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Shirley Jackson: Mother of the Fictional and Real-Life Teen

This look at the depiction of adolescent and teen girls in the fiction and nonfiction of American author Shirley Jackson is excerpted from Girls in Bloom: Coming of Age in the Mid-20th Century Woman’s Novel by Francis Booth, reprinted by permission.

In the works of Shirley Jackson (1916 – 1965), there is an absence of sex of any kind, other than the veiled implication that Natalie Waite in Hangsaman has had a sexual experience that she does not remember, and which is not described in the novel.

One reason for this lack of sex among her teenage protagonists might be that Jackson had daughters of her own who might read her work. She did know a lot about the adolescent girl; she wrote several of them into her novels and stories, chief among them, the aforementioned Natalie Waite; Harriet Merriam (The Road Through the Wall), and Merricat Blackwood (We Have Always Lived in the Castle).

Northern Gothic

Jackson’s style might be called Northern Gothic, in contrast to Flannery O’Connor’s Southern Gothic. Jackson’s Gothic is much cooler and less febrile than O’Connor’s, the horror is more subtle and told with a flat, deadpan manner.

The work that first made Jackson (in)famous was the short story “The Lottery,” first published in the New Yorker in 1948, in which we slowly come to realize that the apparently very normal inhabitants of the apparently very normal village annually select by lottery one of their neighbors to stone to death; it is the banality, the ordinariness of the people and their environment – what Hannah Arendt later called “the banality of evil” – that makes it so shocking; Jackson was deluged with hate mail of a very vicious and personal nature.

Her most famous novel, The Haunting of Hill House, is an equally subtle and slow-revealing story but this time a full-length novel, that Stephen King praised as one of the greatest of American ghost stories and that has been compared with The Turn of the Screw for its pervasive atmosphere of ambivalent menace. King especially praised the book’s first line: “No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality.” King said, “there are few if any descriptive passages in the English language that are finer.”

One of Jackson’s most Gothic novels is The Sundial, which Jackson herself called “a nasty little novel full of mean people who hate each other.” As in We Have Always Lived in the Castle and The Haunting of Hill House, a grand old house is at the center of the story and a character in its own right. This was a key trope in Gothic novels with malign settings like the Castle of Otranto, Castle Udolpho, and Northanger Abbey, though the latter turns out not to be malign at all.

In Jackson’s version of the Gothic castle lives one of her most memorable creations, the appalling ten-year-old Fancy Halloran (another version of the name Frances) of The Sundial (1958) not yet a teenager and nowhere near to coming of age but fully realized in wickedness; a kind of literary version of Wednesday Addams. (The Addams Family, with their own spooky, Gothic house, had started appearing in The New Yorker in 1938.)

     Young Mrs. Halloran, looking after her mother-in-law, said without hope, “maybe she will drop dead on the doorstep. Fancy, dear, would you like to see Granny drop dead on the doorstep?”
    “Yes, Mother.” Fancy pulled at the long black dress her grandmother had put on her…
     “I am going to pray for it as long as I live,” said young Mrs. Halloran, folding her hands together devoutly.
     “Shall I push her,” Fancy asked, “Like she pushed my daddy?”
     “Fancy!” said Mrs. Ogilvie.
     “Let her say it if she wants,” young Mrs. Halloran said. “I want her to remember it, anyway. Say it again, Fancy baby.”
     “Granny killed my daddy,” said Fancy obediently. “She pushed him down the stairs and killed him. Granny did it. Didn’t she?”

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Girls in Bloom by Francis Booth on Amazon*
Girls in Bloom on Amazon UK*
Girls in Bloom in full on Issuu
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Jannie wants to be Jo March

By the time her later novels were being published, Jackson had teenagers of her own and knew how to write them. As well as publishing her serious work, both novels and stories, she regularly contributed frothy vignettes of her own family life to women’s magazines, which were collected as Life Among the Savages (1953) and Raising Demons (1957); the demons of course being her own children: Laurence; Joanne; Sally and Barry, in that order.

Joanne, known in the family as Jannie, is a keen reader, unlike her older brother – in this they are very much like many of the brother/sister pairs in Girls in Bloom. Jannie is also like many of her fictional counterparts in that she is obsessed with Little Women to an extent that even her writer mother finds worrying. In one scene Jackson calls to her from the foot of the stairs.

There was a pause and then Jannie said, sniffling, “Yes?”
“Good heavens,” I said, “are you reading Little Women again?”
Jannie sniffled. “Just the part where Beth dies.”
“Look,” I said, “the sun is shining and the sky is blue and –”

Later they have a full-blown mother/daughter bonding session over that book and writing in general; again like many of her fictional counterparts, Jannie wants to be a writer, as does Jackson’s daughter Sally: Jackson’s late essay ‘Notes for a Young Writer’ was ‘originally written as a stimulus to my daughter Sally, who wants to be a writer.’ Although not obviously a tomboy herself, Jannie, like most girls, identifies most closely with Jo March.

     I was sitting at the kitchen table grating potatoes for potato pancakes and was thus a wholly captive audience when Jannie came in from school with her arithmetic and spelling books, and, of course, Little Women. She put the books down, took off her jacket and hat, took an apple, and sat down at the table across from me. “I’ve been meaning to ask you for a long time,” she said. “Suppose I wanted to write a book. Where would I begin?”
     “At the beginning,” I said smartly; I had just grated my knuckle.
     “I wish Laurie and Barry were girls,” she said.
     “Why on earth?”
     “And Sally’s name was Beth.”
     “Why put the whammy on Sally? Why don’t you be Beth?”
     “I’m Jo.”
     “And Laurie is Meg? And poor Barry has to be Amy?”
     “If they were only girls.”
     “And does that make me Marmee? Or can I be the old cook?”
     “Hannah? When I write my book –“
     “I’d rather be crazy old Aunt March, come to think of it. Who do you like for Professor Bhaer?”
     Jannie turned pink. “I didn’t really think about that yet,” she said.
     Charitably, I changed the subject. “Don’t you have any homework to do?” I asked.
     She sighed. “I’ve got to write a book report,” she said. “That’s why I’d like to write a book, so then I could write a book report on that, and save all that time.”

