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1920s Novels by Women Writers That Still Resonate Today

It’s incredible (and sad) that we’re still grappling with the same issues presented in these five 1920s novels by women writers. Four of them fell out of print and were rediscovered and reissued decades later; one has never gone out of print. It’s wonderful that all are available in fresh new or recent editions.

In these reissues, fascinating new introductions, forewords, or afterwords re-introduce these writers aren’t known enough and/or shouldn’t have been forgotten in the first place: Ursula Parrott, Radclyffe Hall, Anzia Yezierska, Jessie Redmon Fauset, and Dorothy Canfield Fisher.

As Edna St. Vincent Millay famously wrote, it’s not one damn thing after another, it’s the same damn thing, over and over. One hundred years or so after these books came out, we’re still grappling with their central themes in the culture and in personal lives. And while that’s frustrating, it’s also why these novels are still relevant to contemporary readers.

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Ex-Wife by Ursula Parrott (1929)
The struggle for women’s bodily autonomy goes on, alas

I first discovered Ursula Parrot and her best-known book, Ex-Wife, in this episode of the Lost Ladies of Lit podcast. Marsha Gordon, the author of Becoming the Ex-Wife: The Unconventional Life & Forgotten Writings of Ursula Parrott . It remained the most successful and controversial of her many published works. From Marsha:

“Once the most renowned ex-wife in America, bestselling author Ursula Parrott (1899– 1957) was routinely described as ‘famous’ in her lifetime when the press covered her new books, Hollywood deals, marriages and divorces, and run-ins with the law … She published twenty books from the late 1920s through the late 1940s, several of them bestsellers, and over one hundred short stories, articles, and novel-length magazine serials.

… After making hundreds of thousands of dollars writing — during the height of the Depression no less — Ursula lost it all, ending up homeless in the 1950s. Like many other influential, bestselling women writers, she was unfairly pigeonholed and dismissed as a romance magazine writer and her death in 1957 transpired with little notice.”

Patricia, the novel’s protagonist, relates her adventures and misadventures in a brisk, wry style. The writing feels so fresh, it could have been written yesterday. Patricia’s story features a disintegrating open marriage, bed-hopping, abortion, rape, and spousal abuse, all awash in plenty of alcohol (though set in the days of prohibition).

A typical review observed: “There is a procession of men friends, numerous affairs — but no real love or joy … This book is assuredly frank. If it hasn’t been ‘banned in Boston,’ it will be.” Though Ex-Wife’s controversies drove it onto the bestseller list, it was never banned — demonstrating the random nature of censorship. Many reviewers cast Ex-Wife as a cautionary tale: “Freedom of women found not so free,” blared one headline.

In Becoming the Ex-Wife, Marsha Gordon pinpoints what is so disturbing about how Ex-Wife was received and reviewed:

“While many contemporary reviewers of the novel criticized its sensationalism, none expressed concerned over the violence Patricia endures. That reviewers compared Ex-Wife to novels ranging from Daniel Defoe’s 1724 Roxana to Anita Loos’s 1925 Gentleman Prefer Blondes suggest a certain blindness to the real atrocity of the novel, which has to do with the way men, repeatedly, forcefully, and viciously take liberties with women’s bodies. Was this violence so ordinary, or seemingly justifiable, that it went unnoticed?”

All twenty of Ursula Parrot’s fell out of print. McNally Editions republished Ex-Wife in 2023; and it has been translated into Italian, Swedish, Spanish, German, and Dutch. Marsha Gordon has lots more to say about this forgotten author and her neglected body of work in 10 Fascinating Facts About Ursula Parrott.

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The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall (1928)

A queer writer’s plea for tolerance is dragged through the courts

Radclyffe Hall (1880 – 1943) was a British author best known for her groundbreaking novel, The Well of Loneliness. It’s often described as the story of young woman’s coming to terms with her lesbian identity, but it’s more than that. It’s about a person born female making sense of her maleness. It was certainly ahead of its time in expressing the concept of gender dysphoria without the vocabulary available today.

Radclyffe Hall wore male clothing, preferred to be called “John,” and wanted to be accepted by society as male. Hall described herself as a “congenital invert,” a term that came from early 20th-century sexologist Richard von Krafft-Ebing, referring to inborn gender reversal where women could be born with a masculine soul and vice versa — in contemporary terms, transgender.

The book’s main character is Stephen Gordon, whose father fittingly gave her a male name. Hall touchingly, often achingly, weaves the story of Stephen’s life, longings, and relationships with women using the limited descriptive language available at the time. The book caused a furor when it was published in England in 1928. Though it addressed its themes in a subtle and completely non-graphic manner, copies of the book were seized soon after publication.

The campaign against the book was led by the editor of the Sunday Express, who famously wrote, “I would rather give a healthy boy or a healthy girl a phial of prussic acid than this novel.”

Hall’s publisher forced to endure an obscenity trial. The prosecution won, with the British court ruling that the novel was obscene because it defended “unnatural practices between women.” Hall and her publisher were forced to burn the already-printed copies in England, at their own expense. Fortunately, the book was concurrently published in France and other countries, and thanks to a loophole it could be imported into Britain. The controversy made it a bestseller, though officially it remained banned in England until 1959, sixteen years after Hall’s death.

The Well also went to trial in the U.S. in 1928, and it prevailed, though not without a fight (and a sharp attorney). Radclyffe Hall waded into the fray with eyes open. She wrote the novel purposefully as a plea for tolerance of people who didn’t fit into the gender binary. Of the five books presented here, it’s the only one that has never gone out of print. Consider a foundational LGBTQ classic, it’s a great read — or listen. I’m listening to it on Audible, interpreted by a wonderful reader.

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Bread Givers by Anzia Yezierska (1925)
The travails of a young woman immigrant and the elusive American Dream

Bread Givers is the best-known novel by by Anzia Yezierska (1885 – 1970), whose work reflected the Jewish immigrant experience in early 1900s America. To present this kind of story with a female perspective — and get it published — was a rarity at the time, reflecting the author’s chutzpah and determination.

Anzia arrived with her family to New York City’s Lower East Side around 1893. A product of the immigration wave of the late 1800s, she never quite shed the feeling of being an outsider. Longing to rise above her circumstances, she was somewhat hampered by her brittle personality and a helping of self-loathing.

An autobiographical novel, Bread Givers delves into the well-trodden theme of an immigrant family whose children strain against Old World parents. The father, Reb. Smolinsky, is learned in the holy Torah, but he’s childish, impractical, and inflexible when it comes to his three daughters, who chafe under his domination.

The youngest and feistiest of the sisters is Sara, oddly nicknamed “Blut und Eisen” (Blood and Iron). The fictional stand-in for the real-life Anzia, Sara rebels fiercely, fighting for autonomy and self-determination. The process of breaking away from her father’s rule is painful. Some of her strivings lead to discomfort and embarrassment, but she emerges as a person (mostly) in command of her world.

Bread Givers reads a bit awkwardly at times, sometimes apparent that English wasn’t this writer’s first language. Still, it’s a fast-moving read in which one person’s immigrant experience speaks to the universal promise and perils of the mythical American Dream.

Bread Givers was out of print when it was rediscovered by a doctoral student in the 1960s. It was republished in 1975 and has been reissued in several editions since. Here’s more about Bread Givers and in Anzia’s own words, her struggle to write it.

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There is Confusion by Jessie Redmon Fauset (1924)

Black narratives and histories are once again being challenged

There is Confusion by Jessie Redmon Fauset (1882 – 1961) was the first novel by this multitalented editor, poet, essayist, educator, and novelist associated with the Harlem Renaissance. In addition to her own pursuits, Jessie was known as one of the “literary midwives” of the movement, someone who encouraged and supported other talents in her role as the literary editor of The Crisis, the official magazine of the NAACP.

After being out of print for decades, Modern Library reissued There is Confusion in 2020 (this novel deserves a better cover!). The publisher’s synopsis:

“A rediscovered classic about how racism and sexism tests the spirit, ambition, and character of three children growing up in Hell’s Kitchen and Harlem … Set in early-twentieth-century New York City, There Is Confusion tells the story of three Black children: Joanna Marshall, a talented dancer willing to sacrifice everything for success; Maggie Ellersley, an extraordinarily beautiful girl determined to leave her working-class background behind; and Peter Bye, a clever would-be surgeon who is driven by his love for Joanna … There Is Confusion is an unjustly forgotten classic that celebrates Black ambition, love, and the struggle for equality.”

Reviews in white newspapers made a huge to-do about There is Confusion’s depiction of middle-class Black people doing ordinary things and grappling with universal quandaries and challenges of life. They didn’t object, but found it incredible that the Black characters were portrayed in ways that didn’t involve the usual demeaning stereotypes. They also expressed amazement that a Black woman could write so gracefully, blithely unaware that Jessie was a graduate of Cornell University (class of 1905!) and had a Master’s degree in French from the University of Pennsylvania.

There is Confusion was the first of Jessie Fauset’s four novels, all of which were occasionally criticized by Black critics as having an overly bourgeoise perspective. Yet other Black reviewers were delighted. Critic and anthropologist William Stanley Braithwaite praised Jessie as “the potential Jane Austen of Negro literature.” Here’s more about There is Confusion.

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The Home-Maker by Dorothy Canfield Fisher (1924)
Women are still doing most of the housework and childcare

The Home-Maker by Dorothy Canfield Fisher imagined a domestic role-reversal, something virtually unheard of in the early 1920s. Fisher (1879–1958) was an American writer, educational reformer, and social activist based in New England.

