Nava Atlas's Blog, page 38
June 20, 2021
Ántonia Shimerda: Singular Heroine of Willa Cather’s My Ántonia
This character analysis of Ántonia Shimerda, the heroine of My Ántonia by Willa Cather (1873-1947) is excerpted from Girls in Bloom: Coming of Age in the Mid-20th Century Woman’s Novel by Francis Booth, reprinted by permission.
My Ántonia (1918) is the third of Willa Cather’s Midwestern pioneer novels (often referred to as the Prairie Trilogy) of early twentieth century frontier life which, despite their brevity, manage to encompass the epic sweep of the pioneering move to the West, seeming to hark back to an earlier era of rugged individualism.
Despite the title, Ántonia (the Shimerda family have come from Bohemia; all Czech names have the stress on the first syllable, hence the accent over the Á) is not the narrator nor even the central character; she is always slightly off to one side and a little out of focus.
Nevertheless, this is a true coming of age story; at the end it fast forwards to Ántonia being a middle-aged woman having had a large number of children, but not with the narrator: despite the title, she is not and never has been ‘his’ Ántonia.
A family in Nebraska Territory
Unusually, a female author uses a male narrator: Jim Burden, ten years old at the start of the novel – Ántonia is two years older – to tell the story of his and other immigrant families, mostly newly arrived from Europe, settling in the virgin territory of Nebraska. The Shimerdas have been tricked by a relative into paying too much for unfit, unusable land, animals and dwellings; at first they live in not much more than a hole in the ground.
Ántonia’s father cannot reconcile himself to this hard new life; he has been a respected musician in Bohemia but is now reduced to extreme poverty. He kills himself after one misfortune too many.
After their father’s death, Ántonia’s older brother Ambrosch becomes the head of the family and tries, in his own way, to protect her. When she gets a job as cook for a neighboring family, the brother fights to stop her from becoming independent.
“They had a long argument with Ambrosch about Ántonia’s allowance for clothes and pocket-money. It was his plan that every cent of his sister’s wages should be paid over to him each month, and he would provide her with such clothing as he thought necessary. When Mrs Harling told him firmly that she would keep fifty dollars a year for Ántonia’s own use, he declared they wanted to take his sister to town and dress her up and make a fool of her.
Mrs Harling gives a lively account of Ambrosch’s behavior throughout the interview; how he kept jumping up and putting on his cap if he were through with the whole business, and how his mother tweaked his coat-tail and prompted him in Bohemian. Mrs Harling finally agreed to pay three dollars a week for Ántonia’s services – good wages in those days – and to keep her in shoes. There had been hot dispute about the shoes, Mrs Shimerda finally saying persuasively that she would send Mrs Harling three fat geese every year to ‘make even.’ Ambrosch was to bring his sister to town next Saturday.
‘She’ll be awkward and rough at first, like enough,’ grandmother said anxiously, ‘but unless she’s been spoiled by the hard life she’s led, she has it in her to be a real helpful girl.’
Mrs Harling laughed her quick, decided laugh. ‘Oh, I’m not worrying, Mrs Burden! I can bring something out of that girl. She’s barely seventeen, not too old to learn new ways. She’s good looking too!’ she added warmly.”
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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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The narrator, Jim, tells us how good it is ‘to have Ántonia near us again; to see her every day and almost every night!’ But he does not seem to have, and certainly does not convey to Tony, as he sometimes calls her, any romantic or sexual desires towards her, even though he is ‘jealous of Tony’s admiration for Charley Harling.
Because he was always first in his classes at school, and could mend water-pipes or the door-bell and take the clock to pieces, she seemed to think him a sort of Prince. Nothing that Charley wanted was too much trouble for her.’
Jim’s family move from the relative wilderness of the open fields to the relative civilization of the nearest nearby town, Black Hawk. All this is happening just at the time in American history where the Europeans who had first tamed the wild plains of states like Nebraska were Europeanizing the frontier. This is America’s bildungsroman as much as Ántonia’s, the story of the journey from virgin to sophisticate, from wild to tamed, from ingenuous to knowing, innocent to cynical, unstoried to storied. Much is gained, and much is lost in that journey.
“There was a curious social situation in Black Hawk. All the men felt the attraction of the foreign, well-set-up country girls who had come to town to earn a living, and, in nearly every case, to help the father struggle out of debt, or to make it possible for the younger children of the family to go to school.
These girls had grown up in the first bitter-hard times, and had got little schooling themselves. But the younger brothers and sisters, for whom they made such sacrifices and who have had ‘advantages,’ never seem to me, when I meet them now, half as interesting or as well educated. The older girls, who helped break up the wild sod, learned so much from life, from poverty, from their mothers and grandmothers; they had all, like Ántonia, been early awakened and made observant by coming at a tender age from an old country to a new.”
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A 1918 review of My Ántonia
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From time to time, traveling entertainers set up a tent in the town where they stage plays and hold dances. ‘Ántonia talked and thought of nothing but the tent.’ This changes not only Ántonia – formerly a total innocent – but men’s attitudes to her. She has come of age from girl to woman in their eyes.
“Ántonia’s success at the tent had its consequences. The iceman lingered too long now, when he came into the covered porch to fill the refrigerator. The delivery boys hung about the kitchen when they brought the groceries. Young farmers who were in town for Saturday came tramping through the yard to the back door to engage dancers, or to invite Tony to parties and picnics.”
Mr Harling, acting, like her own brother, in loco parentis, tells her she must stop. ‘This is what I’ve been expecting, Ántonia. You’ve been going with girls who have a reputation for being free and easy, and now you’ve got the same reputation… This is the end of it, to-night. It stops, short. You can quit going to these dances, or you can hunt another place. Think it over.’
For him, as for most men, a girl can either be a shy virgin or a seductive siren; there is no middle ground. Ántonia decides to leave, she has been offered work in another house. Mrs. Harling tells her something has changed within her. ‘I don’t know, something has… A girl like me has got to take her good times when she can. Maybe there won’t be any tent next year. I guess I want to have my fling, like the other girls.’
The narrator himself seems to think that Ántonia is now available: he takes her home after the dance and tells her she must kiss him good night. ‘Why, Jim! You know you ain’t right to kiss me like that. I’ll tell your grandmother on you!’ He tells her that her friend Lena let him kiss her, ‘and I’m not half as fond of her as I am of you.’ Being two years older than Jim, Ántonia is more concerned about his future than he is for hers.
Jim does make good, ending up at Harvard. Ántonia on the other hand is tricked by the man she had been going out with into going away with him; he leaves her, pregnant, before they are married. She returns in shame though she is unbowed.
When he comes back from school Jim says to her, ‘since I’ve been away, I think of you more often than of anyone else in this part of the world. I’d have liked to have you for a sweetheart, or a wife, or my mother or my sister – anything that a woman can be to a man.’ She looks at him with her ‘bright, believing eyes,’ glad that he remembers her so fondly when she had disappointed him.
Life intervenes‘Ain’t it wonderful, Jim, how much people can mean to each other? I’m so glad we had each other when we were little. I can’t wait till my little girl’s old enough to tell her about all things we used to do.’ Jim tells her when he goes away again that he will come back, but he doesn’t; ‘life intervened, and it was twenty years before I kept my promise.’ By this time she is married to a poor but honest man from Bohemia and has a large number of children.
“Before I could sit down in the chair she offered me, the miracle happened; one of those quiet moments that clutch the heart, and take more courage than the noisy, excited passages in life. Ántonia came in and stood before me; a stalwart, brown woman, flat-chested, her curly brown hair a little grizzled. It was a shock, of course. It always is, to meet people after long years, especially if they have lived as much and as hard as this woman had. We stood looking at each other. The eyes that peered anxiously at me were – simply Ántonia’s eyes.”
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More about My Ántonia by Willa Cather Wikipedia Reader discussion on Goodreads My Antonia scholarly edition (full text) Audio version on Librivox. . . . . . . . . .
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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June 18, 2021
Hobart Book Village, a Bibliophile’s Dream in Upstate NY
Have you ever heard of a book town or book village? Chances are you haven’t, if you live the U.S.; there are only three of them in all of North America. One of the most charming and accessible book towns is Hobart Book Village in upstate New York. (At right, a stack of books at LionEyes Books, which specializes in art books.)
It just so happens that Hobart, NY (Delaware County), one of North America’s rare book towns, is just a couple of hours from where I live in upstate New York. This book village was started in 2005 by local entrepreneur Don Dales; and while there has been a turnover in shops, the book village concept has been going strong in this hamlet for an impressive number of years.
The book town is a concept has caught on around the world, especially in Europe. It’s pretty much what it sounds like — a gathering of bookshops concentrated in the center of a small town or village.
Alex Johnson, the author of Book Towns elaborates:
“A book town is simply a small town, usually rural and scenic, full of bookshops and book-related industries. The movement started with Richard Booth in Hay-on-Wye in Wales in the 1960s, picked up speed in the 1980s and is continuing to thrive in the new millennium.
From the start, the driving force has been to encourage sustainable tourism and help regenerate communities … One important reason that almost all book towns are in bucolic locations is that they require cheap property to enable book businesses to open their doors. Many have been subsidized by local authorities to help them get off the ground. While many cities have numerous bookshops, book towns concentrate the outlets in a small area to create a critical mass.”
Web: Hobart Book Village
Main Street, Rt. 10, Hobart, NY 13788
Summer hours (starting June 1): Daily, 11-5. All other times of the year the village is mostly open on weekends; consult the website (above) for more details, or go directly to hours and directions.
Hobart Book Village’s website describes itself as having six bookshops, but I count eight (plus the Children’s Community Library). Whether six or eight, there’s plenty to keep book lovers busy for several enjoyable and relaxing hours.
NearbyHobart is tucked away in the beautiful Catskill mountains region of NY State, so make sure to consult Trip Advisor for more to do in the region as well as places to stay and eat.
