.
In 1973, Sexton was on the Pulitzer Prize committee and argued vehemently to award the prize to Kumin for her fourth book, Up Country, an honor that many saw as overdue. As a past recipient of the award, Sexton knew well how the prize would affect her friend’s career. Once Kumin won the Pulitzer, she was in demand — invited to speak around the country, hired to teach at Columbia University, profiled in magazines.
Kumin had become a professional poet in an industry she referred to as “PoBiz.” She and Sexton stayed in constant telephone contact but saw each other less frequently as professional demands took her away from Newton.
Emotional needs
The two women were essential to each other’s creative and intellectual development, but Sexton’s needs were emotional as well. When Sexton set off for Europe after winning her traveling fellowship, she felt unanchored and adrift and relied on Kumin’s letters to calm her manic and unstable moods.
In 1973, following Kumin’s Pulitzer, Sexton got divorced. Sexton had initiated the dissolution of her marriage, but she came to regret the decision. In March of 1974, Sexton called Kumin and said she was sitting in front of a pile of pills and planned to keep taking them until both she and the pills were gone.
Kumin rushed over to Sexton’s house and drove her to the emergency room. Sexton was furious, but Kumin said, “If you’re going to telegraph your intentions, you don’t give me any choice.”
It was not by any means a one-way relationship. Kumin needed Sexton’s friendship. Doherty says she “needed Sexton to shake her up and pull her out of her proper, reserved self.”
But Kumin’s needs and friendship were not enough to sustain Sexton. In the months following her March attempt, Kumin believed her friend seemed “healed,” but in October of the same year, after what seemed like an ordinary lunch with Kumin, Sexton drove home and committed suicide by sitting in her idling car in her closed garage.
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10 Poems by Anne Sexton, Confessional Poet
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After an initial statement in the aftermath of Sexton’s death, Kumin refused to speak about her friend. “I carried Anne’s death in my pocket,” she wrote to one friend, but she couldn’t help but resent the many messages she received from fans, friends, and acquaintances of Sexton and herself.
The bombardment infringed on her efforts to grieve her friend. She was especially angered by Tillie Olsen’s notes implying that Kumin had failed to be an “active sworn enemy” of Sexton’s suicidal thoughts.
Eventually, she was able to write a foreword to Sexton’s Complete Poems, published in 1981, in which she recalled their early friendship and the evolution of Sexton’s art and its role: “Before there was a Women’s Movement, the underground river was already flowing, carrying such diverse cargoes as the poems of Bogan, Levertov, Rukeyser, Swenson, Plath, Rich, and Sexton.” Kumin did not name herself, of course.
After Sexton’s death, Kumin and her husband moved to their house in rural New Hampshire. Kumin continued to write prose, fiction, children’s books, and especially poetry until her death in 2014. She won numerous awards and was named poetry consultant for the Library of Congress (a position now known as the U.S. poet laureate position).
Contributed by Lynne Weiss: Lynne’s writing has appeared in Black Warrior Review; Brain, Child; The Common OnLine; the Ploughshares blog; the [PANK] blog; Wild Musette; Main Street Rag; and Radcliffe Magazine. She received an MFA from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and has won grants and residency awards from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the Millay Colony, the Vermont Studio Center, and Yaddo. She loves history, theater, and literature, and for many years, she has earned her living by developing history and social studies materials for educational publishers. She lives outside Boston, where she is working on a novel set in Cornwall and London in the early 1930s. You can see more of her work at LynneWeiss.
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*These are Bookshop Affiliate and Amazon Affiliate link. If a product is purchased by linking through, Literary Ladies Guide receives a modest commission, which helps maintain our site and helps it to continue growing!
The post The Literary Friendship of Poets Anne Sexton and Maxine Kumin appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.