At the start of The Home-Maker, Evangeline and Lester Knapp are both unhappily going through the motions of their traditional roles. An accident forces them to reverse roles, and from that adversity, the family finds strength and happiness. I couldn’t scout out when The Home-Maker fell out of print, other than that it did. It seems to have been re-issued as an Audible edition only (which is how I consumed it), and not in book form. Here’s a concise description from the audio edition:

“Evangeline Knapp’s neighbors are in awe of her prowess. She re-upholsters furniture and can take scraps of fabric and create a beautiful garment. Her house is always immaculate and her children are beautifully behaved — except for the stubborn youngest, but with Eva’s strength of will, they’re certain she’ll sort him out in time.

The neighbors don’t know that in her frenzied zeal to create the perfect home, her children live in dread of her temper. She loves them, but she can’t stand having to remind them constantly about the same things, simple rules easy enough for anyone to understand. Eva can’t abide childishness.

Her husband Lester is no less miserable in his job as a department store accountant, sacrificing his love of literature and poetry to the daily grind of commerce. Lester can’t seem to get ahead and feels like a failure … When a near-fatal accident forces these two to switch roles, each finds their true calling. Then fate steps in again. As with her children’s classic Understood Betsy, Dorothy Canfield Fisher brilliantly explores the inner lives not only of the parents but the three Knapp children. The Home-Maker proves … that biology should not determine destiny.”

The Home-Maker seems to have been well-received at the time as a mid-list book by a well-known author. Despite its unusual theme, it was surprisingly uncontroversial. I wonder if it would be more so today, with this crazy “trad wife” trend happening. This novel is engaging and enjoyable, and reminds us that even today, women in heteronormative households are still doing the lion’s share of housework and childcare.

The audiobook of The Home-Maker is available on Audible (via Amazon), and can also be read on Project Gutenberg (though the formatting is hard on the eyes).

The post 1920s Novels by Women Writers That Still Resonate Today appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Mystery Illness: Theories and Conjectures

Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–1861) was one of the great romantic poets of the Victorian era. “Sonnet 43” breathed her famous words to life: “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.”

Her early texts, flavored with feminism, paved the way for others to follow. Immensely popular in her lifetime, her work was somewhat forgotten until rediscovered with new appreciation starting in the second-wave feminist era of the 1970s. Her life was one of contrasts: she was remarkably prolific, enjoyed a happy marriage with fellow poet Robert Browning, yet her lifelong chronic illness shadowed her for all time.

Browning kept a diary of her ailments, yet many questions remain unanswered about the source of her maladies. A Penn State anthropologist may have found the answer more than a century later.

Deciphering Browning’s Illness

Research associate in anthropology Anne Buchanan wanted to separate theory from plausible facts. The poet suffered from debilitating physical pain from age 13. Unable to diagnose or treat her symptoms, doctors drew up all sorts of hypotheses. From heart palpitations to anorexia and tuberculosis; some theorized the lifetime effects of injuries to her spine from falling from a horse.

Buchanan mentions some attributing Browning’s illness to defense against the inferior status and treatment of Victorian women. Interestingly, Buchanan’s daughter Ellen experienced similar symptoms to Browning. Diagnosed with hypokalemic periodic paralysis (HKPP), the disease is a muscle disorder that lowers blood potassium levels by trapping potassium in muscle cells.

There is no cure for the rare disorder. However, HKPP is genetic. Buchanan found slight evidence that an uncle in Browning’s family may have had similar symptoms.

While many experts have poured through Browning’s journals and diaries, none have come close to a definitive answer. An HKPP diagnosis could be the most likely prognosis.

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The Poetry of Elizabeth Barrett Browning:
A 19th-Century Analysis

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The Opium Theory

It’s no secret that Browning took laudanum, an opiate, to treat her chronic ailments. Historians believe its prolonged use led to opium addiction, eventually resulting in her spending her entire fortune on the drug.

In the 19th century, laudanum was the drug of choice. The alcohol-based medicine containing opium was frequently used until the early 1900s. 

Dr Joseph Crawford, a senior lecturer at Exeter University, wrote extensively about its misuse among the great romantic poets and writers. Female writers, including Browning, referenced opium and other opiate type drugs in their works. She called it her “elixir” because of its “tranquilizing power.”

Unfortunately, her “elixir” may have contributed to her premature death. Theories abound for the cause — some cite heart failure; others an overdose.

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Opioid addiction treatment today

As we know, opioid addiction crisis has continued unabated. Whereas opium was previously painted as the villain, modern medicine is applying it to the greater good. Today, opium tincture-assisted treatment is used to treat opioid-use disorder. 

Another effective treatment method is prescription medicine Suboxone. However, this option could soon be off the table in light of the Suboxone tooth decay lawsuit. 

At the center of the lawsuit is the global pharmaceutical company Indivior. Thousands of plaintiffs claim Indivior failed to warn patients and healthcare providers about Suboxone’s oral health risks.

Patients who used Suboxone film suffered dental injuries, including severe tooth decay, erosion, and tooth loss, allegedly due to its acidic formulation. TruLaw says Suboxone lawyers are investigating claims that film testing was inadequate, and its dental risk warnings insufficient.

Opioid addiction remains a pressing issue today. Like Browning, other writers and artists used various forms of the drug to elicit euphoric emotions, inspiring some of their best works. Now that we know the detrimental effects, people are seeking effective opioid addiction treatment.

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Keeping Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Legacy Alive

Elizabeth Barrett Browning inspired Emily Dickinson and Virginia Woolf and is considered one of the 19th century’s greatest poets. Long before the 20th-century feminist movements, Browning condemned barriers to women’s achievement in her seminal work, the book-length poem Aurora Leigh.

The British Library also recently acquired a series of letters written by Browning. The collection includes 131 letters dated after her “1844 Poems,” which brought her fame. Most are addressed to her sister, Henrietta Surtees Cook.

Browning was steadfast in her romantic outlook on life despite the trials and tribulations she faced. Despite her lifelong ill health, she prevailed and is remembered as one of the greatest poets that ever lived, especially as a paragon of Victorian poetry.

The post Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Mystery Illness: Theories and Conjectures appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.

Fascinating facts about Djuna Barnes, author of Nightwood

Djuna Barnes was a Modernist writer whose various talents and eccentricities made her unique. She went to great lengths to protect her privacy, so it’s not surprising that she had a whole closet full of skeletons. These fascinating facts about Djuna Barnes are presented by Jon Macy, creator of the graphic novel Djuna: The Extraordinary Life of Djuna Barnes. 

Childhood trauma armored Djuna with a razor sharp wit, and an almost Ahab-and-the-whale, determination to succeed as a writer. Immensely talented, she was a journalist, poet, artist and novelist.

She became a celebrated star in 1920s Paris along with her friends James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, and Gertrude Stein. Her masterpiece, Nightwood, is one of the greatest lesbian novels ever written, and her influence on modern writers reverberates into the present.

Much of her allure comes from the mystery surrounding her self-isolation. Why did she turn her back on the world to live as a recluse for the last forty years of her life? Many have tried to find out, myself included. Here are a few things that struck me during my search to understand Djuna Barnes’ complex truth.

 

Djuna grew up in a cult-like family

Djuna grew up in a free love bohemian cult that abused her and then forced her into marriage at seventeen to get rid of her. It would be easy to portray her family as villains — they were in many ways, but they also had charm, ambition, and talent to spare.

Djuna’s grandmother, Zadel Barnes, was a pioneering journalist and activist. In 1879, she founded a London salon for writers, actors, abolitionists, reformers, and queers of all kinds. Her sphere included; William Morris, Eleanor Marx, Victoria Woodhull, and of course, Oscar Wilde.

Zadel was a talented grifter and free love advocate. She gifted Djuna with a wealth of literary intelligence, and taught her how female journalists can sidestep propriety when it suited their mission.

 

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She embellished people’s responses in interviews

In her days as a journalist, Djuna interviewed every famous person in early 1900s New York. Such luminaries included silent film star Alla Nazimova, Ziegfeld, Diamond Jim Brady (who kept his underwear in a safe), Coco Chanel who gave her a dress, and Jack Dempsey, the shy boxer.

She was well paid, but she chafed under the usual assignments. Djuna found celebrities shallow, so she changed their words to sound more engaging. None of them complained because she made them seem wittier than they were.

Djuna preferred to interview the offbeat and downtrodden. She challenged her editors by doing articles on legless elevator men, women cops who liked poetry, and Black acting troupes who could never get a break — people no one else would touch.

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Djuna: The Extraordinary Life of Djuna Barnes by Jon Macy 
(Street Noise Books, 2024) is available on Bookshop.org, Amazon*
& wherever books are sold
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She supported her family at age nineteen

Djuna’s father had two wives and many children in the utopian free love commune where she grew up. When her mother divorced her father, Djuna’s fractured half of the family landed in a windowless Bronx tenement, alone and destitute. She was homeschooled and unsocialized, yet fiercely precocious.

She demanded a job from the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. She said, “I can write, I can draw, and you would be a fool not to hire me.” The fact that she could interview someone and draw their portrait meant she could get paid twice. Her ungrateful mother and three brothers would never have survived without her.

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A suicide landed right in front of her

The stock market crash of 1929 was devastating to the American expatriates in Europe. The jobs were gone and the reporters, including Djuna, lost everything.