The goodAll the bookstores are within close walking distance of one another, so you park once and you’re done.Each of the bookstores has something distinctive to offer, so that they don’t overlap too much. That makes each shop a different experience.All of the booksellers are super friendly and welcoming, happy to engage with fellow bibliophiles.There’s a mix of new and old books, and you’re likely to find some great bargains among the latter.You can visit two art galleries located amidst the bookstores. The Mural Gallery is one of them, though it’s only open on Saturdays from 12-4. An art gallery is part of one of the largest shops, Liberty Rock Books.Two huge sales: From the website — “Two huge semi-annual sales are held on the weekends of Memorial Day and Thanksgiving Day. These sales draw hundreds of collectors, book lovers, vacationers and local residents since it is a great way to stock personal libraries for the summer, fall and winter or kickstart Holiday shopping.”The not-so-goodA dearth of food; no coffee: There was no food or coffee place open in town during the hours I was there. I drove about a half mile to a gas station to get coffee and a snack. There’s just one place in the midst of the bookstores called The Dinner Plate, but it’s totally not vegan-friendly for someone like myself. I suppose I could have made do with a salad and a cheese-less pizza, but the place only opens at 4:00, the time when I wanted to start making the trek back. I suggest bring a picnic or stopping at a nearby town for food before hitting the bookstores. The adjacent town is Stamford, which has a few eateries. There are other options further afield as well.There’s no public transportation to Hobart; it’s only reachable by car.Festival of Women WritersHobart is also known for its annual Festival of Women Writers and its winter workshops. Get all the information here.
The bookshops and more (as of summer 2021)
Adams Antiquarian Books (602 Main Street) features three floors of organized and and attractively displayed books, giving it the feel of so much more than just one bookshop. This treasure trove was the first bookshop opened in Hobart Book Village. From the brochure: “Featuring fine books, art, and tea offered in a bright, cordial atmosphere that makes both the collector and the browser feel welcome. Featuring 17th, 18th, 19th, and 20th century: Fiction, Biographies, Art, Music, Theatre, Dance, Etiquette, Graphic Arts, Poetry, Greek and Latin Texts, Theology, Science, Natural History; American, World; and Local History.”
Blenheim Hill Books is in a temporary location (645 Main Street) due to an interior fire. Their usual location is 698 Main Street. From the brochure: “Blenheim Hill Books appeals to readers with thousands of new and gently used books in categories ranging from contemporary and classic fiction to gardening, nature, and biography … Poetry and history are well represented. We have recently expanded our children’s section to include young adult fiction and graphic novels. New picture books share space with collectible illustrated children’s books.”
Children’s Community Library (The Book Nook) and Vintage Bottega (645 Main Street): In its current (2021) temporary location, Blenheim Hill Books shares a space with a tiny but charming children’s library. Also in this space is the aforementioned vintage clothing store.
Creative Corner Books (607 Main Street): I was delighted to encounter a couple of my recent vegan cookbooks from my “other life” in this delightful bookshop featuring floor to ceiling cookbooks and craft books! From the brochure: “At Creative Corner Books, cooks and crafters will find inspiration in a bright, cozy setting. We boast an eclectic collection of cookbooks — new, used, and vintage … Our varied inventory of craft, hobby, and DIY books will get your creative juices flowing, whether your interests lie in needlecrafts, quilting, paper crafts, bookbinding, gardening, jewelry, woodworking, mosaics, or dozens of other projects.”
Liberty Rocks Books (678 Main Street) is the largest (5,000 sq. feet) of the Hobart bookstores with vast inventory in many categories, mostly used and vintage. The space, whose inviting seating area you see in the first photo above, includes an art gallery, and houses an additional bookstore, Hobart Book Emporium, shown in the second photo. The Emporium is a collective of four booksellers in one attractive, beautifully curated space. From the brochure: “We continue as broad generalists with specialty collections as they become available. Our used and scarce books … include a large selection of children’s books from the 19th and 20th centuries … Plan on staying a good while when you visit us.”
LionEyes Books (722 Main Street), the newest of the current roster of shops, specializes in art books. A lovely, compact shop, the art-lover will be in book heaven. From the brochure: “Art, art, and more art is what you’ll find at LionEyes Books, where sharing affordable finds with you is my passion! When you browns the shelves you’ll come upon well-known, lesser-known, and ‘why-arent-they-known?’ artists who thrill me to my core. The inventory is priced according to my attachment to the art/artist/text … for me the excitement is always in the hunt!”
More Good Books is also located at 645 Main Street, housing the temporary location of Blenheim Hill Books, The Children’s Community Library, and Vintage Bottega. I didn’t realize that this was a separate shop, so I failed to get a photo … I’ll just have to go back! From the brochure: “A new shop focusing on Railroads, Ships & Boats, Automobiles, Games and Sports, Hobbies, Pets and more! Located within a multi-vendor space at the historic Hobart Inn, this bookshop speaks to all ages who relish adventure, fun … and the love of animals.”
New York Books & Ephemera (615 Main Street), one of the newer shops, is adjacent to (and connected with) Creative Corner Books. It features books, maps, and gifts with a New York State theme. From the brochure, “Topics include New York architecture, arts and culture, biographies and memoirs of remarkable NY citizens, NY State and local history, folklore, nature, travel, and more … In the same location, visit the Made in New York shop, offering locally produced food products and gifts hand made by NY artisans.”
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21 Fascinating Facts about Rachel Field, Novelist, Poet, & Illustrator
Rachel Field (1894 – 1942) was an astonishingly prolific playwright, poet, children’s writer, novelist, and illustrator. I knew almost nothing about her before I moved into her old house on an island in Maine, but now I know better. Here is a selection of fascinating facts about Rachel Field, a talented and prolific author who deserves to be rediscovered and read. (photo at right, Beineke Library, Yale)
Due to the tragedies that reverberated from her sudden death and the subsequent hardships of her bereaved family, Rachel’s work and her famous bright spirit faded prematurely from the national literary scene. Fortunately, the first biography of Rachel Field arrived in 2021 to celebrate the woman and her writing.
The Field House: A Writer’s Life Lost and Found on an Island in Maine includes a thread of contemporary memoir. In the form of letters that I composed to Rachel Field, or perhaps, to her spirit, the book weaves in the story of how my evolving relationship with Rachel transformed my life, both as a writer and as a mother. She continues to uplift her readers, even now.
Successful playwright: One of her plays, Three Pills in a Bottle, was so successful that for decades following its publication in 1918, it was performed an average of once a week, year-round, in community theaters all over the country.
Prolific poet: She published seven collections of poetry during her life (with an eighth posthumous publication). Her poetry was widely celebrated, anthologized, and made into picture books throughout her lifetime and beyond.
First woman to win the Newbery Medal: She received the award for her book, Hitty, Her First Hundred Years, published in 1930.
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Learn more about Rachel Field
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National Book Award winner: In 1936 she won the National Book Award for her first novel, Time Out of Mind.
Three of her novels were made into films: The first of which, All This and Heaven Too, was nominated for a Best Picture Oscar. The film’s star, Bette Davis, became a dear friend to Rachel and her husband.
An honored book of poems for children: An illustrated children’s book made from her poem, Prayer For a Child, won the Caldecott Medal in 1945, three years after Field’s tragic and untimely death in 1942 at the age of 47 years old.
A very late reader: Rachel couldn’t read until she was 10 years old. “I literally wrote before I could read,” she told interviewers. This might have been because she loved hearing books read aloud, and learned entire plays and passages of poetry by heart, sometimes after a single hearing.
A youthful thespian: Young Rachel played the part of Shylock in a performance of Shakespeare’s “Merchant of Venice” when she was only 9 years old.
Publishing debut as a teen: Her first published story, “A Winter Walk,” came out in St. Nicholas Magazine in 1911, when she was 16.
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Q&A with Robin Clifford Wood, author of The Field House
The Field House on Bookshop.org*
The Field House on Amazon*
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Photographic memory: It was her “camera memory,” Rachel said, that allowed her to recall every minute detail of the contents and décor of a home or room that she visited. This skill came to play in her novel writing.
“Special student” status at Radcliffe: “Rachel Field didn’t officially graduate from Radcliffe when she completed her studies in 1918. She had attended under a program that allowed “special students,” otherwise unqualified, to enroll in the College to pursue particular aptitudes (in Rachel’s case, her writing skill).
Honorary degrees: Twenty years after she attended Radcliffe, she was awarded honorary degrees from Colby College and the University of Maine.
Directed her own play: In 1918, Rachel directed a group of Sutton Island children in a performance of her play, “Three Pills in a Bottle.” Fifteen minutes before showtime, the child playing the part of the scissors grinder “fell ill with mumps,” and Rachel had to play the part.
An avid collector: Rachel was an avid collector of antique dolls, patchwork quilts, and music boxes. What ever became of her collections? I never found out.
Illustrious family lineage: Rachel was part of an illustrious line of Field family fame. Two of her relatives were Supreme Court justices, and one, Cyrus Field, laid the first successful transatlantic communications cable in 1858.
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Hitty is a real doll: The original “Hitty” doll that inspired Rachel’s Newbery Medal winning book lives in a glass case in the library of Stockbridge, Massachusetts, right next door to the home where Rachel spent her childhood.
Continental criss-crossing: Before Rachel Field made the permanent move from New York City to Hollywood, she made the lengthy, cross-country trek between the two coasts numerous times. In one year, from July 1936 – July 1937, she crossed the continent six times.
Collaboration with her husband: In 1937, Rachel and her husband Arthur Pederson co-wrote a book called To See Ourselves that highlights a charmingly unusual depiction of 1930s Hollywood as a neighborly small-town community.
Screen rights windfall: In 1938, Rachel negotiated with Warner Brothers Studios for a $52,000 advance for the film rights to All This and Heaven Too. That’s equivalent to almost a million 2021 dollars!
Screenplay contender for GWTW: Rachel Field was short-listed as a contender to write the screenplay for Gone With The Wind. The list included names like William Faulkner, Sinclair Lewis, and Thornton Wilder.
Contributor to Fantasia: Disney Studios chose Rachel Field to write the English lyric used for the “Ave Maria” sequence in their 1940 film, Fantasia.
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Contributed by Robin Clifford Wood: Robin has a BA from Yale University, an MA in English from the University of Rochester, and an MFA in creative writing from the Stonecoast program at the University of Southern Maine. During twenty-five years as a full-time mom, she published local human-interest features in New Hampshire, New York, and Massachusetts and spent seven years as a regular columnist, first in Massachusetts, then for Maine’s Bangor Daily News. She began teaching college writing in 2015.