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Shirley Jackson on Motherhood, Experience, and Fiction Writing
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The joys and perils of parenting an adolescent girl

As well as contributing these domestic scenes to various magazines, Jackson also wrote and published several essays about the joys and perils of being the mother of an adolescent girl. In “Mother, Honestly!” She talks about being the mother of a twelve-year-old girl and captures perfectly the sudden transition from girl to about-to-be woman.

     Those mothers who have lasted till a child has reached twelve have themselves pretty well in hand… now that the girl is twelve she is practically grown-up and can take care of herself and begin to be responsible.
     I know mothers who keep telling themselves and telling themselves it is like that, their voices getting more and more shrill, wringing their hands and grinding their teeth. Now the girl is twelve, they say, she’s practically grown-up. She is. She is. She is.
     That’s me.
     Last year I sent my daughter, an agreeable child who liked to play baseball and thought boys were silly, off to camp. I got back – and it only took two months – a creature who slept with curlers in her hair, bought perfume from the five-and-ten, and addressed me as nothing but “Mother, honestly”
     … She is growing up and pretty soon now she will start being responsible and neat and sensible. I must be more tolerant… One thing really bothers me. I recently met a mother whose daughter is sixteen. When I remarked casually that I would be happy when my daughter outgrew her present stage and became more sensible and responsible, she just looked at me for one long minute and then began to laugh. She laughed and laughed and laughed. As I say, that bothers me a little.

Jackson later wrote an article titled “On Girls of Thirteen” in which she talks about the mythical girl to whom her daughter always refers when she is forbidden to do something. This girl is “thirteen years old. She is allowed to cut her own hair. She is also allowed to wear lipstick all the time; she uses bright red nail polish and heavily scented bath salts, and stays up as late at night as she pleases.”

This imaginary girl goes to any dance she likes and stays out as late as she likes afterward, goes to the movies on school nights, and is allowed to walk out with a boy without having to introduce him to her parents first. “I don’t know her name or where she lives, but I’d like to get my hands on her. Just for about five minutes. She is the lowest common denominator, the altogether anonymous ‘everyone else’ who rules the lives of thirteen-year-old girls and their miserable mothers.”

 

Betsy of “The Missing Girl”

There is a thirteen-year-old girl, Betsy, in Jackson’s story “The Missing Girl,” set in the Phillips Education Camp for Girls Twelve to Sixteen; both the story and the setting are rather reminiscent of Eudora Welty’s story Moon Lake. She is as awkward and as uncommunicative with adults as Jackson’s non-fictional thirteen-year-olds. Betsy, who has roomed with the eponymous missing girl, is being questioned by the chief of police. She tells him the missing girl “said she had something to do.”

The chief asks Betsy how she said it; perhaps she was lying? ‘“She just said it,” said Betsy, who had reached that point of stubbornness most thirteen-year-old girls have when it seems that adult obscurity has passed beyond necessity. “I told you eight times.” Later in the same story, the librarian tells the chief, “one girl is much like another, at this age. Their unformed minds, unformed bodies, their little mistakes.”

 

Memories of Jackson’s own teen years

Finally, in Jackson’s essay ‘All I Can Remember’ which was printed as the preface to the story collection Just an Ordinary Day, she talks about her memories of herself as a teenager. She begins: “All I can remember clearly about being sixteen is that it was a particularly agonizing age.”

Like some of her characters, and many others in Girls in Bloom, she is a voracious reader and this is the age at which she decides to become a writer. Again, Jackson perfectly captures the awkwardness of the teenager and the difficulty of communication between herself and her parents; the teenage Jackson in this description very closely matches Harriet Merriam in The Road Through the Wall.

I also remember such a tremendous and frustrated irritation with whatever I was reading at the time – heaven knows what it could have been, considering some of the things I put away about that time – that I decided one evening that since there were no books in the world fit to read, I would write one.

After dismissing the poetic drama as outmoded and poetry as far too difficult, I finally settled on a mystery story as easiest to write and probably easiest to read…

After the first two or three murders, the story got rather sketchy, because I had not enough patience to waste all that time with investigation, so I put the names of my characters together and took my manuscript downstairs to read to my family.

My mother was knitting, my father was reading a newspaper, and my brother was doing something – probably carving his initials in the coffee table – and I persuaded them all to listen to me; I read them the entire manuscript, and when I had finished, the conversation went approximately like this:

brother: Whaddyou call that?
mother: It’s very nice, dear.
father: Very nice, very nice. (to my mother) You call them about the furnace?
brother: Only thing is, you ought to get all those people killed. (raucous laughter)
mother: Shirley, in all that time upstairs I hope you remembered to make your bed.

I do not remember what character eventually came out of the hat with blood on his hands, but I do remember that I decided never to read another mystery story and never to write another mystery story; never, as a matter of fact, to write anything ever again. I had already decided finally that I was never going to be married and certainly would never have any children.