Djuna was on her way to deliver her last article to an editor when a man’s body fell at her feet. He had jumped from the rooftop. His blood was all over the sidewalk and part of his brain splashed onto her fine tailored tweed skirt. She was so upset she had to lay in bed for three days to recover. The article, incidentally, was about fine dining.

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Nightwood was first written as a poem

Djuna Barnes’ masterpiece is her 1936 novel, Nightwood. It was praised by critics as a work of genius exemplifying late Modernism. It is also considered a finest work of lesbian fiction. The novel is famous for its lush poetic quality, often compared to an opera. A little-known fact is that Barnes wrote it in verse, then translated it into prose. She was a poet first, which gave her a uniquely powerful voice that carried into her writing.

It’s also known as the chewiest read in the English language, even surpassing James Joyces’s Ulysses for its unfathomable experimentations. Comparative literature professors have been known to assign Nightwood as a way to weed out the weaker students in their class. Once you know that Joyce was poking fun at us the whole time, Ulysses lets you in on its joke. Djuna Barnes poked society with intricate daggers.

 

 

She saved Patchin Place in Greenwich Village

Djuna lived on a little gated street in Greenwich Village called Patchin Place. It was cobblestoned, with beautiful ailanthus trees, and even had one of the last two original gas street lamps in New York City. Many famous people lived there, including e.e. cummings, Marlon Brando, and John Reed. By the 1970s, Djuna was the last one.

A developer tried to buy the charming little cul-de-sac intending to tear it down and build condos. At a public meeting, Djuna shouted down the developers and stopped the proceedings. She bellowed, in her high mid-Atlantic tone, “If lost, where would all the young muggers go to practice their trade?” Patchin Place was saved.

 

Ingmar Bergman almost made an adaptation of Nightwood

Djuna was incredibly difficult to work with; her legacy was sacred to her. The only people she respected were James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, and . Seven film companies approached her for the rights to adapt Nightwood into a film, but she always turned them down. All except Bergman. She trusted him, and there was talk of starring in it, which Djuna liked.

If the film had been made, Djuna Barnes would have been a household name, and her novel would have come back into print. However, it didn’t come to pass. It’s another tragedy for Djuna, and new generations who would have discovered her if Bergman could have brought her vision to the cinema.

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Djuna was a major recluse who hated disruptions

Djuna was a recluse. She had lived in the same studio apartment for forty years. Few were allowed to enter, and those who did, like Anaïs Nin, inevitably wrote about the experience. Djuna was followed around Greenwich village by students doing their dissertations on her, but she chased them away waving her cane. She called them, “post graduate termites.”

Carson McCullers stuffed flowers in her mailbox. Djuna could be heard from her second story window saying, “whoever is ringing this bell please go the hell away.”

Cordelia Pearson tried to wheedle her way into Djuna’s life by hiring her to paint her portrait. Djuna refused, but complained about it to e.e. cummings and his wife. Djuna put a stop to all the shenanigans, but the woman wouldn’t give up. After endless love letters, she sat crying on Djuna’s doorstep until the police were called to take her away.

Even Djuna’s window cleaner would interrupt her writing by telling her that he had read her book, but didn’t really like it.

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The famous photo purported to be Djuna isn’t actually of her

A famous photograph of two fashionable women in front of a café in 1920s Paris has caption that always reads: “Djuna Barnes and Solita Solano in front of the Le Dome.” It is not them. They’re actually two Parisian models photographed by Maurice Branger (1874–1950) in front of Le Pure Café.

I have carefully studied the angular nose of Djuna Barnes for the last five years. Her clothes. Her style. The wicked black pumps. None of these match the nose, clothes, and style Djuna carefully cultivated to be her signature “genius writer” persona. In the image Djuna is apparently writing her masterpiece at a little iron café table, but it’s with her right hand; she was left handed.

Djuna Barnes is ready for her comeback. It is my hope that my graphic novel biography of this esteemed author assists in preserving her renown, and introduces her literary works to a new generation of readers.

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Contributed by Jon Macy, a graphic novel writer and artist. His most recent work, Djuna: The Extraordinary Life of Djuna Barnes, is now available from Street Noise Books. He admits he might be a little obsessed with Djuna Barnes. Find him at Jon Macy Graphic Novels and on Instagram, @nefarismo

  *These are Bookshop.org and Amazon Affiliate links. If a product is purchased after linking through, Literary Ladies Guide receives a modest commission, which helps us keep growing.

The post Fascinating facts about Djuna Barnes, author of Nightwood appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.

10 Fascinating Facts About Ursula Parrott, Forgotten Author of Ex-Wife

Once the most renowned ex-wife in America, bestselling author Ursula Parrott (1899 – 1957) was routinely described as “famous” in her lifetime when the press covered her new books, Hollywood deals, marriages and divorces, and run-ins with the law. 

As I detail in Becoming the Ex-Wife: The Unconventional Life & Forgotten Writings of Ursula Parrott, she published twenty books from the late 1920s through the late 1940s, several of them bestsellers, and over one hundred short stories, articles, and novel-length magazine serials. 

Ursula Parrott piloted for the Civilian Air Corps during World War II; co-founded a weekly rural Connecticut newspaper with a group including American Newspaper Guild founder Heywood Broun and her literary agent George Bye; was an informant in a federal drug investigation; and travelled the world, including an extended story-collecting trip to Russia in the 1930s. And between all her writing and other adventures, she married (and divorced) four times.

Born Katherine Ursula Towle, she was raised and educated in Boston and spent most of her adult years living in New York City, where she set many of her stories.

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Becoming the Ex-Wife by Marsha Gordon
is available on Bookshop.org &  wherever books are sold

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After making hundreds of thousands of dollars writing — during the height of the Depression no less —  Ursula lost it all, ending up homeless in the 1950s. Like many other influential, bestselling women writers, she was unfairly pigeonholed and dismissed as a romance magazine writer and her death in 1957 transpired with little notice. 

I still wonder why Ursula’s contemporary Jazz Age writer, F. Scott Fitzgerald, is so much more famous than she, something about which I wrote for The Conversation (Why have you read ‘The Great Gatsby’ but not Ursula Parrott’s ‘Ex-Wife’?) and led a webinar for the National Humanities Center (Why You Should Start Teaching Ursula Parrott’s Ex-Wife).

Not one of her twenty novels remained in print until McNally Editions republished her 1929 bestseller, Ex-Wife, in 2023; it has now been translated into and republished in Italian, Swedish, Spanish, German, and Dutch.

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Katherine Ursula Towle’s Radcliffe College yearbook photo, 1920
Courtesy of Schlesinger Library, Harvard Radcliffe Institute

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She Skipped Classes, Cheated on Papers,
and Almost Didn’t Graduate from Radcliffe College

Katherine Ursula Towle was one of seventeen girls from the 1916 class at Boston’s Girls’ Latin School to take honors in her Radcliffe entrance examinations, despite a lackluster work ethic and mediocre grades in high school. At Radcliffe, she was chronically late to classes but demonstrated intellectual promise on the rare occasions that she applied herself. 

Midway through her studies, in 1918, the chairman of the academic board at Radcliffe sent her father a letter telling him that Katherine needed to get her act together. The chairman reminded Dr. Towle that “in order to get the degree from Radcliffe, a student must pass in at least seventeen courses with grades above ‘D’ in two-thirds of them.” In her freshman and sophomore years, Katherine had, in fact, earned Ds in German, history, botany, and even in her major —English.

Dr. Towle must have made his displeasure known, since his daughter turned things around enough to successfully earn her English degree on June 23, 1920. Still, Radcliffe’s 1920 yearbook reads: “I don’t suppose Katharine [sic] Towle is here; she is probably cramming at the Widow’s.” The class president also dedicated a bit of doggerel to Kitty (as she was nicknamed):

She cut classes all during the year,
Her finals then filled her with fear.
At the Widow’s she learned
What from profs, she had spurned,
A proceeding most queer.

 “The Widow’s” was the nickname for Harvard graduate William Whiting Nolen’s “cram parlor,” which sold notes from classes and offered ghostwritten papers for Harvard and Radcliffe students. The Widow’s was an open secret, and Katherine’s use of it to make up for her inattention and truancy was publicly outed in her college yearbook.    

 She Wanted to Drop out of College to Become a Gynecologist

That Radcliffe degree was also nearly derailed by Katherine’s decision to drop out of Radcliffe in her junior year, during which she decided she wished to “go into medicine and specialize in obstetrics.”

“I always had the idea, after that obstetrical incident I ran into during the war,” she later recalled without specifying what the episode was, “that it was pretty awful for any woman to have to have a man doctor around during all that messiness. I still think that, too.”

Her father, however, “refused flat to let [her] go to medical college—said the profession was no place for women, that they lost all their delicacy and fastidiousness, and morals and what all.” Being a doctor was “not a modest occupation for a woman,” chides one of Ursula Parrott’s characters, no doubt in an echo of her father’s rejection of this career path.

Dr. Towle resorted to a bribe to convince his daughter to stay the course of her studies at Radcliffe: he bought her a new car and let her “keep it around college most of the time, and a few odds and ends like that.”

In retrospect, she was glad to have been steered away from a possible gynecological career despite the fact that she was onto something about women’s reliance on often unsympathetic men to deal with reproductive issues. It was something she repeatedly experienced and wrote about throughout her life.

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Newpaper ad, 1929

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Ursula Earned Her First Big Paycheck
as the Stock Market Crashed

After her first marriage to Lindesay Marc Parrott failed, Ursula quit her day job writing advertising copy for department stores and threw herself into writing a book, a very slightly fictionalized version of her travails. At first anonymously published, Ex-Wife came out in August 1929 and changed the course of her life overnight. 