Her articles have appeared in Port City Life magazine, Bangor Metro, and Solstice literary magazine, which published her powerful essay “How Do You Help Your Parents Die?” in its spring 2019 issue. Her award-winning poetry received national recognition from the 2020 Writer’s Digest Competition. Wood lives in central Maine with her husband and dogs. The Field House is her first book. Visit her at robincliffordwood.com.
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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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June 15, 2021
This is My Story: How to Write a Memoir (and Get it Published)
You have a great idea for a memoir, but you don’t know where to start or what to do next. There are so many options for book publishing, and no one seems to agree on the best way to go about it. Here’s some simple and sound advice on how to write a memoir, and the steps to take to get it published.
This guide will help you overcome the main obstacles and show you how to get your memoir published and in the hands of an audience who wants to read it.
Though memoir writing is a specific genre unto itself, writers who have produced well-known memoirs (some of which have become classics) are also known as novelists, short story writers, and poets. Here are some of the classic authors on this site who have at least one memoir to their credit.
Maya Angelou – I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings Simone de Beauvoir – Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter Isak Dinesen – Out of Africa Martha Gellhorn – Travels with Myself and Another Rumer Godden – Two Under the Indian Sun Lillian Hellman – An Unfinished Woman Shirley Jackson – Raising Demons Beryl Markham – West With the Night Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings – Cross CreekBefore we begin, let’s clarify — what’s the difference between autobiography and memoir? The first is broader in scope, covering an entire life, from childhood to where you are now. Memoirs focus on a narrower period within a lifetime or a series of events that happened within a confined period. Get even more clarification in Memoir and Autobiography: Learn the Differences.
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See more writing advice on Literary Ladies Guide
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1. Know your purpose for writing.The memoir genre is popular for many reasons. It opens a window to learning about others’ lives and cultures. Mainly, though, it provides insight into what it means to live in another person’s shoes or experience something firsthand rather than looking at it from afar.
Your purpose for writing a memoir can be personal, dramatic, or even just for fun. Here are some questions to ask when identifying the purpose of writing a memoir.
What do you want to achieve by writing your memoir?Do you hope to share an important story for the world or just an interesting one about yourself?Who are you writing this book for, and how will it help the reader?Are you looking for catharsis or validation of your experience, or would you like to inspire others with lessons learned from your life experiences?
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Isak Dinesen’s classic memoir, Out of Africa
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Memoirs are personal, and you may never find the perfect audience for your story. However, if you plan out how to write, publish, and market your memoir from the very start, then it will be easier to reach those people who can relate to what you have written.
Telling your story is not about the size of an audience; it’s about how you can help others who are going through similar experiences find hope. Here are three critical considerations related to planning your memoir.
Figure out what type of memoir you want to writeConsider your time frame and budget constraintsFind a book publisher that best fits your needs (or even consider self-publishing)3. Decide on the book publishing method.
The question to ask at this point is: should you use an agent, or self-publish? One of the best things about using an agent or book publisher is connecting with more people in the industry than just writers and editors. They also have connections with marketing teams. Agents and publishers are masters at finding new audiences for their books.
On the other hand, if you’re looking for the best way to get a book published on your own, know that you will be in charge of everything: writing the book, editing it, creating a cover design and layout for print or ebook formats. You also need to know how to market your book effectively so that people will buy it.
It all depends on whether you want to take the time to learn how to market your book or prefer to focus on writing. For most, writing a book is what they’re after, so it would make sense to use an agent or a book publisher.
Keep in mind that if you decide to use a third party (and not self-publish), these book publishing companies will take a cut of anything you make from the book. Actually, they keep the lion’s share. They front the cost of production, printing, and some marketing. The author generally gets less than 10% of the cover price after they’ve earned out an advance.
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Quotes from I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,
Maya Angelou’s classic memoir
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Starting with an outline is a great stepping stone to writing the rest of the book. This outline should include what you want to write about and what research will be necessary.
By creating an outline before writing individual chapters, you have a better chance of staying on track and doing more research to make your content as informative as possible.
This means that the final output will be higher quality and more enjoyable to read than if you had just written the first chapter and continued writing until your book was finished.
5. Take breaks and understand that the first draft will be far from perfect.
Often, when you’re working on something difficult for an extended period (such as writing a book), it helps to take frequent breaks. This can rejuvenate you, refresh your thoughts and help you stay focused with less effort than before.
Keep in mind that the first draft is never perfect, but you can make better with self-editing and revision. It’s essential to be patient and have faith that your hard work will pay off in the end.
A standard tip that published authors share with those that are just getting started (and that can help you out) is to share what you’ve written so far with someone else who might give some feedback about sentence structure, flow, or if anything is missing from a paragraph.
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Simone de Beauvoir’s Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter
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ConclusionThe journey from idea to published work can be long and arduous, but it doesn’t have to be daunting. By following these steps, you will be able to overcome all the obstacles in your way so you can finally get your story out there for an audience who will stand to benefit from your writing.
You’ll also have a clearer picture of whether you will use book publishing companies or go it alone when it comes to publishing and marketing your memoir. Whatever you decide to do, one thing is for sure: It’s time to start writing today.
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June 14, 2021
7 Ideas For Stunning, Unique Home Libraries
Home libraries of many different styles are popular today. From classic traditional to retro, rustic to modern minimalist, myriad types and sizes of home book havens can be created. Yet there are major differences between these contemporary reading rooms and designs. Most often, there’s no need for a designated room for your home library.
You may choose a corner of a spacious area in an open-concept living room or den; even a cozy nook beneath a long staircase or floor-to-ceiling shelving in your office space works well. Libraries no long need doors or specially structured spaces.
Books add character and charm to any interior environment, so be inventive and create a unique, stylish library design. Here you’ll find innovative ideas and tips for a home library design that are stylish and functional. Photo top rightby Jon Tyson on Unsplash.
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Photo: Two-Story Contemporary Home Library: This spacious two-story contemporary home library features large-scale floor-to-ceiling built-in shelving. Lined with a glorious collection so books, these shelves offer the ideal image of an orderly, well-organized home library. The high vaulted ceiling provides plenty of space for the upstairs balcony with more shelves neatly lined with books.
The recessed lights above the first-floor bookshelves and the bright, sparkling fixtures in the ceiling offer good reading light. On the first floor, the plush neutral-toned corner sectional sofa, pillows, and matching ottoman provide a welcoming ambiance. Who can resist lingering in this stunning, inviting interior to browse and explore this large, intriguing collection of books?
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Photo: Leora Dowling / Unsplash
Country Cottage Library and Sitting Room: This charming country cottage-style library with its adjoining sitting room welcomes one and all. The floor-to-ceiling shelves are filled with books is a comfortable state of slight disarray. Near the shelves, a pair of vintage upholstered chairs in light floral prints emphasize the casual cottage atmosphere.
Beside one chair, a basket of handcrafted walking sticks lends character to this library setting. In the sitting room beyond, rustic wooden chairs with spool backs align with the overall decor. The patterned wallpaper mirrors the design of the front room’s cushioned chairs, inviting visitors to relax, read and linger for a while.
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Upstairs Library Nook with a View: This beautiful upstairs library offers a quiet reading space with a large selection of books in a long wall of ceiling-high shelving. Modern rectangular pendant lights add more soft reading light.
The light natural timber flooring lends lovely wood tones while adding to the room’s basic beauty and allure. This library has the feeling of a tree-top reading room that is separate from the rest of the house. The large indoor plant along with the pristine white walls and shelving accents this interior’s soft brightness and appeal.
Every room will always look better with a cozy place to sit. Adding a comfy chair to read in will always improve a home library. Don’t forget to add a child sized chair too for quality time in the library with the kids.
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Library as a Room Divider: This attractive living space carves out a comfy living space by using floor to ceiling shelving as a room divider. The wall of high bookshelves adds character, and the tabletop adjacent to the sofa can function as a display for the titles that are next on your reading list.
With natural light from its windows, this reading and seating area has a pleasing open, yet cozy feeling. The decor and atmosphere encourage browsing and reading while you enjoy a warm beverage or cuddling up with your companion animal.
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Understated Beauty Farmhouse Style Library: This simple, rustic farmhouse style library has beautiful natural-finish deep wood shelves. The built-in shelving unit provides plenty of room for books plus drawers and cabinetry below for storage. Since farmhouse style is simple and uncluttered, it promotes an organized, neat design that suits a quiet reading area.
Rooms that feature natural wood are also calming and conducive to quiet reading. This type of home library can be equally effective as a separate area or combined with a family room. The simple design and decor clear your mind from the day’s earlier tasks and demands, leaving you relaxed for reading.
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Cozy Cookbook Library and Eating Area: For the compulsive cookbook collector, what better place to display your books than where you eat? This casual cookbook library can be constructed in a dining room, dinette, or even in an open-plan kitchen if you have the space. The floor to ceiling construction ensures that your collection can grow. If your books don’t quite fill the shelves, you can always use the spaces for displaying dishes, or any other kitchen wares that look attractive.
Your dining table can be used to display your favorites when not in use, or as a space to mull over and choose the delicious recipes you want to make next.
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Photo: Jonathan Borba / Unsplash
Casual Library in a Garret-Style Space: This cozy library setting is easy to fit into a garret-style room with a sloping ceiling. The handcrafted units of low, deep bookshelves create a casual display for books and decorative items. The simplicity of the light walls and flooring, and double doors is pleasing in this small attic room.
The low-to-the-floor library lends creative charm and design to an otherwise empty interior corner. Yet something about its uncomplicated style is endearing and somewhat intriguing. This is a great space for sinking deep into a captivating mystery novel or oversized art or travel book to dream over.
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We might be living in a sleek, sophisticated digital world, but nothing compares with the inviting warmth and enjoyment of a cozy or chic home library setting. The casual luxury of relaxing on a deep-cushioned sofa with your favorite book and beverage remains a major pastime.
Some homeowners even build a garden library by the pool with sliding doors to keep books dry and fresh. Why not enjoy your treasured reading time to the ultimate in your own unique, clever, trendy or traditional library setting?
See more ideas for The Bookish Life on this site.
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Miranda Gay: Coming of Age in Pale Horse, Pale Rider
This introduction to Miranda Gay, a central character in of two of the three stories in Pale Horse, Pale Rider by Katherine Anne Porter (1939), is excerpted from Girls in Bloom: Coming of Age in the Mid-20th Century Woman’s Novel by Francis Booth, reprinted by permission.