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Contributed by Francis Booth,* the author of several books on twentieth century culture:

Amongst Those Left: The British Experimental Novel 1940-1960 (published by Dalkey Archive); Everybody I Can Think of Ever: Meetings That Made the Avant-Garde;  Girls in Bloom: Coming of Age in the Mid-Twentieth Century Woman’s Novel; Text Acts: Twentieth Century Literary Eroticism; and Comrades in Art: Revolutionary Art in America 1926-1938

Francis has also published several novels: The Code 17 series, set in the Swinging London of the 1960s and featuring aristocratic spy Lady Laura Summers; Young adult fantasy series The Watchers; and  Young adult fantasy novel Mirror Mirror. Francis lives on the South Coast of England. He is currently working on High Collars and Monocles: Interwar Novels by Female Couples.

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*These are Amazon Affiliate links. If a product is purchased by linking through, Literary Ladies Guide receives a modest commission, which helps maintain our site and helps it to continue growing!

The post Shirley Jackson: Mother of the Fictional and Real-Life Teen appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.

Beryl Markham, Aviatrix, Adventurer, Author of West with the Night

Beryl Markham (October 26, 1902 – August 3, 1986) is perhaps best remembered as a pioneering aviatrix, becoming the first person to fly solo across the Atlantic nonstop from Britain to North America. She was also a racehorse trainer and had torrid love affairs and tepid marriages, all of which she recounted in her famed  1942 memoir, West with the Night.

Born Beryl Clutterbuck, she seemed at first destined to lead the kind of life described in old English novels – an uneventful childhood in a grand country house; schooling in literature, language, and sewing by a Jane Eyre-like governess; attending swish parties and tea dances until the day a handsome man from a fine family proposes, and that would be that. Then, having babies, supervising the staff, gardening, and fox hunting for the rest of her life.

But Fate had other ideas. Beryl spent her childhood in Kenya, and grew up to breed champion racehorses and pilot planes. Encouraged by Antoine de Saint Exupery, she wrote what would become a classic memoir about Africa, West with the Night. This book, Ernest Hemingway opined, was so good it made him feel ashamed because “she can write rings around all of us who consider ourselves writers.” As is well known, Hemingway was rarely complimentary towards fellow writers.

 Early life

Beryl’s father, Charles Clutterbuck, a former military man who struggled financially, sought his fortune in East Africa. He bought a thousand acres, mostly heavy bush and open pasture, in Kenya’s Rift Valley. In 1906, he moved his wife and two small children there from the Midlands. Beryl was then was three years old. Her mother, Clara Agnes Markham, lasted only eighteen months in Kenya before returning to England with their son, Beryl’s brother Richard.

Beryl and her father were left to their own devices. She later explained she was raised “in a world without walls,” as her father was busy running the farm and raising horses while she hunted and played with the tribesmen working on the farm — the Nandi, Kipsigis, Luo, Kikuyu, and Masai. She learned all of their languages, with Swahili becoming her first tongue.

Later, Beryl was sent to boarding school in Nairobi. After three years, she was expelled for being unruly and fomenting revolt among her fellow pupils. Her father read her the classics as she grew up, and she continued this habit into adulthood. This pastime would eventually serve her writing well.

By the age of eighteen, Beryl become the first woman to become a licensed horse trainer. Her reputation grew as her stock won more races, including the prestigious Kenya St. Leger. Women were still not licensed in England to train so she was a true pioneer.

Also at age eighteen, she married an older wealthy neighbor named Jock Purves. According to Mary Lovell, who wrote the excellent biography, Straight On Till Morning, the rumor was that her father married her off due to financial problems with the farm brought on by drought. Beryl never confirmed this. The loveless match lasted only two years.

By then, Beryl’s father had gone broke and moved to Peru to raise thoroughbreds. She was miserable with her husband, so she focused on her horses, socialized with the Happy Colony set of Nairobi (including Karen Blixen — better known by her pen name as the writer Isak Dinesen — and Denys Finch Hatton).

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Learning to fly, and a royal romance

At age twenty-four, she sought a divorce. By then she had started to fly, mentored by pilots like Finch Hatton. As Blixen’s love affair with Finch Hatton wound down, Beryl took up with him herself. Finch Hatton wasn’t the marrying kind, and eventually she married Mansfield Markham, an English aristocrat, by whose surname she became known.

Beryl Markham’s personal life grew ever more interesting; many find her life as thrilling as her writing. With her white-blonde hair, lithe build, and cover-girl good looks, paramours were easy to come by. She had an affair with Prince Henry, the Duke of Gloucester (the Prince of Wales brother), and the wags claimed he was the father of her son, Gervase.

When word got around, Henry was forced to end the romance, and Beryl was given a small annuity for the rest of her life. This was fortuitous; like her father, she was terrible with money. Marriage wasn’t her strong suit, either. Her marriage to Mansfield Markham failed, exacerbated by rumors of her liaison with the Duke.

Beryl needed to find a way to make a living. She obtained a pilot’s license and spent the next several years, from 1931 to 1936, delivering mail, ferrying passengers, and scouting elephants for safaris all over Sudan, Kenya, Tanzania, and Zimbabwe. Many of these flights are the basis of stories in West with the Night.

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Denys Finch Hatton
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Relationship with Denys Finch Hatton

Beryl met Denys Finch Hatton when she was about eighteen, and became a friend of both his Karen Blixen’s; they later ran in the same social circles. Blixen and Hatton were together about six years, however, Blixen was very possessive and wanted to get married. Finch Hatton wasn’t the marrying kind, and over time, this caused a terrible rift between them.   

As the relationship continued to deteriorate, Finch Hatton moved out of Blixen’s farm to the Muthaiga Club in Nairobi, where Beryl Markham also happened to be staying after returning from England. Her affair with Prince Henry had come to an end — at the Queen’s insistence. But Beryl and Finch Hatton’s affair had started before this, and they were very well suited. She considered him, according to biographer Mary Lovell, a mentor, brother, lover, friend; in her eyes, as Lovell says, she was the only man who could shore up against her father.   