A tale from the trenches of marriage, infidelity, divorce, dating, and remarriage in boozy, dissipated Manhattan, Ex-Wife is a fascinating, very frank novel filled with infidelities (committed by both husband and wife), spousal conflict and the male double standard. It’s also about how women navigated the logistics of post marital life in 1920s New York.

The novel became a sensation and a bestseller, earning its young author her first big paycheck in October 1929, the very month the stock market crashed. Mercifully, it was too late for her to have invested in the market, which was on the cusp of sending the entire nation into fiscal collapse.

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Ex-Wife Led to Norma Shearer’s Only Best Actress Academy Award

Ex-Wife wasn’t just successful; it became a cultural phenomenon. MGM snapped up the rights to it, although they were forced by the Hays Office to retitle the adaptation The Divorcee (1930) to distance the film from the scandalous, censorable content of its source material (which included both a rape and a harrowing abortion scene). 

Norma Shearer asked her husband, MGM’s boy wonder producer , to give her the female leading role. But Thalberg thought his wife wasn’t the right type for Parrott’s “very modern and unconventional heroine.”

The plucky Shearer hired then-unknown George Hurrell, a photographer newly arrived in Hollywood, to take a series of pictures of her in “a luxurious and revealing negligee” procured for the occasion. She left the photographs for her husband to discover on his office desk, later recalling “I had to prove to Irving that I could look sexy.”  

The stunt worked; Shearer got the role and subsequently won her only Academy Award for Best Actress as a result. 

 

Jimmy Stewart Got His First Leading Role Thanks to Ursula,
and F. Scott Fitzgerald Was Hired to Adapt One of Her Stories   

In the early 1930s, Ursula had published dozens of shorts stories and novels, most of which revolved around successful career women and their failed marriages. Hollywood couldn’t get enough.

Her 1935 novel, Next Time We Live, was about two career-hungry characters, Cicely and Christopher, whose ambitions complicate their marriage and child-rearing. When Universal adapted it into a film in 1936 (the studio retitled it Next Time We Love out of concerns that audiences might mistakenly think the film was about reincarnation) they cast as the complex, sympathetic wife and mother who wants more out of her life.  

The Boston Globe reviewer was wowed by the film, especially the “superb performance of a young newcomer” whom the reviewer praised as worth watching for in future films: a young in his first starring role.  

As further proof of Ursula’s Hollywood status, in 1938 MGM hired F. Scott Fitzgerald to adapt one of her stories, “Infidelity,” into a screenplay. He worked on it for months but the censors stopped the project from going into production. 

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Ursula in her Hollywood days, early 1930s

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Ursula Had No Love For Hollywood

When she made her first trip to Hollywood in April 1931, Ursula Parrott took the town by storm. “Of all the writers brought to Hollywood,” Mollie Merrick wrote in her Boston Globe column, “Ursula Parrott is perhaps coining the most money at the moment. That girl writes ‘em rapidly. They’re sold before she has had so much as a chance to jot the idea out sketchily on paper.”

Parrott also got in on the celebrity author act when she renamed Kansas City–born Betty Grable “Frances Dean.” The name didn’t stick, but Grable’s career under her birth name did. Parrott did not, however, enjoy being in Hollywood. In a letter to her agent, she complained that every morning she felt like she had “died and waked up in a sort of gaudy hell—what with all that California sunlight.” 

She summed up her feelings about the town and its denizens with a perfectly New Yorker quip: “The best clothes, and the worst conversations in the world.”

 

Ursula and Her Son Were Carjacked by a Convicted Murder

In 1937, when her son Marc was thirteen, Ursula rented a car and drove from Tucson to Florence, Arizona, stopping in small towns along the way. As they were departing Nogales, a young man whom she later described as “nice mannered, wearing a brown suit and an olive drab hat, and about five feet ten inches tall” asked for a ride.

“I told him that I did not want to take him because my car was loaded with luggage,” she explained to the press, adding, “If I had been in the east I would never have taken him but he seemed a nice man and I relented.”

Once on the road, the man’s demeanor changed. He drew a gun to enact “a typical western holdup,” forcing Ursula and Marc out of the car. The man drove off with her purse and their luggage in the rental car, leaving mother and son to walk the highway until a passing motorist eventually picked them up.

The perpetrator of this carjacking was Johnny Quantrell, a convicted first-degree murderer serving a life sentence! Quantrell had just pulled off his fourth prison escape and was eventually captured and returned to jail.

Adding insult to injury, Ursula was sued for $1,600 by the rental car agency “because she could not return the automobile.” Despite newspaper headline proof of what happened, the agency charged that “Mrs. Parrott had refused to pay.” This was evidence—if any was needed—that trouble followed Ursula wherever she went.

 

She Sprung a Soldier from a Military Stockade
for a Night on the Town

A few days before New Year’s Eve 1942, while still married to her fourth and final husband (Fred Schermerhorn), Ursula liberated an army private from a Miami military stockade, where he was awaiting trial for a marijuana drug bust (Private Michael Neely Bryan had hidden reefer in a radio phonograph that Ursula had bought for him; he took it on a flight from NYC to Miami). 

On the afternoon of December 28, 1942, at approximately 5:00 p.m., Ursula—wearing a bright yellow hat and driving a green Ford sedan—drove off the base with Bryan concealed in the back seat of her car. 

Because Bryan had a pending marijuana charge in New York City, Ursula earned herself a federal indictment alleging that she “aided a private of the United States Army to desert, and did harbor, conceal and protect him in said desertion” and that “she did interfere with the armed forces by influencing Subject, Bryan, to disregard orders and instructions of the United States Army.”

These were serious accusations. The Los Angeles Times headline was appropriately dramatic: “Ursula Parrott Seized by Federal Agents.” After some crazy headlines and surprises (she was actually a paid informant, according to her FBI file), Ursula was acquitted of all charges in February 1943.

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Ursula in 1934
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Some Lost Ursula Parrott Manuscripts
Might be Out There, Somewhere

When Ursula’s life was falling apart in the late 1940s and early 1950s, she moved from hotel to hotel, often fleeing before she was confronted with bills she was unable to pay. 

In 1949, she was staying at the Henry Hudson Hotel on 58th Street in New York City, just south of Central Park, where she ran up a hefty $1,746 bill. When she snuck out of the hotel, she left behind what was described as “a purely fictitious check for $1,500” and “six pieces of luggage—loaded with ‘miscellaneous valueless items’ including an old scale.” 

She also left a note in which she announced that she was “walking out of here tomorrow afternoon you understand for 24 hours with a suitcase, hatboxes, leaving behind all manuscripts, heaps of clothes and so on.”

Ursula never stopped writing even as her publication fortunes fell, including a memoir in which she might have shared so many details about her life. Although the Henry Hudson Hotel management described the manuscripts she left behind as “valueless” when they were interviewed by the New York papers, I’ve fantasized that some hotel maid or policeman might have squirreled those manuscripts away somewhere. Perhaps they are just waiting to be discovered in someone’s closet, attic, or basement?

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The 2023 McNally edition of Ex-Wife
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Despite Her Famous Life, Not a Single
Newspaper Ran an Obituary for Ursula Parrott

When Ursula died in the fall of 1957 in the charity ward of a New York hospital (of what her son described as “a mercifully fast cancer”) not a single U.S. newspaper published an obituary — not even in her hometown of Boston, where she was buried in the family plot at Holyhood Cemetery. Walter Winchell dedicated a mere sentence to her demise, though he had given space generously to her setbacks in his column for years: “Author Ursula Parrott passed away in a local hosp last week.”

Ursula Parrott’s first obituary was published in July 2024, as part of the New York Times “Overlooked” series.

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Contributed by Marsha Gordon.  Marsha Gordon is Professor of Film Studies at North Carolina State University, a recent Fellow at the National Humanities Center, and an NEH Public Scholar.  You can learn more about Ursula Parrott in Becoming the Ex-Wife: The Unconventional Life & Forgotten Writings of Ursula Parrott, which was reviewed in the The New Yorker, the New York Times, LA Review of Books, the New York Sun, and the New York Review of Books. 

She has appeared on numerous podcasts to discuss Parrott’s life, including the Lost Ladies of Lit Podcast and the Bio Podcast with Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Debby Applegate.  Marsha is currently writing a biography of the pioneering Golden Age Hollywood filmmaker Dorothy Arzner. 

  

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Rosamunde Pilcher’s The Shell Seekers: An Appreciation

A few months ago, I was helping pack up my father’s house because, at age ninety-two, he was moving to a retirement home. He had always been a great reader and bibliophile, so we had to go through his library and decide what we would keep and what we would give away. I stumbled on an old paperback of Rosemunde Pilcher’s The Shell Seekers, which must have belonged to Dad’s late girlfriend. 

Published in 1987, The Shell Seekers was an international bestseller. I hadn’t read it in decades and had forgotten what a jewel of a book it was – a 500-page tome of a family saga. Rereading it around a recent Christmastime, I couldn’t wait to go upstairs in the evening and delve back into its pages  despite being surrounded by family and friends,   

The Shell Seekers has beautiful descriptions and many memorable characters. The story reflects the tapestry of life — good times and bad, heartbreak, and passion.