Katherine Anne Porter (1890-1980) is best known for her only novel, Ship of Fools, which she began writing in 1931 but only published in 1962. In addition to this magnum opus, she published only short stories, fewer than thirty, but which earned her a reputation as one of the twentieth century’s greatest stylists of short fiction.
Porter had a fascinating life: having been born in Texas, she married three husbands of various nationalities and lived in several countries, including Mexico, where many of her stories are set, and Bermuda where she began her stories about Miranda Gay, who is usually considered to be her alter ego and spokeswoman.
Introducing Miranda Gay
Pale Horse, Pale Rider (1937) consists of three of what Porter called short novels, though they are more like long short stories.
The first, ‘Old Mortality’ and the third, which is the title story, concern Miranda Gay; in the first we see her, very briefly, coming of age and in the third she is a young career woman working as a journalist during the First World War, falling in love with a young soldier and getting caught in the Spanish Flu epidemic.
Miranda, Maria, and cousinsDespite its brevity, ‘Old Mortality’ is in three parts – in the first Miranda is eight, in the second she is ten. In the third she is eighteen and has eloped from home. Also despite its brevity, the story has more insight into a young woman’s coming of age and her relationship to her family and the outside world than many full-length novels. The first part, which finishes in 1902, features Miranda and her older sister.
“Maria and Miranda, aged twelve and eight years, knew they were young, though they felt they had lived a long time. They had lived not only their own years; but their memories, it seemed to them, began years before they were born, in the lives of the grown-ups around them, old people above forty, most of them, who had a way of insisting that they too had been young once. It was hard to believe.
Miranda persisted through her childhood in believing, in spite of her smallness, thinness, a little snubby nose saddled with freckles, her speckled gray eyes and habitual tantrums, that by some miracle she would grow into a tall, cream-colored brunette, like Cousin Isabel; she decided always to wear a trailing white satin gown. Maria, born sensible, had no such illusions. ‘We are going to take after my Mamma’s family,’ she said. ‘It’s no use, we are. We’ll never be beautiful, we’ll always have freckles. And you,’ she told Miranda, ‘haven’t even a good disposition.’”
Cousin Isabel is a source of romantic wonder and an object of admiration for the two girls as is Aunt Amy, who ‘belonged to the world of poetry,’ whereas Cousin Eva, ‘shy and generous, straining her upper lip over to enormous teeth,’ was ‘a blot, no doubt about it, but the little girls felt she belonged to the everyday world of dull lessons to be learned, stiff shoes to be limbered up, scratchy flannels to be endured in cold weather, measles and disappointed expectations.’
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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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Eva wears her mother’s old clothes and teaches Latin in a women’s school while she travels around making suffragist speeches, for which she later goes to jail.
Later, the two sisters, ‘who read as naturally and constantly as ponies cropped grass, and with much the same kind of pleasure,’ discover some ‘forbidden reading matter,’ gothic novels about ‘beautiful but unlucky maidens, who for mysterious reasons had been trapped by nuns and priests in dire collusion; they were then “immured” in convents.’ The word immured perfectly describes to them their situation.
‘It was the word Maria and Miranda had been needing all along to describe their condition at the Convent of the Rapture of Jesus, in New Orleans, where they spent the long winters trying to avoid an education.’ The convent is their home, ‘their familiar world of shining bare floors and insipid wholesome food and cold-water washing and regular prayers; their world of poverty, chastity and obedience, of early to bed and early to rise, of sharp little rules and tittle tattle.’
At the age of ten, Miranda decides she is going to be a jockey when she grows up – not that she is going to grow very far up. ‘Her father had said one day that she was going to be a little thing all her life, she would never be tall; and this meant, of course, that she would never be a beauty like aunt Amy, or Cousin Isabel.
Her hope of being a beauty died hard, until the notion of being a jockey came suddenly and filled all her thoughts.’ The father is not sympathetic towards the girls: ‘“Nest of vipers,” he boasted, “perfect match of serpents teeth. Can’t do anything with ‘em.” He fluffed up Miranda’s hair, pretending to tousle it.’
Miranda at eighteenThe next time we see Miranda she is eighteen and has run away to be married, though we are told nothing about either the elopement or the husband. She meets Cousin Eva on a train taking them both to Aunt Amy’s funeral; Eva is now fully committed to the suffragist movement for which she has been to jail three times.
Miranda has not seen her father since she eloped and he does not welcome her with open arms, in fact he physically pushes her away when he sees her. The end of ‘Old Mortality’ is one of the best extended descriptions of a girl’s coming of age in all of the literature about female adolescence.
“‘Where are my own people and my own time?’ She resented, slowly and deeply and in profound silence, the presence of these aliens who lectured and admonished her, who loved her with bitterness and denied her the right to look at the world with her own eyes, who demanded that she accept their version of life and yet could not tell her the truth, not in the smallest thing. ‘I hate them both,’ her most inner and secret mind set plainly, ‘I will be free of them, I shall not even remember them…’
She did not want any more ties with this house, she was going to leave it, and she was not going back to her husband’s family either. She would have no more bonds that smothered her in love and hatred. She knew now why she had run away to marriage, and she knew that she was going to run away from marriage, and she was not going to stay in any place, with anyone, that threatened to forbid her making her own discoveries, that said ‘No’ to her…”
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Pale Horse, Pale Rider on Bookshop.org*
Pale Horse, Pale Rider 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!
The post Miranda Gay: Coming of Age in Pale Horse, Pale Rider appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.
June 8, 2021
Caresse Crosby, Patron of the Literary Lost Generation
Caresse Crosby (born Mary Phelps Jacob; April 20, 1892 – January 24, 1970) was known as a patron to the Lost Generation and other expatriate writers in Paris of the late 1920s. With her second husband, Harry Crosby, she founded Black Sun Press, publishing early works of writers who would have a lasting impact.
And in an offbeat yet impactful turn of events, in 1914, Crosby became the first person to receive a patent for the modern bra in 1914. The following appreciation of Crosby’s Paris years is excerpted from Everybody I Can Think of Ever: Meetings That Made the Avant-Garde by Francis Booth, reprinted by permission.
Diarist and novelist Anaïs Nin on Caresse Crosby:
“Caresse Crosby enters with the buoyancy of a powder puff, caressing voice (was this how she gained the nickname of Caresse from Harry Crosby?), her fur hat, her eyelashes, her smile all glittery with animation. The word on her lips is always yes, and all her being says yes yes yes to all that is happening and all that is offered her. She trails behind her, like the plume of a peacock, a fabulous legend. She ran the Black Sun Press in Paris, lived in a converted windmill, knew D.H. Lawrence, Ezra Pound, André Breton, painters, writers. At the Quatre Arts Ball she once rode on a horse as Lady Godiva.”
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Harry Crosby in 1919
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Caresse’s husband Harry was the Harvard-educated nephew of J.P. Morgan. Together Caresse and Harry ran the Black Sun Press and were publishers, supporters and patrons of many young writers, including Kay Boyle, D.H. Lawrence, Hart Crane, Ernest Hemingway, Henry Miller, and Anaïs Nin; they published James Joyce’s Tales Told of Shem and Shaun and issued his Pomes Penyeach in a special edition, illustrated by James’ daughter Lucia.
As publishers and patrons they were magnificent, as writers less so, though it is hard to agree with Robert McAlmon when, with his usual sexist tone he describes Caresse as “an attractive, smartly-dressed woman but I did not take her literary interests or tastes seriously.”
The publishing house got its name because, as Caresse said, “black was Harry’s favorite color and he worshipped the sun.”
D.H. Lawrence
It was sun worship – in the atavistic sense not in the modern sense of sunbathing – that first led the Crosbys to D.H. Lawrence, an apostle of the sun himself. By 1929, Lawrence was looking for a publisher for Lady Chatterley’s Lover but without success; he was prepared to underwrite the costs himself but he was still having difficulty.
Lawrence was reluctant to leave his home in the warmth of the south of France in March, but decided he would have to go to Paris. While he was there the Crosbys invited him and Frieda to stay at their mill outside the city. Harry and Caresse had first seen and fallen in love with the mill, the scene of so many literary stories, while they were staying with the Duc de la Rochefoucauld in his château – being the nephew of J.P. Morgan assured Harry the best invitations.
Strolling around the vast estate they saw the old mill, semi-derelict but beautifully located. They immediately told the owner that they wanted to buy it; Harry did not have his check book on him so he ripped the cuff off the sleeve of Caresse’s white blouse and wrote him a check on that.
James Joyce
Caresse and Harry heard about James Joyce through his publisher Sylvia Beach, as did most people; they were just starting the Black Sun Press and they “yearned for a piece of the rich Irish cake then baking on the Paris fire.’
But when they first met him, “Joyce was uncommunicative and seemed bored with us, retreating behind those thick mysterious lenses until something was said about Sullivan’s concert the evening before, then suddenly he came to life – talking all the while about great Irish tenors.” Joyce was a tireless supporter of John Sullivan and the talk brought him to life. Harry and Caresse joined him in his enthusiasm, ostensibly anyway.
Joyce invited them back the next week for a concert and finally they worked up the courage to ask him if they could print some of what he was then calling Work in Progress, which eventually became part of Finnegan’s Wake. Joyce agreed, if only because they did not want many pages and they promised unlimited corrections – something Sylvia Beach had unwisely offered Joyce some years earlier. Caresse and Harry also agreed to pay Joyce whatever he asked for in advance; Joyce was always short of money.
The Crosbys began to visit Joyce regularly, when he gave them his ‘corrections and additions’. Harry noted in his diary “I liked the flash of triumph when Caresse asked him how much he enjoyed doing this new work, the same flash of triumph as when one is sleeping with a woman one loves, the same flash of triumph when one bets high on a horse and sees him gallop past the winning post a winner.”
Joyce signed a contract for the publication on April 3, 1929; the Crosbys paid him $1,000 as a half-payment. Joyce went through the proof sheets in mid-April, mostly at the Crosbys’ Paris apartment, but only after they had assured him that they would tie up and muzzle their dog Narcisse while he was there. He worked in their library which had a lamp with “an enormous lightbulb” in deference to the weakness of Joyce’s eyes. As he had been with Harry earlier, Joyce was always keen to show off his cleverness. Caresse wrote about this time in The Passionate Years:
“Now, Mr and Mrs Crosby,” Joyce said, “I wonder if you understand why I made that change?” All this in a blarney-Irish key.