Finch Hatton helped Markham in many ways; he inspired her to read the classics, learn how to educate herself, and enjoy life. He also helped her with her flying. The affair ended when he invited her to fly to the coast and visit his house. Her aviation teacher had a premonition and asked her not to make that trip, confident that she was close to being able to go solo.

Beryl she stayed behind. A few days later, Finch Hatton and his servant were killed upon take-off in a fiery crash. His death came at the height of their romance, so what would have happened next, we can only speculate.

From “Birth of a Life,” a chapter in West with the Night where Markham writes about learning to fly and her friendship with Denys Finch Hatton:

“Denys was a keystone in an arch whose other stones were other lives. If a keystone trembles, the arch will carry the warning along its entire curve, then, if the keystone is crushed, the arch will fall, leaving its lesser stones heaped close together, though for a while without design.  Denys’ death left some lives without design, but they were rebuilt again, as lives and stones are, into other patterns.”

He had been one of her early mentors for flying and she went on to great, courageous accomplishments in aviation. Finch Hatton had been instrumental in helping her to believe in herself.

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Beryl Markham in 1936
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A pioneering aviatrix, and West with the Night

In 1936, Markham became the first woman to travel across the Atlantic, east to west, and the first pilot to fly from England to North America. Her plane, The Messenger, was supposed to land in New York, but after 21 hours and 25 minutes, she crash-landed in Nova Scotia, miraculously surviving with only a gash to the forehead.At first it was assumed that her plane had run out of fuel, though what actually happened was that the gas line had frozen.

Beryl Markham became an international star overnight, prompting her to begin writing West with the Night. Published in 1942, the book spent many weeks on The New York Times bestseller list as Number #1. These two glowing reviews were typical of the book’s reception:

“When a book like Beryl Markham’s West with the Night comes along it leaves a reviewer very humble. Words of praise used for other works seem trite and thin. For West with the Night is more than an autobiography; it is a poet’s feeling for her land; an adventurer’s response to life; a philosopher’s evaluation of human beings and human destinies.” (Rose Field, Books, July 5, 1942)

“Beryl Markham does more than tell of Africa. With admirable modesty, she offers us a thrilling as well as appealing saga of a very valiant and very human woman, philosophically pitting her skill, bolstered by limitless faith in herself, against relentless Nature in all her multifarious disguises, in the dank jungles, the desert wastes, and the boundless skies.” (Linton Wells, Saturday Review of Literature, June 27, 1942)

Fame and fortune came her way, followed by a return to love, when she met the charming Raoul Schumacher in Los Angeles. Their meeting was a coup de foudre. The couple moved from New York to New Mexico then back to California, smitten, writing together, and married.

When the U.S. entered World War II, West with the Night practically vanished. The public was no longer interested in reading odes to Africa and Beryl’s adventures. She received royalties for a few years, providing a small income, and eventually, the book went out of print.

Beryl’s husband, Raoul Schumacher, claimed to be a Hollywood writer, biographer Lovell found no listings of employment at the studios. He also claimed to be a ghostwriter, but there’s no evidence of this, either. To his credit, he was an excellent editor. He and Beryl began collaborating on short stories, published under her name in magazines like The Saturday Evening Post and Cosmopolitan. Eventually, Lovell compiled the stories in the collection The Splendid Outcast.

The pay for the short fiction was generous, so the couple, still madly in love, kept writing and throwing marvelous parties. However, Schumacher’s drinking got out of hand, and eventually, this marriage, too, was doomed to fail. By 1948, Markham moved back to Kenya to train racehorses and seek a divorce.

Rumors she had not written West with the Night began to surface, and dogged her for decades. The gossip was brutal — particularly the claim Markham was nearly illiterate and couldn’t have written such a book. Contrary to this absurd claim, anyone who is illiterate couldn’t possibly earn a commercial pilot’s license, nor speak five languages. Markham had many mentors, including her father as well as Denys Finch Hatton, who encouraged her to educate herself. 

 

A biographer’s perspective

Mary Lovells’ biographies are objective, though she set out to destroy her subjects. After all, they’re usually no longer alive to defend themselves. Lovell sets out to tell a tale based on fact, not smash our idols forevermore; the reader has at least a modicum of respect for the subject.

Beryl was indeed a lousy mother — her son Gervase was raised by her mother-in-law for the most part — and she had many liaisons. She also blurred her vignettes sometimes and may have exaggerated— though this is poetic license most writers take advantage of to craft a compelling narrative.

After much research, Lovell was convinced that Beryl was the true author of West with the Night, and Schumacher helped with editing (for which Markham later thanked him for in her acknowledgments). Lovell writes that there are even surviving manuscript pages with his edits. and most of the book was written when Beryl was staying in the Bahamas, later sending large parts of the manuscript to her publisher in New York; Schumacher never visited his wife in the Bahamas. Nevertheless, Schumacher was broken by his problems and the divorce, so he and his friends may have started the hearsay.

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Rediscovery of West with the Night

West with the Night remained out of print until 1983 when fate intervened. By then, Beryl was back in Kenya living off a small trust fund funded by the royal family. At Christmas, according to Lovell, a stranger had written her with an interesting story. The letter writer, George Gutekunst, a restaurateur from California, had been fishing with Ernest Hemingway’s son Jack, who encouraged him to read his father’s letters (“They’re very revealing.”). When he did, he noticed Hemingway’s comment to his editor Maxwell Perkins about Beryl Markham and West with the Night.

Intrigued, Gutekunst was able to find one lonely copy of West with the Night in a library and read the book in one sitting. Astounded, he immediately read it again, believing he had rediscovered literary gold. He showed the book to Evan Connell, the author of Mrs. Bridge; they sent it to North Point Press. West with the Night was reissued to great acclaim and the grapevine about authorship was reignite. Lovell’s Straight On Till Morning, published in 1987, has put all the rumors to rest. 