Rosamunde Pilcher (1924 – 2019) was born in Lelant, Cornwall. She began writing at age seven and published her first short story at eighteen. In the World War II years, she served in the Women’s Royal Naval Service, and was posted to Sri Lanka for a time. 

In 1946 she married Graham Hope Pilcher, a decorated veteran and textile businessman. They moved to Dundee, Scotland where they lived happily ever after and raised four children. Her son Robin Pilcher ended up being a successful novelist in his own right.

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Pilcher’s early novels were published under the pen name Jane Fraser. Within ten years, she was writing under her real name. She was prolific: twenty-five novels and five short story collections. She became an icon and a household name. She won many awards and honors, including an Officer of the Order of the British Empire given by The Queen in 2002. 

The Shell Seekers and other novels by Pilcher have been adapted to movies starring actresses like and . One critic said that Pilcher’s books were based on three principles: money, happiness, and a happy ending.

Novelist and onetime president of the Romantic Novelists Association in England, Katie Fforde, said this about Pilcher: “Her houses are full of secrets, families full of lies, beautiful settings, page-turning plots. She changed the face of romantic fiction.”

When I look at the picture of Mrs. Pilcher on the dust jacket of her novel September, I see a grandmotherly figure in a favorite pullover with a smile crinkling her face— the type of person I would have liked to have had a cup of tea with.

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The Shell Seekers in brief

The Shell Seekers is the story of Penelope Keeling, an older woman who has had a long and rich life and realizes a painting she owns by her late artist father is worth a lot of money.  The children discover this; some are very focused on the money, and of course, this brings dissension. 

The book is also written in flashbacks going back to World War II, and has three themes:  

The bohemian life – something Pilcher knew well having grown up in Cornwall where there were a lot of painters in the town of  St. Ives,The impact of large inheritances on a family – building bridges or tearing people asunder,The days before the war in England.

A quote from The Shell Seekers:

“Time had lost its importance. That was one of the good things about getting old: you weren’t perpetually in a hurry. All her life, Penelope had looked after other people but now she had no one to think about but herself. There was time to stop and look, and looking to remember. Visions widened like views seen from the slope of a painfully climbed mountain, and having come so far, it seemed ridiculous not to pause and enjoy them.”

There is a story behind Pilcher’s writing of this novel: In my paperback, there is an introduction to the 10th anniversary edition written by Pilcher. It was 1984, and she had already written several successful books. When Tom Dunne, her editor and publisher from St. Martin’s Press, came to visit Pilcher in Scotland, her children chaffed him, asking why he couldn’t make their mother rich and famous — and them as well. 

Good-naturedly, he responded she needed to write a book that merited “advance publicity and global promotion.” Pilcher observed, “He told me I needed to write ‘A big fat novel for women. A good read. Something to get the teeth into.’ And something, above all, that tapped into my life and the experiences of my generation.” Pilcher, at sixty, accepted the challenge and two years later presented her manuscript.  

In 2019, The Guardian wrote that The Shell Seekers had sold over 60 million copies by then, and had been translated into multiple languages. Interestingly, Pilcher always had an enormous following in Germany.

Pilcher retired from writing in 2000, at the age of seventy-six, choosing to put her pen down while at the peak of talent, and not fading away from age or ability. She died at ninety-four of a stroke in 2019, surrounded by her loving family.    

I read both The Shell Seekers and September (a story about a coming out party in Scotland, pulling characters and stories from all over, including some characters from The Shell Seekers). What I admire about Pilcher’s style is that it is so graspable. Mother Nature plays a huge role in her writing, and her characters are accessible. Even bad guys have a quality about them that a reader can almost like. In the novels I’ve read, just as you think you’ve predicted what will happen, it turns out you are wrong.

I appreciate that there’s no bad language, and sex is suggested rather than described in detail for paragraphs on end. As my late mother once said, “Rosamunde Pilcher wrote books the way they used to be written.” And she was right. 

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Contributed by Tyler Scott, who has been writing essays and articles since the early 1980s for various magazines and newspapers.  In 2014 she published her novel The Excellent Advice of a Few Famous Painters. She lives in Blackstone, Virginia where she and her husband renovated a Queen Anne Revival house and enjoy small town life. Visit her at Pour the Coffee, Time to Write.

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Professional Women Who Found Their Voices Through Authorship

Women from all walks of life have turned to authorship as a medium for self-expression and social impact. They address universal issues from defining one’s identity as a woman in the world to finding the resilience to handle life’s trials and tribulations.

The literary world wasn’t always welcoming to female writers. Some wrote under pseudonyms so that their gender wouldn’t have an effect on the reception of their work. Women writers were often sidelined from prestigious awards, with the result that  brilliant works weren’t considered worthy of recognition.

Authors like Jane Austen and Virginia Woolf were among those who slowly changed the face of the male-dominated publishing industry. Austen’s on-point social observations have  delighted readers for generations, while Woolf’s classic feminist writings have remained relevant.

To this day, many women write about experiences close to their hearts, hoping to help others in similar situations. Here, we explore the stories of some female authors who started out in other professions, and whose words have reverberated in the reading public’s imagination.

 

N.K. Jemisin: Counselor Turned Bestselling Novelist

N.K. Jemisin used to work as a career counselor in Massachusetts. It was a logical follow-up to her Master’s degree in education. But in the evenings, she caught something: the writing bug. Today, Jemisin is a celebrated speculative fiction writer. Her novels challenge societal norms and champion diversity.

In The Fifth Season, one of her most popular works, humanity must figure out how to handle a relentless spate of natural disasters. It is a broken planet with a stringent caste system – a perfect backdrop for underrepresented voices in fantasy literature. Green Ronin Publishing also produces a role-playing game based on the Broken Earth trilogy.

Jemisin’s stories reflect her deep sensitivity toward social issues. Her commitment to social justice is evident in the seamless way she integrates power dynamics and oppression in her writing. Indeed, we have become so accustomed to the hierarchies in our world that injustice may not even seem apparent.

Moreover, her novels have excellent, intricate world-building. Having an immersive read in your backpack can make everything better!

 

Michelle Obama: From Legalese to Affirmation

Michelle Obama’s book, The Light We Carry, reveals how four words have often plagued her. She stresses how these words haunt even the most accomplished people and leave them struggling for an answer. Am I good enough?

In uncertain times when self-doubt becomes a constant companion, community support can be life-changing. In this book, the former First Lady and lawyer shares deeply personal stories that can help find resilience amid adversity.

Her works are more relevant than ever in these volatile times – an era of chaos and hardships. Consider this: An ironworker in St. Louis recently became an amputee after a horrible crane accident. It was a regular workday for him until a catastrophic crash. How can anyone emerge from something like this unless they have resilience? 

Victims of traumatic incidents often find inspiration in works like Obama’s. Her words encourage us to muster courage and determination and take action to change our circumstances. For instance, the accident victim has teamed up with a St. Louis personal injury lawyer to get help with medical expenses and possible lost wages. 

According to TorHoerman Law, obtaining compensation for suffering and losses in accident cases can be daunting. Legal proceedings are often complex, but having the fortitude and willingness to rebuild one’s life makes a difference.

 

Dr. Jen Gunter: Simplifying Health and Wellness

Dr. Jen Gunter works as an OB-GYN. Her experience in this field compelled her to make health more accessible and approachable for women – without myths and misinformation. The reproductive health realm is replete with superstitions and old wives’ tales. We need strong, science-backed voices to address concerning issues. The scope is immense, from the appropriate diet during pregnancy to understanding premature births. 

In The Vagina Bible, Dr. Gunter tackles medical gaps and biases in reproductive health. She also runs a blog called The Vajenda to help improve the quality of healthcare for women.

Through her writing, she has helped many women overcome long-standing misconceptions. She also simplifies complex medical subjects so anyone can understand and take charge of their health. 

Her core mission is to challenge outdated narratives and encourage women to adopt a more informed and autonomous approach to healthcare. We daresay she is succeeding – a triumph for women everywhere.

 

Elizabeth Gilbert: The Artist Behind Creative Nonfiction

For a long time, fiction and non-fiction remained in silos. They coexisted but never collided. Elizabeth Gilbert was one of the voices who changed that and introduced readers to a new,  more engaging approach to nonfiction. 

Known for her bestselling memoir Eat, Pray, Love, Elizabeth Gilbert brought creative nonfiction to the forefront of modern literature. 

Her memoir examined personal reinvention and spiritual growth after a difficult life transition. However, the open and reflective writing style resonated most with audiences.

Her book had much going for it, with vivid travel descriptions and emotional depth. The personal growth was palpable. Gilbert’s brought the destinations to life, immersing readers in sensory experiences. 

The transformative journey felt personal and inspired readers  to go on one themselves. It also reshaped the writing of self-help and travel memoirs.. 

Since then, the reading world has seen more of such purposeful, quest-driven narratives. We now intertwine emotional and physical journeys, using travel as an avenue to answer life’s unsolved questions. We have Elizabeth Gilbert to thank for this innovation in nonfiction, a gateway to draw in readers who usually prefer fictional stories.

 

Writing and Independent Thought

The written word has immense impact. We feel its power when we dive into Agatha Christie’s thrillers that play on complex human relationships. The magic is evident in the change writers like Mary Wollstonecraft have brought – A Vindication of the Rights of Woman demanded women’s education with the power of words.

As women  redefined their professional lives through writing, they have experimented with various genres as a way  to reach readers. Their books and other writings  have become spaces for personal reflection and social justice, making the literary world richer for their contributions.