“No, why?” We chorused, and there ensued one of the most intricate and erudite twenty minutes of explanation that it has ever been my luck to hear but unfortunately I hardly understood a word, his references were far too esoteric. Harry fared better, but afterward we both regretted that we did not have a dictaphone behind the lamp so that later we could have studied all that had escaped us. Joyce stayed three hours, he did not want to drink, and by eight he hadn’t got through with a page and a half. It was illuminating.
The Crosbys wanted to commission Picasso to do a portrait of Joyce for the book. Harry noted in his diary for May 3, 1929:
“C. spends the morning with Picasso I with Joyce. Picasso told her he wouldn’t do a portrait of Joyce because he never did portraits anymore but that sometime he would do a drawing for the Black Sun Press.”
Caresse asked the sculptor Brancusi for a drawing instead; he agreed and did several sketches. They were good likenesses but the Crosbys really wanted something more abstract. Brancusi agreed provided he was given complete freedom. The resulting “portrait” is just three vertical lines of various lengths and a spiral; not a literal portrait in any sense but the Crosbys and Joyce loved it, though Sylvia Beach thought it was “a bit too basic.”
When the book was finally ready for publication the printer had to come back to the Crosbys, very embarrassed, to tell them that the final page only had two lines; could Mr. Joyce perhaps provide an additional eight lines. Caresse was too frightened to ask him but the printer went behind her back directly to Joyce and got the lines; apparently Joyce had wanted to add more but was too frightened of Caresse to ask her.
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Everybody I Can Think of Ever on Amazon U.S.*
Everybody I Can Think of Ever on Amazon U.K*
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Caresse first met Picasso’s friend and patron Gertrude Stein in 1928; they were not received warmly.
“To Gertrude Stein’s we went but once. I do not recall that Harry ever met her again. We were only three or four. She wanted to look at our editions and we wanted to look at her Picassos. We did both. Her portrait is well-known now, but then it had not yet met the public. The story goes that a friend complained to Picasso, ‘it doesn’t look like her.’ ‘It will,’ he replied.”
Harry and Caresse did meet Stein again, in the Midi in France in 1934 when it was Alice Toklas who was the ‘star’ of the luncheon. ‘She was in top form and led us through many a merry adventure, as she told us tales of her travels with Gertrude while Gertrude sat smiling upon us all like a happy Buddhess.’
The last time Caresse met Gertrude “I liked her best of all.” It was autumn 1945, in Paris, immediately after the war; Caresse was one of the first Americans to return. She had brought over drawings by American artists that she arranged to show in a gallery on the Rue Furstemburg.
“Paris was starving for contact with the American world of art and everyone flocked. Gertrude Stein came stalking in with her white poodle at her heels. She sat in the centre of the tiny room and almost stole the show, my show, but even when she walked off with the best-looking G.I. in the place, I forgave her. As Picasso had foreseen, his portrait now looks just like her.”
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F. Scott FitzgeraldIn The Passionate Years, Caresse also tells a nice story of how she first met F. Scott Fitzgerald: she was passing through Baltimore on her way to the ship that would take her to Europe. She had never met him before but had been given his number and phoned him to introduce herself.
It went beautifully. He would wear a red carnation. He would meet me in the bar of the Lord Baltimore at twelve, he would take me to lunch, he would see that I reached the pier by two … I confidently entered the bar. It was 12:15 but no Scott – so I sat down and told the waiter I would order when the gentleman arrived – but no gentleman arrived.
Then someone who was no gentleman insisted on joining me. I got up flurried and went to the telephone. I had forgotten the number which I had had from a friend in New York. The operator could find no record of Scott Fitzgerald whatsoever. I was furious, and then I heard my name being paged. I was wanted on the telephone.
My barroom friend retreated. It was Scott full of apologies, he had been working he said, forgot the time etc. etc. Would I jump in a cab and come to the house. Did I like beer? I didn’t, but I answered, ‘Love it.’ If it hadn’t been for the barroom beau I’d have gone back and had a snifter myself.”
We drew up in front of a rather sinister-looking house, and as I remember, I had to go around to the back to get in. Scott answered the door in a flapping dressing-gown, hair tousled, but with a smile that unlatched my heart. “So you’re Caresse Crosby,” he said.
“And you are you.”
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Caresse Crosby’s patent. She was the first recipient of a patent for the modern bra,
patent number 1,115,674, granted on November 3, 1914, titled m. p. jacob–brassière:
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One of Caresse and Harry Crosby’s greatest successes as publishers came when they acted as midwives at the birth of one of the great American poems: they bullied, blackmailed and kidnapped Hart Crane into finishing his monumental poem sequence The Bridge – which, along with Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and William Carlos Williams’ Paterson, is one of the great pillars of American twentieth century epic poetry.
Crane and the Crosbys were introduced in Paris by Eugène Jolas, Joyce’s French translator, whom they had met though Sylvia Beach and who had also introduced them to Joyce. Jolas published Crane’s poems in transition, including some early parts of The Bridge; he called the Crosbys the “mad millionaires.”
They were certainly eccentric; among other things, they had dogs named Clytoris and Narcisse Noir. Crane describes his first meeting with them in a letter to Malcolm Cowley dated February 4, 1929.
“Have just returned from a weekend at Ermenonville (near Chantilly) on the estate of the Duc du Rochefoucauld where an amazing millionaire by the name of Harry Crosby has fixed up an old mill (with stables and a stockade all about) . . . I’m invited to return at any time for any period to finish The Bridge, but I’ve an idea that I shall soon wear off my novelty.”
Crane’s novelty did wear off, though not immediately. By the time the Crosbys met Crane they had already read what then existed of The Bridge. They were impressed. But the poem still needed some additions; the Crosbys decided to help Crane finish it, whatever the cost, personal and financial. It turned out to be a high price to pay.
While they were in New York and planning to force Crane to finish The Bridge, Harry and Caresse had been decorating their daughter Polleen’s room ready for when she came home from Swiss boarding school. She was due home on the Monday but on Saturday Harry brought Hart Crane home for the night. They had no guest room so had to put him up with his ‘sailor’s duffel bag and his hobnailed shoes’ in Polleen’s newly decorated room. Caresse describes that night in The Passionate Years:
“We were aware of Hart’s midnight prowlings and also aware, to our dismay, of his nocturnal pickups. He said he’d go out for a nightcap so it was with great relief that I heard him come in about 2 am and softly close the stairway door. Thereafter it was quiet. But in the morning, what a hideous awakening!”
Crane had completely wrecked Polleen’s room.
“On the wallpaper and across the pale pink spread, up and down the curtains and over the white chenille rug were the blackest footprints and handprints I have ever seen, hundreds of them. No wonder, for I heard to my fury that he had brought a chimney-sweep home for the night.”
At least it made a change from sailors, who were Crane’s preferred partners. Caresse forgave him and stuck with him through to the publication of The Bridge, going so far as to lock him in and forcing him to write. The tough love strategy worked and Crane finally finished the poem. On December 7, 1930 they held a party to mark the completion of The Bridge under the shadow of the actual bridge which it celebrates. Harry and Caresse were due to sail for France on the 13th. They never made it.
The demise of Harry Crosby
During the night of December 8, 1929 Harry Crosby suddenly told Caresse he wanted them both to leap from their hotel window and achieve a “Sun-Death” on this winter day. Caresse ignored him; he was drunk. It was six weeks after the Wall Street Crash and many financiers did in fact jump from tall buildings.
On the 10th Harry met his mistress, whom Caresse called the Fire Princess. He was supposed to meet Caresse later at the Lyceum Theatre, with Hart Crane and others. When there was no sign of Harry the party went into the theatre but Crane left his number at the box office in case a call came. It did. Crosby and his mistress were dead in a hotel room. They each had a bullet to the head and Harry still had a gun in his hand. Harry’s last entry in his diary was December 9:
And again my Invulnerability is put to the test.
One is not in love unless one desires
to die with one’s beloved
there is only one happiness
it is to love and to be loved
Caresse thought she was Harry’s beloved but she was obviously wrong. Their friends rallied around Caresse. Kay Boyle wrote to her on December 17, 1929 from Neuilly:
“dear darling child – I want to be near you and kiss you 1000 times and tell you how enormous how magnificent you are – I cannot say anything to you that is in my heart – but I see you like a fiery little steed and I worship you for it. Here is my devotion and my love and my homage forever and ever – your / Kay”
As if that weren’t enough for Caresse to bear, Hart Crane killed himself two years after Harry, on April 27, 1932, jumping from a boat on the way back to America from Havana.
After Harry’s and Hart Crane’s suicides Caresse Crosby continued her work and continued to meet new people. In her autobiography, The Passionate Years, she remembers meeting Ezra Pound for the first time; he had the same striking effect on her as on everyone else. It was in the early spring of 1930 and he had been living in Rapallo in Italy for some time. She had already had many letters from Pound ‘interlarded with his vivid designs and graphic flourishes’ but had not yet met him in person. Caresse found Pound interesting but socially awkward.
Anaïs Nin’s impressions
Anaïs Nin’s memories of first meeting Caresse, at a party at the surrealist painter Yves Tanguy’s house in the winter of 1939, with which we started this extract, continued:
“The life of certain women dresses them in anecdotes which become more visible than fur coats or silk dresses. Stories surround Caresse like a perfume, a necklace, a feather. She always seems fresher and younger than all the women there, because of her mobility, ease, flowingness. D.H. Lawrence would have called it her ‘livingness.’ A pollen carrier, I thought, as she mixed, stirred, brewed, concocted her friendships by a constant flux and reflux of activity, by curiosity, avidity, amorousness.”
In her journals for the winter of 1954/55, Nin is still in awe of Caresse Crosby:
“The dress is airy, winged. It is of black but transparent material, it is inflated and crisp by new chemistries, as organdy once was by starch and ironing. It gives her the silhouette of a young woman. Her hair, though grey, is glossy, and brushed and also starched and the opposite of limp, because the spirit in Caresse is airy and alive …
Age can wrinkle her face, freckle her hands, ruthlessly drop the eyelids over opened eyes, can tire her, but it cannot kill her laughter, her enthusiasm, her mobility.