The chapters in West with the Night could each stand on their own as short stories. The prose is elegant (perhaps Saint Exupery’s influence) and lovingly detailed. Passages are infused with haunting phantasmagoric beauty, bringing to life a world that no longer exists.

The publishers and editors at North Point Press secured the U.S. and British rights and the book was reissued in 1983. West with the Night was well received by the critics again, although talk re-emerged that Raoul Schumacher was the author — there was a Vanity Fair article written by one of Raoul’s friends claiming this.   

The response to the reprint was thunderous. The first printing of her book had been 5,000 in 1983, a year later 9,100 whereas in 1986 North Print sold 15,000 quickly and had to reprint 100,000 more. Beryl Markham did receive the royalties due her. 

What really helped the book was George Gutekunst (who had found out about her from Hemingway’s letters) also raised money for a documentary on her life from the likes of TV station KQED in San Francisco ; he also put up at least $20,000 of his own money. “World Without Walls” was aired in the Bay area in 1986.   

Though Beryl died in Kenya in 1986, it’s likely that she saw the film because she cooperated with the material and got a lot of attention from reporters afterwards. Around the time of her death, there was an effort to make a movie version of West with the Night though that hadn’t come to fruition. In 1988 director Tony Richardson made a TV movie about her called “A Shadow on the Sun.”

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West with the Night on Bookshop.org*
Beryl Markham page on Amazon*
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Beryl Markham’s legacy

For writers with interesting lives, stories can write themselves. Beryl Markham certainly had rich subject matter – being attacked by a lion as a child; saving a stranded pilot from the desert; the death of the love of her life Finch Hatton (on a flight she was supposed to take with him); the list is endless.

Adventurous, fearless, Beryl Markham shattered glass ceilings long before the term had been coined. To borrow from William Butler Yeats, she had a fascination with what is difficult, and she has bequeathed her memories and experiences in her fine book and stories to generations of readers.

The last word comes from the eponymous chapter “West with the Night”:

“You can live a lifetime and, at the end of it, know more about other people than you know about yourself. You learn to watch other people, but you never watch yourself because you strive against loneliness. If you read a book, or shuffle a deck of cards, or care for a dog, you are avoiding yourself. The abhorrence of loneliness is as natural as wanting to live at all. If it were otherwise, men would never have bothered to make an alphabet, nor to have fashioned words out of what were only animal sounds, nor to have crossed continents – each man to see what the other looked like.”

Contributed by Tyler Scott. Tyler lives in Blackstone, Virginia with her husband and Norfolk Terrier.  Her essays and articles have appeared in numerous magazines and newspapers and her novel The Excellent Advice of a Few Famous Painters*  is available on Amazon.

Sources

Lovell, Mary. Straight On Till Morning, The Life of Beryl Markham. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987Markham, Beryl. West with the Night. San Francisco: North Point Press, 1983Markham, Beryl. The Splendid Outcast, Beryl Markham’s African Stories. San Francisco: North Point Press, 1987

Historic Fiction

McLain, Paula, Circling the Sun . New York: Ballantine Books, 2015

More about Beryl Markham

Wikipedia Reader discussion on Goodreads The Many Lives of Beryl Markham

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*These are Bookshop Affiliate and Amazon Affiliate links. If a product is purchased by linking through, Literary Ladies Guide receives a modest commission, which helps maintain our site and helps it to continue growing!

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The Age of Phillis by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers: A review

The Age of Phillis by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers illuminates the life and significance of Phillis Wheatley Peters, the enslaved African American whose 1773 book of poetry, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, challenged prevailing assumptions about the intellectual and moral abilities of Africans and women.

In The Age of Phillis (Wesleyan University Press, 2020), which won the 2021 NAACP Image Award for “Outstanding Literary Work—Poetry” and was long-listed for the National Book Award, Jeffers portrays the life of the poet both before she was taken from her home in West Africa and throughout her lifetime in the United States, first enslaved and later free.

I became aware of the book by attending a virtual reading and can attest that Jeffers’s reading style is dynamic and worth searching out in audio and video recordings on the internet.

Jeffers, recipient of the 2018 Harper Lee Award for Literary Distinction (a lifetime achievement award), presents not only Wheatley, but many others of her era, enslaved and free, through one hundred poems that draw on primary sources to provide insight not only into the circumstances of Wheatley’s life, but into the people and conditions that condoned the horrors of slavery.

Jeffers portrays the ways that these conditions affected Phillis even when she is not directly mentioned. The poem “Catalog: Water,” describes the 1781 voyage of the slave ship Zong, in which well over one hundred (estimates range between 130 and 180) living enslaved people were thrown overboard to drown, in verses that appear arranged on the page to evoke a sailing ship’s tacking against the wind.

 

Jeffers begins:

I know I’ll try your patience,
As I have for several years:
When I talk of slavery,

And ends by saying

Don’t you know that
Drowned folks will rise
To croon signs to me?
And anyway, I didn’t tell

This story to please you.
I built this altar for them.

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More about Phillis Wheatley
10 Poems by Phillis Wheatley
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An imagined biography based on research

Jeffers employs a variety of poetic forms to present a largely imagined biography of Wheatley, drawing on information she gleans from existing sources to postulate the area of her birth (likely the West African region of Senegambia), her religion (likely Muslim), her life with the Wheatleys (who purchased her from a Boston slave market), her friendship with Obour Tanner (a woman enslaved in nearby Rhode Island), her travel to London following the publication of her book, and her courtship and marriage to John Peters.