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They wrote bestsellers and/or future classics before age 25

To write a great novel (or even a decent one), it seems that a writer should have a certain amount of life experience. But that’s not always the case — not in the past, and not in the present. Following are seven novels written when their authors were precocious young women — some still in their teens.

Some have become iconic classics; others sold in the millions are forgotten bestsellers.

So, what of it? Maybe the point is that if you have a story inside of you, find a way to tell it no matter what your age — tender through advanced. It may not become a classic or a bestseller or even be published, but at least will be something to build on.

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Mary Shelley: Frankenstein, 1818

In the throes of her tumultuous, tragic, and romantic youth, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797 – 1851) created Frankenstein, one of the most memorable and influential novels of all time. Mary wasn’t yet twenty-one at the time.When she met Percy Bysshe Shelley, the romantic poet, she was around sixteen. Their fateful liaison would alter the course of her life. In the summer of 1814, seventeen-year-old Mary eloped to Italy with the already-married Shelley, who left his distraught, pregnant wife behind.

In the summer of 1816, Mary and Percy rented a villa not far from Lord Byron’s on Lake Geneva. On the night of a thunderstorm (yes, the classic “dark and stormy night”), it was proposed that each of the group write a supernatural tale. 

Frankenstein was first published anonymously, but eventually the author’s identity was revealed and subsequent editions bore her name. In the preface to the 1831 edition, Mary tells the story of how she came to write her masterpiece. Here in her own words is the story of how it came to pass that a sheltered young woman from England came to write one of the most haunting tales of all time, with a creature that continues to grip the imagination.

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Miles Franklin: My Brilliant Career, 1901

My Brilliant Career was Miles Franklin‘s first novel. Stella Maria Sarah Miles Franklin (1879 – 1954) went on to become one of the most prominent Australian authors of the first half of the 20th century.

Franklin wrote this novel while still in her teens, and it was published before she turned twenty-one. My Brilliant Career tells the story of Sybylla Melvyn, a high-strung, imaginative girl from the Australian countryside. When her parents fall on hard times, they send her to live with her grandmother in another part of the country.

Convinced that she’s ugly and useless, Sybilla is surprised when Harold Beecham, a wealthy young man, courts her and proposes marriage. Sybilla knows that she is “not a valuable article in the marriage market,” but “despises the slavery which respectable marriage will bring.” She will never “perpetrate matrimony,” will never be a “participant in that ‘degradation’” — these are astonishing words from the pen of a teen who, like her heroine, grew up in the outback.

Sybilla must navigate the narrow choices available to women of her time and place, and her desire to be independent. The 1979 film adaptation starring Judy Davis and Sam Neill was lovely as well, and quite true to the book.

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Viña Delmar: Bad Girl, 1928

Despite its provocative title, the forgotten bestselling 1928 novel, Bad Girl by Viña Delmar, wasn’t all that. Delmar, just twenty-three when it was published, was already married and the mother of a four-year-old son. That in itself wasn’t so unusual at the time, but not emblematic of experience-seeking urban women of the Jazz Age.

In Bad Girl, Dorothy, or “Dot,” as she’s called, has one instance of premarital sex, marries the guy (not a bad sort, but none too bright), and after a respectable period of time, becomes pregnant. She seriously considers ending the pregnancy, but goes ahead with it. Dot’s pregnancy and childbirth occupy much of the novel. The cover of a later edition (above) sensationalizes the story, as was typical of pulp novels.

There’s nothing scandalous about this middling novel, but the realities of a young wife’s pregnancy and her experiences in a birthing hospital were enough to grab the attention of The New England Watch and Ward Society. This organization, whose mission was censorship of books and the performing arts gave rise to the phenomenon of “Banned in Boston.”

Publishers welcomed their books being “Banned in Boston” — the controversy boosted book sales, as it did for Bad Girl. Despite having been a big bestseller, copies are hard to come by; I got mine on Ebay. I needed to read it for a project I’m working on, but wouldn’t necessarily recommend it. Still, it’s an interesting document of its era, and the basis of the well-regarded 1931 film of the same name. Here’s a 1928 interview with Viña Delmar.

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Daphne du Maurier: The Loving Spirit, 1931

Not as well known as Daphne du Maurier’s more iconic works like Rebecca and My Cousin Rachel (among many other thrilling tales), The Loving Spirit was her first novel. Twenty-four at the time it was published, it launched what would become a stellar career.

Beginning in the early 1800s, The Loving Spirit tells the story of the Coombes family and is mainly set in Cornwall, a part of England in which the author spent much of her life. Janet Coombes marries her cousin, Thomas Coombes, a shipbuilder. The novel follows the adventures and trials of this family for four generations.

A modern reprint of this novel rightly described it as having “established du Maurier’s reputation and style with an inimitable blend of romance, history, and adventure.” Readers familiar with du Maurier’s later, and more famous works, have been delighted to discover her first novel. More about The Loving Spirit.

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Carson McCullers: The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, 1940

Carson McCullers (1917–1967) was twenty-three when The Heart is a Lonely Hunter was published. While her novels, novellas, and short stories have retained a prominent place in the American canon, Lonely Hunter has arguably remained her best-remembered. This selection of quotes from The Heart of a Lonely Hunter sample the tone and flavor of the narrative.

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter made McCullers an overnight literary celebrity. She described herself as “much too young to understand what happened to me or the responsibility it entailed.” Readers and critics considered it an epic achievement and marveled that one so young had such a grasp of human nature. From a 1940 review:

“The characters move around Singer, a man of mystical understanding, in an intricate dance of hope and despair: Mick, and adolescent ardently longing to express herself in music; Jake Blount, a wild, blundering reformer; Dr. Copeland, the African American patriarch. Their appeal to Singer is the appeal of all humanity to a silent, cryptic universe.”

Reviewers felt that McCullers had captured America’s racial and economic divides simply and dramatically. Richard Wright, reviewing the novel in 1940, wrote:

“To me the most impressive aspect of The Heart is a Lonely Hunter is the astonishing humanity that enables a white writer, for the first time in Southern fiction, to handle African-American characters with as much ease and justice as those of her own race.”

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Kathleen Winsor: Forever Amber, 1944

Forever Amber by Kathleen Winsor is the sprawling story of Amber St. Clair, a beauty who climbs the class ranks of Restoration-era England. Twenty-five when the novel was published, Winsor had devoted more than five years to its nearly 1,000 pages.

Amber’s fictional narrative is interwoven with true historic facts of the English Restoration. On her nearly 1,000-page path to becoming the mistress of Charles II, Amber leaves a trail of scandal in her wake — theft, multiple husbands and lovers, and lots of sexual escapades (though none graphically described).

Forever Amber scandalized and enthralled. Fourteen U.S. states and all of Australia, banned the book upon its release, citing obscenity. It went to costly trials in the U.S.; Winsor and her publisher stood by her work and eventually prevailed in court. The notoriety trials didn’t hurt its popularity — quite the opposite.

Winsor made a fortune from Forever Amber and went on to write a few more novels, though none achieved its level of sales or notoriety. One reviewer wrote that Amber made Scarlett O’Hara look like a kindergarten teacher.

Forever Amber (which took me months to listen to) fell out of print, but is available in a “rediscovered classics” edition (with the cover shown above). It has been called a “bodice ripper,” it is not. Though it does take a bit of stamina to read, in my humble opinion, it doesn’t belong in the literary trash heap.

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Françoise Sagan: Bonjour Tristesse, 1954

Bonjour Tristesse by Françoise Sagan is the story of Cecile, an amoral seventeen-year-old, who goes on vacation to the south of France with her father, Raymond. Sagan was eighteen when it was published and immediately became the epitome of an enfant terrible.

The title Bonjour Tristesse, meaning “hello sadness” in English, comes from a line in the poem “À Peine Défigurée” by Paul Éluard. The poem describes the familiarity of sadness that reappears in waves.

Bonjour Tristesse is a novel of romantic intrigue gone awry. The tangled web of romance and expressions of sexuality earned the book plenty of backlash, but it also solidified Sagan’s position as part of the rebellious post-war youth generation. Here’s a contemporary review of Bonjour Tristesse.

Fast-living and reckless all her life, Sagan nevertheless went on to become one of France’s most prolific and notable 20th-century writers.

 

More recent young women authors …

Writers in their teens and twenties are still producing the novels, maybe more then ever before. Here are a few recent titles, not including those written by enterprising self-publishers who build their readership on social media (especially TikTok):

S.E. Hinton was in high school when she wrote the now-classic YA novel of disaffected youth, The Outsiders (1967).

Angie Thomas wrote The Hate U Give (2017) while she was in high school and was twenty-one when it was published. A YA novel intended to shed light on the Black Lives Matter movement and the issue of police brutality, it was adapted to a highly acclaimed film that came out the following year.

Kody Keplinger was seventeen when she wrote The Duff (2010), a YA romance that stirred up some controversy. Though she has written several YA novels since, The Duff remains her best known.

Helen Oyeyemi was eighteen when The Icarus Girl (2005), a story of a girl with a Nigerian Mother and English father, was published to much acclaim. She has since published seven more novels and two plays.

Flavia Bujor (French-Romanian) takes the prize for youth here — she wrote the children’s story, The Prophecy of the Stones (2004) when she was thirteen. Though the reviews for the American edition were quite mixed, it was translated into twenty-three languages.