Her second husband, Harry Crosby, committed suicide at the side of another woman (but Caresse had been invited first to share the suicide pact). Her adored son Bill died asphyxiated by a faulty gas heater in Paris. She lost two fortunes, but she wears at her neck a huge bow because dress and body and hair reflect the alertness and the discipline of her spirit.”
Nin had been sent to interview Caresse for the magazine Eve. She still thought Caresse was “an extraordinary woman.” Anaïs is obviously infatuated with Caresse, with her “lively and gay blue eyes, her constant sparkling laughter, a short humorous nose, a warm manner which wins everyone and a gift for making friends … She never commands, but whatever she asks is immediately accomplished.”
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More about Caresse Crosby The Extraordinary Life of Caresse Crosby, Inventor of the Bra Phelps Family History in America Inventing the Bra was the Least Interesting Thing This Blue-Blooded Bohemian DidContributed 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 Caresse Crosby, Patron of the Literary Lost Generation appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.
June 5, 2021
Voyage in the Dark by Jean Rhys (1934)
This review and analysis of Voyage in the Dark, a 1934 novel by Jean Rhys, is excerpted from Girls in Bloom: Coming of Age in the Mid-20th Century Woman’s Novel by Francis Booth, reprinted by permission.
Jean Rhys (1890-1979) is best known for her novel Wide Sargasso Sea, a take on the Jane Eyre story from the point of view of the “madwoman in the attic,” Rochester’s wife, who, like Rhys, came from the Caribbean. It was finally published in book form in 1966 after years of tinkering and after a very long gap following her early novels, the first of which, Quartet, was published in 1928.
Voyage in the Dark doesn’t read at all like a pre-war novel. It feels far more like the British kitchen-sink novels and dramas of the late 1950s/early 1960s where amoral young women with either no parental influence or a very bad one float aimlessly through a world of seedy boarding houses and casual sex: A Taste of Honey by Shelagh Delaney (1958), The L-Shaped Room by Lynne Reid Banks (1960), which became the 1962 film, and Up the Junction by Nell Dunn (1962), which also became a film as well as a TV play.
Voyage in the Dark is to a large extent autobiographical, following an eighteen-year-old girl who has come to a cold, damp England from the warm, sunny Caribbean, as Rhys herself did.
Anna is no English rose; she has a totally opposite life experience to the upper-middle-class English girls of Rosamond Lehmann and her peers: she is traveling around England working as a showgirl, both in the sense of acting on the stage and in the pejorative sense the word had at the time of a “woman of easy virtue.”
Though by no means a prostitute, Anna certainly seems to be prepared to have relationships with men for money, as do all the women she knows, most of whom are older than her. One friend calls her “the Virgin,” though it is not absolutely clear whether at the start of the novel she is.
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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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One of the men who gives her money believes she is a virgin but when she goes to his room she denies it; oddly, because virginity is presumably a very valuable commodity. “I’m not a virgin if that’s what’s worrying you,” she says. “You oughtn’t to tell lies about that,” the man replies. She denies that she is telling lies and says it does not matter anyway. The man replies: “Oh yes, it matters. It’s the only thing that matters.”
She tells him she wants to leave, but then she doesn’t. “When I got into bed there was warmth from him and I got close to him. Of course you’ve always known, always remembered, and then you forget so utterly, except that you’ve always known it. Always – how long is always?”
Anna is traveling and rooming with Maudie who is ten years older than her and highly cynical; hardly the ideal role model. She sees that Anna is reading Nana, Zola’s 1880 novel about an eighteen-year-old showgirl who becomes a highly successful prostitute, casually ruining all the men around her; Anna is of course an anagram of Nana. In its way, Nana is a coming of age novel, if an extremely dark one: “All of a sudden, in the good-natured child, the woman stood revealed, a disturbing woman with all the impulsive madness of her sex, opening the gates of the unknown world of desire.”
“That’s a dirty book, isn’t it?”
“Bits of it are all right,” I said.
Maudie said, “I know; it’s about a tart. I think it’s disgusting. I bet you a man writing a book about a tart tells a lot of lies one way and another. Besides, all books are like that – just somebody stuffing you up.”
In fact, apart from Nana and Alexandre Dumas’ Lady of the Camellias, most courtesan novels were written by women who actually were courtesans, such as Colette’s Chéri and Gigi, additions to the genre established by French nineteen century authors like Liane de Pougy, Céleste de Chabrillan and Valtesse de la Bigne.
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Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
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Anna and Maudie always seem to be poor and always have trouble getting landladies to accommodate “professionals,” as one landlady calls them. Maudie encourages Anna; she is not entirely reluctant, has no qualms about accepting money from men, and is not even especially repulsed by the physical side of it.
“You shut the door and you pull the curtains over the windows and then it’s as long as a thousand years and yet so soon ended.” But Anna wonders when and how her life will change; how, even if, she will come of age as a woman, where she will end up; she has none of Nana’s or Dumas’ Marguerite Gautier’s single-minded drive to become rich through exploiting men and just seems to have fallen into this way of life.
“Of course, you get used to things, you get used to anything. It was as if I had always lived like that. Only sometimes, when I got back home and was undressing to go to bed, I would think, ‘my God, this is a funny way to live. My God, how did this happen?’”
‘But it isn’t always going to be like this, is it?’ I thought. ‘It would be too awful if it were always going to be like this. It isn’t possible. Something must happen to make it different’ and I thought, ‘yes, that’s all right. I’m poor and my clothes are cheap and perhaps it will always be like this. And that’s all right too.’ It was the first time in my life I’d thought that.
The ones without any money, the ones with beastly lives. Perhaps I’m going to be one of the ones with beastly lives. They swarm like woodlice when you push a stick into a woodlice-nest at home. And their faces are the colour of woodlice.”
In a way, Anna cannot wait to get old; when an older woman says to her that this is no way for a young girl to live, she thinks: “people say ‘young’ as though being young were a crime, and they are always scared of getting old. I thought, ‘I wish I were old and the whole damned thing were finished; that I shouldn’t get this depressed feeling for nothing at all.’”
But in Anna’s way of life, youth is the most valuable commodity, as a male acquaintance tells her in a letter informing her that Walter, one of the men who has been giving her money, and of whom she has become quite fond, cannot see her again; it is a rather standard Dear Jane letter, telling her she would be better off without him.
“I’m quite sure you are a nice girl and that you will be understanding about this. Walter is still very fond of you but he doesn’t love you like that anymore, and after all you must always have known that the thing could not go on forever and you must remember too that he is nearly 20 years older than you are. I’m sure that you are a nice girl and that you will think it over calmly and see that there is nothing to be tragic or unhappy or anything like that about.
You are young and youth as everybody says is the great thing, the greatest gift of all. The greatest gift, everybody says. And so it is. You got everything in front of you, lots of happiness. Think of that. Love is not everything – especially that sort of love – and the more people, especially girls, put it right out of their hands and do without it the better… Walter has asked me to enclose this cheque for £20 for your immediate expenses because he thinks you may be running short of cash. He will always be your friend and he wants to arrange that you should be provided for and not have to worry about money (for a time at any rate).”
In this demimonde everything has a price, though not necessarily a high price; life is cheap, and women are cheaper: £20 to buy off Anna must have seemed a reasonable amount, though at least one man “gave me fifteen quid” for a single experience.
Maudie tells Anna that a man said to her, “have you ever thought that a girl’s clothes cost more than the girl inside them?… You can get a very nice girl for five pounds, a very nice girl indeed; you can even get a very nice girl for nothing if you know how to go about it. But you can’t get a very nice costume for her for five pounds.”
Anna is not deeply upset about Walter and she has no hesitation in asking him for more money later when she needs an abortion, illegal and very dangerous in those days, and costing £50. But even this does not seem to make Anna want to change her way of life; everything in grey, miserable England seems like a bad dream to her anyway, even though the dream is interspersed with pleasant interludes.
“Sometimes not being able to get over the feeling that it was a dream. The light and the sky and the shadows and the houses and the people – all parts of the dream, all fitting in and all against me. But there were other times when a fine day, or music, or looking in the glass and thinking I was pretty, made me start again imagining that there was nothing I couldn’t do, nothing I couldn’t become. Imagining God knows what. Imagining Carl would say, ‘When I leave London, I’m going to take you with me.’ And imagining it although his eyes had that look – this is just for while I’m here, and I hope you get me.
‘I picked up a girl in London and she … Last night I slept with a girl who … ’ That was me.
Not ‘girl’ perhaps. Some other word, perhaps. Never mind.”
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Voyage in the Dark on Bookshop.org
Voyage in the Dark 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 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 Voyage in the Dark by Jean Rhys (1934) appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.
June 4, 2021
The Literary Friendship of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings & Zora Neale Hurston
This musing on the friendship of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings and Zora Neale Hurston, two complex literary personalities, is excerpted and adapted from The Life She Wished to Live: A Biography of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Author of “The Yearling,” © 2021 Ann McCutchan. Used with permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.
In the summer of 1942, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings was invited to speak at historically black Florida Memorial College in St. Augustine. One of the instructors that term was Zora Neale Hurston. At the time, Zora was completing her memoir, Dust Tracks on a Road, covering her childhood in Eatonville, Florida’s first all-black incorporated city.
A budding friendship in a complicated era
Marjorie had just published Cross Creek, her memoir of the north-central Florida hamlet she had, fourteen years earlier, adopted as home. The two women became acquainted, and when Marjorie returned to Castle Warden, the St. Augustine hotel her husband, Norton Baskin, owned and operated, she told him she’d “met the most wonderful woman.”
In fact, she had immediately invited Zora to tea at their hotel apartment. But as soon she told Norton about it, she regretted the offer. She suggested she meet Zora elsewhere, not at the hotel, where white regulars might frown on a fashionably dressed black woman passing through the lobby and withdraw their business.
Marjorie’s concerns were real. Florida was an entrenched pocket of the Deep South; Jim Crow laws ruled. Lynchings still occurred, especially in the area between the Georgia-Florida line and north-central Florida, once home to plantations. There had been five plantations in Alachua County, 70 miles west of St. Augustine, where Cross Creek was tucked away.