I especially like Jeffers’s use, at times, of different typefaces to indicate a double consciousness on the part of Wheatley and others—a consciousness of her African heritage as well as of her circumstances in colonial Boston. In essence, Jeffers conveys the necessity of code-switching. “Lost Letter #14: John Peters, Boston, to Phillis Wheatley, Boston” briefly excerpted here, offers one example:

                                          … Miss Wheatley,
will you take my favor to heart? If you will not
cherish me, at least, will you not discard?

                                          […here is a black
man in front of you I am not afraid to love you
in the old african ways here is someone your father
would accept woman I am asking for your hand]

 

 Wheatley’s contemporaries

Other poems portray the struggles of Phillis’s contemporaries—including those of Elizabeth Freeman, who sued for her freedom; of Ona Judge, who escaped enslavement in the home of George and Martha Washington; and of Belinda Sutton, who won a pension from the state of Massachusetts for the years in which she was enslaved. We learn of Black men who fought for American independence and of those who won freedom in Canada by fighting for the British.

In one particularly striking poem, Jeffers portrays George Washington’s consternation over how to respond to a poem and a letter he received from Phillis:

Her letter trembles in my hand, dances
      with confusion, swaying past the stars—

… and makes it clear that Phillis is a challenge to that other age, the term often used to describe the era of the American Revolution—the Enlightenment, or the Age of Reason, and its failure to dismantle slavery:

Her quill and life defy my age’s Reason.

The word Reason can be read in different ways in this line: it can suggest common sense and might at the same time refer to the rationale for enslavement—white supremacy. Either way, the poem is a brilliant response to one of Wheatley’s most famous poems — “To His Excellency General Washington.”

I’ve read this oft-anthologized poem many times. When I was younger, the old-fashioned language bored me. Later, it made me uncomfortable to read an enslaved woman praising a white male slaveowner in the elevated language of heroic couplets—but Jeffers’s depiction of Washington’s discomfiture on receiving Wheatley’s poem transforms it from an act of obeisance to one of self-assertion. 

 

 

A multiplicity of meanings

What I appreciated most about Jeffers’s book was the multiplicity of meanings I found in the title. Most obviously, “the age of Phillis” refers to the era in which Phillis lived and wrote. But the title poem, one of the most moving in the book, begins by asking:

How old was the child when she first laughed/in her master’s kitchen?

and ends by asking

And what was the age
of Phillis when she stopped turning East,
thinking of water in faithful bowls
of her parents,

of love only ending in death?
There is no such age. There never will be
though a sister’s mouth might tell you lies.

But ultimately, Jeffers implies that the age of Phillis is still with us by presenting many poems in the form of blues and by drawing on the work of the Black poets and artists for whom Wheatley opened the way.

Anyone who picks up this book will benefit from the notes on the poems, as Jeffers explains in them the connections of various poems to the work of those such as June Jordan, Romare Bearden, Langston Hughes, Robert Hayden, Lucille Clifton, Elizabeth Alexander, Audre Lorde, Rita Dove, Nikki Giovanni, and Paul Lawrence Dunbar.

. . . . . . . . . .

The Age of Phillis on Bookshop.org*
The Age of Phillis on Amazon*
. . . . . . . . . .

Contradictions and challenges

Finally, this remarkable book ends with a 20-page essay titled “Looking for Miss Phillis,” in which Jeffers describes her fifteen-year search for historical documentation into the life of Wheatley and those she knew. What she finds leads her to question the reliability of the author of the most frequently cited source on Wheatley, Margaretta Matilda Odell, a white woman who identified herself as the relative of Susanna Wheatley, Phillis’s owner. Odell wrote about the poet fifty years after Phillis’s death.

While Odell offers Phillis’s achievements as an argument against slavery, Jeffers points out that her depiction of John Peters as abusive and untrustworthy is contradicted by the historical record. Jeffers speculates that Odell might have perceived Peters, who tried and failed in several enterprises, including law, commerce, and real estate, as an “uppity” man, but in the present day, one can’t help but wonder about the role of racism in his failures.

While Odell claims that Peters abandoned Phillis, Jeffers finds evidence that the man was in debtors’ prison, likely the result of his business failures. Thus Phillis, despite her genius, faced the same systemic financial and legal barriers that hinder many African American people today.

The combination of the poems, the notes on the poems, and the essay add power to this unusual book and pave the way for a reinterpretation of Wheatley’s poems that acknowledge her true circumstances before, during, and after her enslavement. What might appear to be a collection of poems inspired by Wheatley and her time demands to be read as a unity, much like a novel or biography.

Phillis Wheatley has been called a genius for her mastery of traditional poetic forms despite her arrival in Boston with not a word of English or any level of literacy. Yet Jeffers’s depiction asks us to attribute yet another form of genius to Wheatley — her ability to master the code-switching that must have been essential to her survival and her poetic and public achievements. Jeffers has another book forthcoming this May: her first novel, The Love Songs of W.E.B. DuBois. I suspect I am only one of many who cannot wait to read it!

Contributed by Lynne Weiss: Lynne’s writing has appeared in Black Warrior Review; Brain, Child; The Common OnLine; the Ploughshares blog; the [PANK] blog; Wild Musette; Main Street Rag; and Radcliffe Magazine. She received an MFA from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and has won grants and residency awards from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the Millay Colony, the Vermont Studio Center, and Yaddo. She loves history, theater, and literature, and for many years, she has earned her living by developing history and social studies materials for educational publishers. She lives outside Boston, where she is working on a novel set in Cornwall and London in the early 1930s. You can see more of her work at LynneWeiss.org. 

 

. . . . . . . . . .

*These are Bookshop Affiliate and Amazon Affiliate link. If a product is purchased by linking through, Literary Ladies Guide receives a modest commission, which helps maintain our site and helps it to continue growing!