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Reuben Sachs by Amy Levy (1888) – an overview

Amy Levy (1861 – 1889), British novelist and proto-feminist essayist, lived the life of the “New Woman” with a circle of literary and lesbian friends, especially her probable lover Vernon Lee.  The wealthy, fictional Sachs family in 19th-century London is the subject of Reuben Sachs (1888), arguably Levy’s best-known work.

Levy’s novel The Romance of a Shop (also published in 1888), is a “New Woman” novel about four sisters trying to make it in business.

In 1886, Levy had published “The Jew in Fiction,” in the British Jewish Chronicle. She said that no novelist so far had succeeded in “grappling in its entirety with the complex problems of Jewish life and Jewish character. The Jew, as we know him today … has been found worthy of none but the most superficial observation.”

The Sachs family lives in the most prestigious parts of London, England (Levy’s parents lived in Bloomsbury). The Sachs are “a family of Portuguese merchants, the vieille noblesse of the Jewish community.” 

In the Sachses’ London Jewish community, “with its innumerable trivial class differences, its sets within sets, its fine-drawn distinctions of caste, utterly incomprehensible to an outsider, they held a good, though not the best position.”

Levy’s short novel was written in response to what she considered the over-sentimental treatment of the Jewish characters and naïve, romantic view of Zionism in George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda (1876) with its “little group of enthusiasts, with their yearnings after the Holy Land.”

 

The story of Reuben Sachs as well as Judith Quixano

Despite the man’s name in the title of Levy’s Reuben Sachs, the novel is at least as much about Reuben’s cousin Judith Quixano. Judith’s patrician Portuguese ancestry is revealed in this description:

She was twenty-two years of age, in the very prime of her youth and beauty; a tall, regal-looking creature, with an exquisite dark head, features like those of a face cut on gem or cameo, and wonderful, lustrous, mournful eyes, entirely out of keeping with the accepted characteristics of their owner.

Judith (whose name references the Biblical story of Judith and Holofernes), who has been adopted by her aunt and uncle after her family lose their money, doesn’t have a financial inheritance of her own and, despite her good looks, she knows her adoptive parents will find it difficult to marry her off into another good Jewish family.

Judith is in love with Rueben and vice versa, although they are first cousins. It looks for a while as if they will marry, but Judith receives a marriage proposal from the non-Jewish, wealthy Bertie. She reluctantly accepts.

Material advantage; things that you could touch and see and talk about; that these were the only things which really mattered, had been the unspoken gospel of her life. 
      Now and then you allowed yourself the luxury of a fine sentiment in speech, but when it came to the point, to take the best that you could get for yourself was the only course open to a person of sense.
      The push, the struggle, the hunger and greed of her world rose vividly before her. Wealth, power, success—a flaunting success for all men to see; had she not believed in these things as the most desirable on earth? Had she not always wished them to fall to the lot of the person dearest to her? Did she not believe in them still? Was she not doing her best to secure them for herself?

Judith regrets her decision almost immediately and wishes she had held out for Reuben. Then she hears that Rueben has died. The novel ends on a low note, with Judith’s dark thoughts.

It seemed to her, as she sat there in the fading light, that this is the bitter lesson of existence: that the sacred serves only to teach the full meaning of sacrilege; the beautiful of the hideous; modesty of outrage; joy of sorrow; life of death.

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Amy Levy

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A commercial success; criticized by the British Jewish press

Although it was a commercial success on both sides of the Atlantic, the British Jewish press hated Reuben Sachs, with its merciless portrayal of such shallow, unsympathetic characters. Jewish World said of Levy: “She apparently delights in the task of persuading the general public that her own kith and kin are the most hideous types of vulgarity.”

The Jewish Chronicle didn’t even review it, despite having published Levy’s earlier essay, but referred to it as being “intentionally offensive.”

The year after Reuben Sachs appeared, and soon after Levy’s death, the future Zionist campaigner Israel Zangwill, who coined the phrase “melting pot” in the title of a play, was commissioned by the Jewish Publication Society of America to write Children of the Ghetto, concerning a group of characters in the Jewish East End of London.

In the novel, Esther Ansell, many of whose views seem to echo Zangwill’s own, writes a novel, Mordecai Josephs, under a male pseudonym; no one knows she is the author; her novel seems to be based on Reuben Sachs. Everyone in Esther’s set hates the book and the way it betrays the mercenary and unspiritual bourgeois Jewish inhabitants of London, exactly the criticism the Jewish press had of Reuben Sachs.

Levy took her own life at the age of twenty-seven and became the first Jewish woman to be cremated in England; Oscar Wilde, who had published her stories in his Woman’s World, wrote an obituary for her.

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Excerpted from A Girl Named Vera Can Never Tell a Lie: The Fiction of Vera Caspary by Francis Booth ©2022. Reprinted by permission.

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; Comrades in Art: Revolutionary Art in America 1926-1938; High Collars & Monocles: 1920s Novels by British Female Couples; and A Girl Named Vera Can Never Tell a Lie: The Fiction of Vera Caspary.

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. 

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Radio Days: Trailblazing Women Journalists on the Airwaves

Starting in the 1920s, trailblazing American female radio broadcasters used their voices to open their fellow citizen’s eyes — or more accurately ears — to news of the wider world.

Historically, women had to fight like crazy to participate in every form of journalism. Though women faced less resistance in the early days of radio, they still had to fight for the right to report hard news.

Early days of radio broadcasting

Radio started crackling its way into American homes in the early 1920s. The airwaves expanded the way news and entertainment reached people. Stations sprang up in cities everywhere, exciting listeners with sounds coming out of a strange little box. Radio came on the scene several years even before the first “talkie” movie (1927), so it truly seemed like magic.

You might think of early radio as an old-fashioned form of podcasting. After all, podcasts are basically radio shows, except they’re distributed on the internet. For people who were lonely and isolated (especially during the Great Depression), radio helped them feel more connected to what was going on in the country and the world.

The industry welcomed women broadcasters because they were good for business. In the 1920s, women spent eighty percent of American income (though they certainly weren’t earning that share), so advertisers loved programs by and for the ladies.

In turn, this opened up other jobs in radio: research, publicity, advertising, talent search, secretarial, and more. A good number of women became executives, too.

Early radio programs were filled with lots of fluff, soap operas, and “women’s topic” programs aimed at housewives. But there was also plenty of serious journalism on the air. It wasn’t all smooth sailing for female journalists, who were sometimes told that their voices didn’t have as much authority as men’s. But a good number of women broke through to bring the important news of their day to the airwaves. Here are three of them.

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Dorothy Thompson

Dorothy Thompson advocates for repeal of Neutrality Act, 1939
Photo by Harris & Ewing, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Dorothy Thompson (1893 – 1961) used her charm, wit, sense of adventure, and strong work ethic to create an incredibly varied career in journalism. She started out by promoting the suffrage movement.

After women won the right to vote in 1920, she moved to Europe and became one of America’s first foreign correspondents. Based in Berlin, she reported from across the continent and at the same time enjoyed a fabulous social life. Her circle of friends included many writers and artists that we still remember today.   

By the 1930s, Dorothy was one of the most trusted American journalists. She never sugar-coated the truth, and because she warned so loudly against the rise of fascism, she was thrown out of Germany in 1933.

As a news commentator for NBC radio in the 1930s, Dorothy’s show, “On the Record” was heard by millions. When Nazi Germany invaded Poland in 1939, legend has it that Dorothy stayed on the air for fifteen days and nights in a row (it’s not clear what she did about sleep!). The June 12, 1939 issue of Time magazine featured her on the cover, speaking into an NBC radio microphone.

“Peace has to be created in order to be maintained. It will never be achieved by passivity and quietism.” That’s just one of the countless pearls of wisdom on the strands of radio pioneer Dorothy Thompson’s life.

Dorothy Thompson’s life and work inspired a 1942 film, Woman of the Year. Katherine Hepburn plays Tess Harding, a character based on Dorothy. It also became a Broadway musical, with Lauren Bacall as Tess.

Dorothy Thompson was considered the most influential American woman, second only to first lady Eleanor Roosevelt. With all she accomplished, and being immortalized in a movie and a musical, isn’t it amazing that few people today have heard of her?

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Pauline Frederick

Pauline Frederick (1908 – 1990) was one of the journalists who was told that “a woman’s voice doesn’t carry authority” when she first tried breaking into broadcast news. After doors had been opened to women in radio, after World War II, they started to close. Pauline pried them open, over and over again.           

Pauline couldn’t convince any radio network to hire her. That frustrated her because as a print journalist she’d covered international news, including the Nuremberg trials. Finally, she freelanced for ABC radio, where she was assigned to the kind of women’s topics she dreaded. One of them was “How to Get a Husband.” Pauline regretted it, saying, “I don’t think I learned anything from it, and I don’t think the audience did either.”

Pauline persisted and finally got to report on news stories. She became the first female journalist to broadcast from China in the late 1940s and followed that with reporting from Asia, Africa, and the Middle East.

After she covered the first televised political convention in 1948, ABC hired her to do a weekday news program called Pauline Frederick Reports. That made her the first woman news commentator on TV. She was also the first woman to moderate a televised presidential debate (1976).

Toward the end of her career, Pauline Frederick returned to her passion for radio. Now one of the stars of broadcast news, she no longer had to struggle for the chance to get on the air. She worked on National Public Radio for five years before retiring in 1980.  

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Kathryn Cochran Cravens
 

[Photo: Kathryn Cochran Cravens, 1938. Image available online
and used in accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107.]