Marjorie was herself ambivalent about black-white relations. Growing up in Washington, D.C., she had absorbed conventional racist attitudes and in 1928, when she bought a run-down Florida orange grove and moved there to write, she had hired several black workers to tend the grove and run her household. Some were lodged in a tenant shack behind her farmhouse. The maid who served Marjorie breakfast in bed wore a uniform and headpiece. “Mrs. Rawlings, kind as she was, never asked her workers to do anything,” Idella Parker, her longest-serving housekeeper, remembered. “She told them.”
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Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
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Yet Marjorie paid higher wages than the going rate, covered her workers’ medical bills, and was considered liberal by her white Cracker neighbors. By the time she met Zora, she had won a Pulitzer Prize for The Yearling and begun moving in elite, highly educated white circles. She had been Eleanor Roosevelt’s guest at the White House. She was awakening to the twin causes of civil and human rights.
Norton, an Alabama native, assured Marjorie Zora was welcome and instructed a black assistant to watch for Zora at the appointed hour and “get her through this lobby the fastest you ever seen and get on the elevator, and get her up there.”
The hour came, but neither Norton nor his assistant saw anything of Zora. Marjorie’s guest had foreseen the situation, entered the hotel through the kitchen, and found her way to the Baskin apartment. When Norton checked with his wife on the hotel phone, she told him what Zora had done. “We’re having tea and having more fun than you’ve ever heard of,” she told him. “And if you’ve got any sense, you’ll come on up here.”
To a friend, Marjorie described Zora as “a lush, fine-looking café au lait woman with the most ingratiating personality, a brilliant mind, and the fundamental wisdom that shames most whites. She puts the full responsibility for Negro advancement on the Negroes themselves and has no use for the left-wingers who consider her a traitor, nor for the ‘advanced’ Negroes who belong to what she calls the fur-coat peerage.
“She says that both ‘advanced’ whites and ‘advanced’ negroes make a mistake in handling the Negro problem with kid gloves, each afraid of the other.”
What Zora told her squared with Carla Kaplan’s assertion that Zora “staked out a conservative position on race that grew from her fierce pride in black institutions and her suspicion of any mask unless it were her own.” Zora, from birth negotiating race, sex, and class to achieve artistry and serve ambition, wore many masks, and as friendly as she and Marjorie became, she modulated her behavior at first, observing the Southern code of manners, in which blacks adopted what Hilton Als has described as “theatrical modesty and duplicity” to manage their inferior position.
Marjorie might have found ease in the idea that the oppressed are responsible for their condition. Yet the meeting challenged her tendency toward what James Baldwin would call “the lie of pretended humanism.”
Marjorie’s ambivalence was apparent in “Black Shadows,” a chapter in Cross Creek, in which she highlighted several “reasonably accurate” clichés about Negroes: they were childlike, carefree, religious “in an amusing way,” liars, undependable. At the same time, she called these clichés superficial, pointing to the Negro population’s African heritage, the unspeakably difficult adjustments to slavery and, since Reconstruction, to “so-called civilization.” The Negro is “left to shift for himself for the most part instead of being cared for,” she wrote.
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The Life She Wished to Live on Bookshop.org*
The Life She Wished to Live on Amazon*
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After meeting Zora, Marjorie’s understanding of race relations began to shift significantly, though not without the interior conflicts, the steps forward, back, and sideways, that monumental change entails. That she had been urged to break custom by her Alabama-born husband led to the couple’s discussions about racial prejudice and Negro rights for many months to come.
Marjorie and Norton were not alone in this; their changing views corresponded with a pro-civil rights movement among educated whites as a whole, sparked by World War II. Nazism had forced some white Americans to own up to their racist policies and behaviors, while across the sea in the armed forces, men and women of many ethnicities served shoulder-to-shoulder, softening racial divisions.
As the United States emerged to lead the “free world,” it would have to embrace civil rights reform as bedrock — both as proper ideal, and as defense, for as the Cold War began, Soviet propagandists keen on locating the “free world’s” weaknesses, found an easy target in racism, particularly in the South.
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Zora Neale Hurston
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Early in 1943, Zora read Cross Creek and sent Marjorie an enthusiastic response. “Twenty-one guns!” she wrote. “It is a most remarkable piece of work. You turned your inside light on that community life, and it broke like day.
“Whether it pleases you or not, you are my sister. You look at plants and animals and people in the way I do. You are conscious of the three layers of life, instead of the obvious thing before your nose. You see and feel the immense past, what is now, and feel inside you something of what is to come. Therefore, you are not pacing the cell of the current hour. You are free, because you have made your peace with the universe, and its laws. You are deep and fine.”
“You did a thing I like in dealing with your Negro characters,” Zora continued, referencing “Black Shadows.”
“You looked at them and saw them as they are, instead of slobbering all over them as all of the other authors do. They talk real too, and act as I know them. You have done a remarkably able thing with the Negro idiom. It is so accurate. I am so sick and tired of that blackface minstrel patter that is put out as Negro dialect. I am not objecting to the bad grammar but the lack of imagination. You catch this thing as it is. You note the “picture talk” that’s something of a linguistic hieroglyphics. I am tickled to death with you, Sugar. I love your description of the women’s behinds. “Box” and “shingle” and they fit the thing so beautifully. You were thinking in hieroglyphics your ownself. You have written the best thing on Negroes of any white writer who has ever lived.”
By July, Norton Baskin was en route to India with the American Field Service. Soon afterward, Marjorie heard from Zora, whom she had written about trouble starting a new book, using it as an excuse to decline Zora’s invitation to take a river trip together. The truth was, Marjorie was embroiled in a lawsuit brought against her by a white neighbor who’d been offended by Marjorie’s depiction of her in Cross Creek. Marjorie was reluctant to travel openly with a black friend, as it might prejudice a critical segment of the public — such as white Crackers sitting on a jury — against her.
Zora replied with an enthusiastic desire to help. “How I wish that I were not doing a book too at this time! I would be so glad to come and take everything off your hands until you are through with yours …”
Deeply moved, Marjorie wrote to Norton, not knowing when or where he would receive the letter.
“The Negro writer, Zora Neal Hurston, has done one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever known,” she said, referring to Zora’s impulse. ”When she and I have finished our present books, I shall take the trip with her if it costs me the lawsuit and your business, not, God knows, in any spirit of condescension but with a desire to learn and to know.”
A surprise visitShortly before Christmas, Marjorie wrote Zora to confirm her Daytona Beach mailing address; she would ship her a holiday box of fruit. Again, she expressed frustration with her writing, and Zora immediately drove the one hundred miles from Daytona to the Creek to give Marjorie a boost. When Zora arrived, Marjorie was in Gainesville, Christmas shopping. Martha Mickens and her daughter Sissy, two of Marjorie’s black housekeepers, invited Zora to wait. Zora carried her bags to the women’s crowded tenant house.
For Norton, Marjorie described Zora’s surprise appearance:
“Well, I had the most mixed emotions. I was so touched by her doing it, as I was touched by her offer to do my housekeeping while I worked — and it was supper time, and it was nighttime and bedtime — and dat old debbil prejudice fair stuck a needle in me. I was ashamed, and I was worried, and I thought this would probably be the evening Mrs. Glisson [a white neighbor] would come up to ask me something, and the word would go out [that Marjorie had a Negro guest], and I would lose the lawsuit!”
But — “Damn it, now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of a moral principle!”
Zora’s bags were brought to the farmhouse guest room. The women would share the home as equals. “I was amazed to find that my own prejudices were so deep,” she admitted to her husband. “But I felt that if I ever was to prove my humanitarian and moral beliefs, even if it cost me the lawsuit, I must do it then.”
Grappling with prejudice
In spring 1944, Marjorie’s young friend Julia Scribner (the publisher’s daughter) visited Cross Creek; the two women asked Idella Parker to take them to a black church — an effort to step inside the black community, to understand it. The trio found “an old shack of a church” and Marjorie gave Idella three dollars for the pastor, with a request to hear some singing.
“It seemed awful to walk into someone’s church and buy their songs,” she wrote to Norton, though she wasn’t sorry to have played the cultural tourist — it was a start. A day or two later, Marjorie took Julia to a cocktail party in Ocala, drank too much, and when a guest made a racist remark, Marjorie held forth on “moral principles” until everyone except Julia turned against her. A friend told Marjorie, “You have never been hated in your life as you are hated here tonight.”
About this incident, Norton responded:
“… you will gain nothing by trying to convince the hidebound Southerner. Their beliefs on the question are firmly congealed and they are determined to keep them intact … Trying to argue the question with them merely increases their hate of the movement and plants the idea that the problem is getting out of hand and something has to be done.”
And that something, Norton suggested, was more violence against the Negroes.
Now Marjorie was reading Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy, a comprehensive analysis of the racial divide, which might have influenced, in April, her advice to Idella about income taxes. Idella wanted to pay hers, but Marjorie asserted no one would catch her if she didn’t.
A tax-paying citizen should have the right to vote, Marjorie said, along with all other privileges; she was well aware that the fifteenth amendment, passed nearly 75 years before, was routinely circumvented in the South, through white primaries, poll taxes, literacy tests, long residency requirements, and other obstacles. She was upset that blacks were drafted in wartime: “You can’t force men into military service for their country, without giving them the same rights as anyone else,” she wrote Norton.
But it was one thing for Marjorie to take a stand on paper or at a party, another to continue wrestling with personal prejudice, revealed in her own language and behavior. A few days later, Marjorie admitted to Norton her revulsion to black skin. “I still have to fight a lingering prejudice, and when little black Martha [Sissy’s daughter] touches me, as she loves to do, I cringe. But if one recognizes it for a prejudice and a hang-over from one’s prejudiced training, it will pass.”
Norton came home that fall. Marjorie began publicly addressing the racial divide. At historically black Florida A & M College in Tallahassee, she was the principal speaker for a two-day celebration honoring black educator/activist Mary McLeod Bethune. Marjorie’s address, “A Floridian’s View of Mary McLeod Bethune” is lost to history, but, she wrote to a friend, “It was a fascinating experience and I am more than ever ashamed of the people who try to hold the Negroes back.”
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The Yearling
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Still, Marjorie’s position was fraught with contradictions. In the post-war era, The Yearling had been called out for offensive language, primarily a few uses of the “n” word. In January 1946, the book was withdrawn from required reading at the predominantly black Morris High School in the Bronx, after irate citizens deemed it a “poison” book for its portrayal of Negroes.