The post The Age of Phillis by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers: A review appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.

Fearlessly Facing Aging: Poems by Grace Paley

A poet has the ability to bring to the light our most inexpressible fears and doubts. When the subject is aging – the subject most of us try to avoid – it is the poets we turn to find the comfort and the clarity we need. Grace Paley is one of the poets who can instruct the heart and mind on living with death, as evidenced by this selection of her poems on aging. 

For the last ten years of her life, Grace wrote poetry on the complexities of living with death as we grow older. “Nature takes its course,” is how we have been instructed to perceive our passing, but what about our other contradictory emotions and realities.

What about our spouse — who will die first and how will the other carry on with daily life. What about our extreme grieving — for a sister or friend — and Grace’s manner of coping seems to be the wisest one: having intimate conversations with her sister — who had died before her – on how to cope with that day’s challenges. Then there is the misplaced grievance regarding our good steps to prolong our lives, only to be disappointed later on: nature does take its course and how we accept that is up to us.

. . . . . . . .

More about Grace Paley
. . . . . . . .

Grace Paley was born in the Bronx in 1922 and died in 2007 of breast cancer. She’s best known for her incomparable and experimental short stories. The stories from Paley’s short story collections, Enormous Changes at the Last Minute, The Little Disturbances of Man, and Later the Same Day, were published in one volume, Collected Stories, which was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award.

Paley was also a renowned essayist and poet. Fidelity, her final collection of poems, was published in 2008, a year after her death in Vermont. The six poems collected here will offer the reader comfort and joy as we contemplate the final mystery of all, death and dying.

 

Further reading about Grace Paley as a poet

Poetry Foundation Poets House Grace Paley’s Political Poems

. . . . . . . . . .

Fear

I am afraid of nature
because of nature    I am mortal
my children and my grandchildren
are also mortal
I lived in the city for forty years
in this way I escaped fear

. . . . . . . . . .
 

Sisters

My friends are dying
well we’re old    it’s natural
one day we passed the experience of “older”
which began in late middle age
and came suddenly upon “old”    then
all the little killing bugs are
baby tumors that had struggled
for year’s against the body’s
brave immunities found their
level playing fields and
victory
but that is not what I meant to
tell you    I wanted to say that
my friends were dying but have now
become absent    the word dead is correct
but inappropriate
I have not taken their names out of
conversation    gossip    political argument
my telephone book or card index in
what ever alphabetical or contextual
organizer    I can stop any evening of
the lonesome week at Claiborne    Bercovici
Vernarelli    Deming and rest a moment
on their seriousness as artists workers
their excitement as political actors in the
streets of our cities or in their workplaces
the vigilant    fasting    praying in or out
of jail    their lightheartedness which floated
above the year’s despair
their courageous sometimes hilarious
disobediences before the state’s official
servants    their fidelity to the idea that
it is possible with only a little extra anguish
to live in this world    at an absolute minimum
loving brainy sexual energetic redeemed

 

. . . . . . . . . . 

Windows

this eighty-year-old body is
a fairly old body    what’s it
doing around the house these days
checking the laundry    brooms
still work    what’s for dinner
there are the windows     look    oh
beyond the river    Smarts Mountain
with the sun’s help is recomposing all
its little hills    never saw it that way
before    windows    the afternoon story
I had thought the tumors
on my spine would kills me but
the tumors on my head seem to be
extraordinarily competitive this week
For the past twenty or thirty years
I have eaten the freshest most
organic and colorful fruits and
vegetables   I did not drink    I
did drink one small glass of red
wine with dinner nearly every day
as suggested by The New York Times
I should have taken longer walks but
obviously I have done something wrong
I don’t mean morally or ethically or
geographically    I did not live near
a nuclear graveyard or under a coal
stack    nor did I allow my children
to do so    I lived in a city no worse t
than any other great and famous city    I
lived one story above a street that led
cabs and ambulances to the local hospital
that didn’t seem so bad and was
often convenient
In any event I am
already old and therefore a little ashamed
to have written this poem full
of complaints against mortality which
biological fact I have been constructed for
to hand on to my children and grand-
children as I receive it from my
dar mother and father and beloved
grandmother who all
ah    if I remember it
were in great pain at     leaving
and were furiously saying goodbye

. . . . . . . . . .

Even

Even at pain’s deafening intrusion
my friend could not forget the pleasant
blasphemous jokes of our daily conver-
nations    she said    grace don’t take me out
of the telephone book of your heart    and I
have not there she is under S for Syb    and
Claiborne still under C

 

. . . . . . . . . .

My Sister and My Grandson

I have been talking to my sister    she
may not know she’s been dust and ashes
for the last two years     I talk to her
nearly every day
I’ve been telling her about our new baby
who is serious    comical    busy    dark    my
sister    out of all the rubble and grit
that is now her    my sister mutters    what
about our baby    he was smart    loving
so beautiful
yes yes I said    listen just last week
he stopped at my hallway door    he saw
your small Turkish rug    he stared at it
he fell to his knees his arms wide    crying
Jeannie   oh my own auntie Jeannie
remembered    ah    her hard whisper came to me
thank you Grace    now speak to him tell him
he’s still my deepest love

. . . . . . . . . .

One day

One day
one of us
will be lost
to the other
that has been
talked about but
lightly    turning
away    shyness    this business of con-
fronting the
preference for survival
my mother said    the
children are grown    we
are both so sick    let us
die together    my father
replied    no no    you
will be well    he lied
of course I
want you in the world
whether I’m in it or
not    your spirit
I probably mean
there is always
something to say    in
the end    speaking
without breath    one
of us will be lost
to the other

. . . . . . . . . .