Kathryn Cochran Cravens (1899 – 1991) started out as an actress in stock theater companies and silent films. Needing more work during the Depression, she found a job in radio. Food, fashion, health, children, and saving money were popular topics, so KMOX in St. Louis hired her to do a broadcast called “Let’s Compare Notes.” It went on air in 1933.

But Kathryn soon grew bored and noticed that there weren’t any women hosting news programs. She convinced the station to let her do a show called “News Through a Woman’s Eyes.” That made her the first-ever female radio news broadcaster. With her acting background, she brought wit and drama to the program. It was such a success that CBS swooped in and lured her to New York City.

By 1936 she had two million listeners and was making a thousand dollars a week — a fortune at the time. And getting more than 3,000 pieces of fan mail every week proved that she was a big hit in the big city!

With every passing year, there was more competition for Kathryn as a female radio news broadcaster. Having blazed the trail, she was no longer a novelty. In 1938, CBS dropped her program. But her experiences sharpened her skills as a journalist, and she became a radio war correspondent during World War II — another first for women.

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Belle da Costa Greene: The Woman Behind The Personal Librarian

In the 2021 historical novel The Personal Librarian, authors Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray illuminate the story of Belle da Costa Greene, private librarian to financial mogul J.P. Morgan. Her expertise and passion were foundational to the beginnings of the Morgan Library and Museum, a cultural gem that continues to thrive in New York City.

This overview of The Personal Librarian novel and its real-life subject is reprinted from the website of N.J. Mastro, with permission. Photo at right is from The Morgan Library & Museum.

The Personal Librarian (2021) opens in 1905. After amassing his fortune, J.P. Morgan has set out to build the finest personal library in the world. In the novel, J.P. casts an imposing figure, as he did in real life. Imagine Rich Uncle Pennybags from the board game, Monopoly, the man on whom the caricature is based.

 

The Personal Librarian — an overview

Upon the recommendation of his nephew Junius Morgan, J.P. hires Belle da Costa Greene to purchase and curate his growing collection of rare books, manuscripts, book-related artifacts, and artwork. At the time, Belle was working as a librarian at Princeton, a white male-only university. Junius discovered Belle’s talent during his frequent visits to Princeton’s rare book collection. Her exceptional knowledge impressed him, as did her witty, animated personality.

Belle dazzles her new employer from the start. Because a great deal of business occurs in social settings as much as at auctions and by private arrangement, J.P. introduces her to New York society, where she makes an indelible impression. Soon she is traveling the world searching for the rarest of books, the most exquisite artwork money can buy, and antiquities few people have ever seen.

A woman earning such a prestigious position as librarian to one of America’s wealthiest individuals was alone a stunning achievement. Women simply didn’t enjoy professional positions of that magnitude; they didn’t even have the vote yet. That Belle was Black made her appointment even more remarkable. Belle had light skin color, enabling her to pass through life presenting herself as a white woman.

Throughout what appeared a charming, glamorous existence, Belle is forced to carry the secret of her true identity. If discovered, she would be fired. Not only would this destroy her career as a librarian, it would also take away her livelihood. Besides supporting herself, she was the breadwinner for her mother and siblings, to whom she provided food, clothing, shelter, and education.

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Belle’s story in The Personal Librarian is poignant, engaging, and instructive. Readers discover Belle while the authors also bring to life on the page two unique worlds, that of rare books and fine art. The main learning for me, however, was the path of Black individuals who passed as white in this era.

Given how harshly Blacks were treated at the time, it wasn’t unusual for individuals with light skin color to elect to pass as white. One can only imagine the heartache that must have accompanied their choice. Belle’s story demonstrates this as she navigates her feelings and those of her family, including dealing with relatives who didn’t approve of her decision or that of her mother’s to live as white women.

 Who was the real Belle da Costa Greene?

Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray appear to have done an exceptional job of staying true to Belle’s actual story. The novel closely follows her life’s chronology.

Belle da Costa Greene was born Belle Marion Greener in 1883 in Washington, DC. Prior to her birth, her father was the first Black graduate of Harvard and spent time as the first Black librarian at the University of South Carolina. Belle’s parents separated when she was an adolescent. While Belle and the rest of her family remained in Washington, D.C., her father went on to pursue what eventually turned out to be a distinguished career in racial justice in other major U.S. cities. Belle only knew him from afar.

Belle’s mother and father, both of mixed race, had light skin, as did their children. Seeing the difficult road ahead for Black people in a segregated, racist world, Belle, along with her mother and siblings, changed their surname to Greene (dropping the “r”) to disassociate themselves from her father, then fabricated a new ancestry by describing themselves as Americans of Portuguese descent. Belle further altered her name by adding da Costa to the Greene name to reinforce her ruse of Portuguese heritage. Only one brother also adopted da Costa.

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Photo: Morgan Library & Museum

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Belle didn’t have the resources to attend college and went directly from high school to her job at Princeton. There her intellect and interest in rare collections set her apart, drawing the attention of Junius Morgan. She began her job as J.P.’s librarian in 1905 and stayed in that position until his death in 1913.

During her tenure as J.P.’s librarian, Belle did indeed take New York by storm. She became a regular at posh dinners and parties where J.P. introduced her to America’s wealthiest class. Belle had a flair for fashion. Stylish and beautiful, she wasn’t afraid to make herself visible — daring, essentially, to hide in plain sight.

Newspapers regularly featured her. One article in the Boston Globe in 1916 wrote, “it is rather gratifying to feminists to reflect that no near-sighted and anemic masculine scholar was Mr. Morgan’s helper in the long task of collecting the library treasure, but a woman, and a young and very pretty one at that.” [1]

Belle soon earned the reputation as the cleverest woman in the country due to her extensive knowledge regarding rare books and art. She knew what she wanted and how to get it by becoming  a savvy purchaser, outsmarting her male counterparts, the dealers and collectors with whom she competed, often beating them at their own game.

In an interview on NPR, authors Benedict and Murray suggested that stereotypes likely contributed to Belle being able to pass as white. Whites commonly perceived Blacks as uneducated and incapable. Belle was anything but. She was educated, confident, and outspoken. She knew how to carry herself in the presence of white upper-class individuals like the Morgans, who ran in rich and complicated circles. [2]

J.P. Morgan died in 1913, passing his library down to his son, J.P. (Jack) Junior. Belle continued to serve as its librarian. In 1924, the collection had become too important to remain private. Jack Morgan gifted the private library to the public as a memorial to his father and named it the Pierpont Morgan Library. He also named Belle director.

Belle worked at the Pierpont Morgan Library for the next 24 years, expanding her reputation for scholarly research. She continued to travel extensively in Europe, attending auctions and collecting artifacts.

Belle never married. She is said, however, to have had a long-standing romantic relationship with Italian Renaissance art expert Bernard Berenson, which is explored fictitiously in The Personal Librarian. Belle and Berenson met in 1909 and enjoyed what the Morgan Library & Museum today refers to as a forty-year epistolary affair. Berenson was married, which may have prevented them from involvement beyond frequent letters and clandestine meetings. Here is Click here for a wonderfully informative video describing their relationship.

Belle retired in 1948. She died in 1950 in New York. It wasn’t until 1999 that J.P. Morgan biographer Jean Strouse discovered Belle’s birth certificate identifying her as “C” for colored. Little more is known, as Belle appears to have destroyed all her personal papers prior to her death.

Today the Pierpont Morgan Library is the Morgan Library & Museum, a major cultural institution. You can see images and hear about the library’s history in this visually rich short video.

Some may view Belle da Costa Greene as an imposter, a woman who pretended to be someone she was not. I believe the opposite. She decided who she was and who she wanted to be, in part doing what circumstances of her era required her to do.

By defying an arbitrary set of rules that were wildly unjust, she didn’t just survive, she thrived. Today she stands as proof of how wrong those rules were and how each individual has a set of choices available to them. While those choices may vary, it is a person’s inner drive and spirit that ultimately prevails.

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The Morgan Library, photo by Mike Peel (mikepee.net)
Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

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Note from Literary Ladies Guide: An exhibit, Belle da Costa Greene: A Librarian’s Legacy, is on view at the Morgan from October 25, 2024 through May 4, 2025. From the museum’s website:

“The exhibition traces Greene’s storied life, from her roots in a predominantly Black community in Washington, D.C., to her distinguished career at the helm of one of the world’s great research libraries. Through extraordinary objects―from medieval manuscripts and rare printed books to archival records and portraits―the exhibition demonstrates the confidence and savvy Greene brought to her roles as librarian, scholar, curator, and cultural executive, and honor her enduring legacy.”

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N.J. Mastro‘s debut novel, Solitary Walker: A Novel of Mary Wollstonecraft, biofiction about Wollstonecraft, the woman widely considered by historians to be the world’s first feminist, will be published in February 2025 by Black Rose Writing. She also writes Herstory Revisited, a blog which reviews biographical fiction about amazing women from history. 

Further reading

Belle da Costa Green, the Morgan’s First Librarian and Director (The Morgan) Belle de Costa Greene: Library Director, Advocate, and Rare Books Expert (LOC) The Story of J.P. Morgan’s ‘Personal Librarian’ — and Why She Chose to Pass as White (NPR)

Notes

[1] Belle de Costa Greene: library director, advocate, and rare books expert. Joanna Colclough. February 9, 2022. Library of Congress. Retrieved from LOC. 

[2] The story of J.P. Morgan’s ‘personal librarian’ — and why she chose to pass as white. Karen Grigsby Bates. NPR. August 31, 2021. Retrieved from NPR.

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