Members of the National Equal Rights League protested The Yearling’s spot on a summer reading list for James Monroe High School, also in the Bronx, with the same objections. Upset, Marjorie wrote to the Rev. Frank Glenn White, director of the People’s Institute of Applied Religion, which espoused social activism and equal rights in particular, and to People’s Voice, addressing her use of the “n” word in The Yearling. The newspaper published part of her letter, introducing her as someone considered “a staunch supporter of Negroes.” She wrote:
“I approve with all my heart the policy of laying a taboo on the use of the word, not because any word is in itself offensive, since all words are only their connotations, but because those who use the word in ordinary speech or casually in print are those who have the wrong attitude, not only toward Negroes, but toward all of life and Christian living.
But in your zeal, you must not see things out of proportion. This is one cause of my weeping for the Negro race, for it is inevitable that intelligent Negroes are likely to be psychologically touchy. As you know, this is not solely a Negro characteristic. Probably ninety-nine out of the hundred human beings, anywhere and everywhere, have been conditioned by circumstances to be touchy about something.
Now it is a great deal to ask of Negroes who have borne up so nobly under inconceivable injustices, not to be unduly touchy. Yet it seems to me extremely important that your race rise to difficult heights and prove itself above trivialities.”
Marjorie pointed out that The Yearling’s time period, 1870-71, called for the “n” word.“It would have been an unpardonable anachronism to have used the word ‘Negro” instead, in a book of this date.” This was the stronger argument; evidently, she could not hear the condescension in her chief message: “don’t be so touchy.” That message echoed Zora’s attitude; It’s possible that in 1946, Marjorie was taking cues from the friend who first galvanized her.
In May, the lawsuit trial occurred, with public support going to Marjorie. (The saga would drag out two more years behind closed doors, ending in a kind of stalemate.) Marjorie was pleased when she heard Zora had written to a friend:
“I could have saved all kinds of trouble if she [Marjorie] had just plain let me kill that poor white trash” who initiated the lawsuit. “If you hear of the tramp getting a heavy load of rock salt and fat-back in her rump, and I happen to be in Fla at the time, you will know who loaded the shell…”
Later years
The few extant letters between Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings and Zora Neale Hurston fall away after the trial. In 1947, Zora moved to Honduras for research, and Marjorie bought a new writing retreat in Van Hornesville, New York. She continued arguing for civil rights. In 1948, Scribners published Zora’s last novel, Seraph on the Suwanee, dedicated to Mary Holland, wife of Florida’s former governor and U.S. Senator Spessard Holland, and Marjorie. (All of Zora’s books were dedicated to white friends and patrons.)
“I am praying that this book will have a big sale so that I can return the sum you so generously loaned me,” Zora wrote Marjorie, indicating her tenuous financial state. That year, she had been arrested in New York and charged with molesting a ten-year-old boy; the charge was dropped after she proved she had been in Honduras. Marjorie was struggling in other ways; ill health, complicated by alcoholism, hampered progress on her last novel. She died in 1953, a year following The Sojourner’s publication.
After Marjorie’s death, Zora wrote to Mary Holland. “I am deprived of the warmth of the association, and … I feel that I failed her in her last extremity.” Marjorie had told Zora she was ill, but by then, Zora couldn’t have come to Marjorie’s aid. She had no car. “I could not bear to admit it to her,” Zora confided, “lest she feel sorry for me.”
Contributed by Ann McCutchan. Ann is the author of six books of memoir, essay, and biography. The founding director of the University of Wyoming Creative Writing MFA program, she was also a professor of creative writing at the University of North Texas and editor of American Literary Review. Awards and fellowships have come from the Rockefeller Foundation, Cornell University, the MacDowell Colony, and others. For more information, visit AnnMcCutchan.com.
More literary friendships George Eliot & Harriet Beecher Stowe Virginia Woolf & Vita Sackville-West Lillian Hellman & Dorothy Parker
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June 3, 2021
May Sinclair, British Novelist, Philosopher, and Suffragist
May Sinclair, (born Mary Amelia St. Clair Sinclair; August 24, 1863 – November 14, 1946) was a British novelist, philosopher, poet, and suffragist who was regarded as England’s “leading woman novelist between the death of George Eliot and the rise of Virginia Woolf,” according to David Williams, a critic who wrote for Punch.
She explored the inner lives of ordinary women in some twenty-three novels, while also publishing two works of philosophy, a biography of the Brontës, several collections of poetry, and dozens of short stories.
May Sinclair is largely forgotten today. All of her works had fallen out of print when Virago Press, the noted British feminist publishing house, reissued three of her most significant novels in the early 1980s. At present, however, only The Life and Death of Harriett Frean (1922), which many regard as her masterpiece, is in print.
She combined an interest in philosophical idealism and Freud and was an early adherent of modernism, which rejected traditional narrative structures. She was the first critic to use the term “stream of consciousness” to describe a narrative technique, and the first British writer to champion the work of T.S. Eliot.
Her 1919 novel, Mary Olivier: A Life, employed second-person narration and took numerous risks, including an attempt to portray the world through the eyes of an infant, as it traced the protagonist’s struggle to achieve spiritual and intellectual independence.
Early life and education
May Sinclair was the youngest of six children and the only surviving daughter. Her father, William Sinclair, was an alcoholic who died in 1881. Sinclair’s mother, Amelia Sinclair, was rigidly and intolerantly Christian. May Sinclair described her as exerting a “cold, bitter, narrow tyranny” over her household.
While Sinclair was able to pursue only one year of formal education at Cheltenham Ladies College, while she was there she won the attention of the noted educator Dorothy Beale, who encouraged her to pursue philosophy. Sinclair left college to care for her ailing brothers and mother.
While Sinclair published her first novel in 1897, it wasn’t until the death of her mother, in 1901, that her writing took off. Her 1904 novel, The Divine Fire, was a best-seller in both the U.K. and the United States. She went on to publish numerous novels that examined the ways in which women’s lives were constricted by social expectations, marriage, patriarchy, and repression.
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A suffragist and modernistThe Divine Fire was so successful that Sinclair embarked on a book tour of the eastern United States. In the course of her travels, she met literary figures such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Mark Twain, and Sarah Orne Jewett. Back in London, she became active in the Women’s Freedom League, and met and befriended figures such as Thomas Hardy, with whom she undertook a bicycling trip, as well as Ezra Pound and H.D.
In 1912 she published a 48-page pamphlet, Feminism, in which she argued on behalf of women’s suffrage and economic equality. At around this time, she also began writing for The Egoist, considered England’s most important modernist periodical for its publication of Imagist poetry and early excerpts of James Joyce’s Ulysses. She also became interested in the works of Sigmund Freud — as were many of the modernists — and Carl Jung. She also became a major financial supporter of the Medico-Psychological Clinic, the first training program in psychoanalysis in Britain.
Sinclair became fascinated by the Brontë sisters and wrote introductions to new editions of their work as well as a critical examination of her own, The Three Brontës. She also produced a novel inspired by their lives, The Three Sisters. When the latter was reissued in 1985, Publisher’s Weekly said that Sinclair “brings to this novel psychological acuity reminiscent of D.H. Lawrence, as well as remarkable skill as raconteur.”
Her fascination with the Brontës led in turn to an interest in the macabre, and thus to the ghost stories that comprised her 1910 collection, Uncanny Stories.
The Great War
When World War I began, Sinclair went to Belgium out of a desire to be helpful. While some sources say she returned home because there wasn’t much for her to do, others claim that she was overwhelmed by what she saw and left the field for that reason. Whatever her reason for returning to England, her Journal of Impressions in Belgium was one of the first accounts of the war written by a British woman.
Stream of consciousness
It was in 1918, while reviewing Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrim series for The Egoist, that Sinclair applied the term “stream of consciousness” to Richardson’s technique of describing the inner life of her protagonist Miriam Henderson.
Apparently influenced by Richardson, Sinclair wrote Mary Olivier: A Life, a coming-of-age novel that is believed to be semi-autobiographical, and which has been described as “a portrait of the artist as a young (wo)man,” appearing as it did at the same time that James Joyce and Virginia Woolf were employing the stream of consciousness technique in their work.
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Falling into obscurityDespite her impressive output and significant contributions, Sinclair is little known today. According to critic Joanna Kavenna, in her review of Suzanne Raitt’s May Sinclair: A Modern Victorian (2001), Sinclair’s personality did not endear her to the modernists or the Bloomsbury crowd, though she worked among them.
While she had thoroughly rejected her mother’s rigid Christianity to become a confirmed agnostic, she was neat and hard-working. Older than many of the Modernists, she was dismissed as “prim” by Virginia Woolf and did not encourage intimate friendships. To employ some of Sinclair’s own techniques of psychological inquiry, these characteristics might have resulted from the tyranny of her mother and the alcoholism of her father, combined with the tragic loss of several brothers to early death.
Further, while Sinclair lived until 1946, she suffered from Parkinson’s disease for nearly two decades before her death and lost touch with her public as well as with her former friends and colleagues. Much like the protagonist of The Life and Death of Harriet Frean, she died in obscurity and isolation, with only the company of her companion and housekeeper, Florence Bartrop.
Fast cars and a love of the road
Yet Sinclair was very much a living woman, even in the final years of her life. The discovery of a Rolls Royce that she purchased around 1935 revealed her love of cars and driving. She bought her first car in 1919, and often urged her chauffeur, Ernest Williams, to drive faster and overtake other cars on the road. She, Bartrop, and Williams took several long road trips through Britain in the 1930s.
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May Sinclair in 1921
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While all of Sinclair’s work, except for Harriet Frean, has fallen out of print, much of her work, including her war essays, her biography of the Brontës, some of her short stories, and most of her novels are available on Project Gutenberg.
The May Sinclair Society was founded in July 2013. The society is in the process of bringing Sinclair’s work back into print through the Edinburgh Critical Editions of the Works of May Sinclair.
The Society will host its third international conference, Networking May Sinclair on June 24–25, 2021 via Zoom. Registration for the online conference is free; for more information and to reserve go to Networking May Sinclair.
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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.org.
More about May SinclairMore information and sources
List of Works Poetry Foundation Yale Modernism Lab May Sinclair Society – Sinclair Trivia May Sinclair: Readable ModernistRead and Listen Online
Project Gutenberg LibrivoxThe post May Sinclair, British Novelist, Philosopher, and Suffragist appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.