Contributed by Nancy Snyder, who writes about women writers and labor women. After working for the City and County of San Francisco for thirty years, she is now learning everything about Henry David Thoreau in Los Angeles.

 

The post Fearlessly Facing Aging: Poems by Grace Paley appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.

Fearless Poems by Grace Paley on Aging

A poet has the ability to bring to the light our most inexpressible fears and doubts. When the subject is aging – the subject most of us try to avoid – it is the poets we turn to find the comfort and the clarity we need. Grace Paley is one of the poets who can instruct the heart and mind on living with death, as evidenced by this selection of her poems on aging. 

For the last ten years of her life, Grace wrote poetry on the complexities of living with death as we grow older. “Nature takes its course,” is how we have been instructed to perceive our passing, but what about our other contradictory emotions and realities.

What about our spouse — who will die first and how will the other carry on with daily life. What about our extreme grieving — for a sister or friend — and Grace’s manner of coping seems to be the wisest one: having intimate conversations with her sister — who had died before her – on how to cope with that day’s challenges. Then there is the misplaced grievance regarding our good steps to prolong our lives, only to be disappointed later on: nature does take its course and how we accept that is up to us.

. . . . . . . .

More about Grace Paley
. . . . . . . .

Grace Paley was born in the Bronx in 1922 and died in 2007 of breast cancer. She’s best known for her incomparable and experimental short stories. The stories from Paley’s short story collections, Enormous Changes at the Last Minute, The Little Disturbances of Man, and Later the Same Day, were published in one volume, Collected Stories, which was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award.

Paley was also a renowned essayist and poet. Fidelity, her final collection of poems, was published in 2008, a year after her death in Vermont. The six poems collected here will offer the reader comfort and joy as we contemplate the final mystery of all, death and dying.

 

Further reading about Grace Paley as a poet

Poetry Foundation Poets House Grace Paley’s Political Poems

. . . . . . . . . .

Fear

I am afraid of nature
because of nature    I am mortal
my children and my grandchildren
are also mortal
I lived in the city for forty years
in this way I escaped fear

. . . . . . . . . .
 

Sisters

My friends are dying
well we’re old    it’s natural
one day we passed the experience of “older”
which began in late middle age
and came suddenly upon “old”    then
all the little killing bugs are
baby tumors that had struggled
for year’s against the body’s
brave immunities found their
level playing fields and
victory
but that is not what I meant to
tell you    I wanted to say that
my friends were dying but have now
become absent    the word dead is correct
but inappropriate
I have not taken their names out of
conversation    gossip    political argument
my telephone book or card index in
what ever alphabetical or contextual
organizer    I can stop any evening of
the lonesome week at Claiborne    Bercovici
Vernarelli    Deming and rest a moment
on their seriousness as artists workers
their excitement as political actors in the
streets of our cities or in their workplaces
the vigilant    fasting    praying in or out
of jail    their lightheartedness which floated
above the year’s despair
their courageous sometimes hilarious
disobediences before the state’s official
servants    their fidelity to the idea that
it is possible with only a little extra anguish
to live in this world    at an absolute minimum
loving brainy sexual energetic redeemed

 

. . . . . . . . . . 

Windows

this eighty-year-old body is
a fairly old body    what’s it
doing around the house these days
checking the laundry    brooms
still work    what’s for dinner
there are the windows     look    oh
beyond the river    Smarts Mountain
with the sun’s help is recomposing all
its little hills    never saw it that way
before    windows    the afternoon story
I had thought the tumors
on my spine would kills me but
the tumors on my head seem to be
extraordinarily competitive this week
For the past twenty or thirty years
I have eaten the freshest most
organic and colorful fruits and
vegetables   I did not drink    I
did drink one small glass of red
wine with dinner nearly every day
as suggested by The New York Times
I should have taken longer walks but
obviously I have done something wrong
I don’t mean morally or ethically or
geographically    I did not live near
a nuclear graveyard or under a coal
stack    nor did I allow my children
to do so    I lived in a city no worse t
than any other great and famous city    I
lived one story above a street that led
cabs and ambulances to the local hospital
that didn’t seem so bad and was
often convenient
In any event I am
already old and therefore a little ashamed
to have written this poem full
of complaints against mortality which
biological fact I have been constructed for
to hand on to my children and grand-
children as I receive it from my
dar mother and father and beloved
grandmother who all
ah    if I remember it
were in great pain at     leaving
and were furiously saying goodbye

. . . . . . . . . .

Even

Even at pain’s deafening intrusion
my friend could not forget the pleasant
blasphemous jokes of our daily conver-
nations    she said    grace don’t take me out
of the telephone book of your heart    and I
have not there she is under S for Syb    and
Claiborne still under C

 

. . . . . . . . . .

My Sister and My Grandson

I have been talking to my sister    she
may not know she’s been dust and ashes
for the last two years     I talk to her
nearly every day
I’ve been telling her about our new baby
who is serious    comical    busy    dark    my
sister    out of all the rubble and grit
that is now her    my sister mutters    what
about our baby    he was smart    loving
so beautiful
yes yes I said    listen just last week
he stopped at my hallway door    he saw
your small Turkish rug    he stared at it
he fell to his knees his arms wide    crying
Jeannie   oh my own auntie Jeannie
remembered    ah    her hard whisper came to me
thank you Grace    now speak to him tell him
he’s still my deepest love

. . . . . . . . . .

One day

One day
one of us
will be lost
to the other
that has been
talked about but
lightly    turning
away    shyness    this business of con-
fronting the
preference for survival
my mother said    the
children are grown    we
are both so sick    let us
die together    my father
replied    no no    you
will be well    he lied
of course I
want you in the world
whether I’m in it or
not    your spirit
I probably mean
there is always
something to say    in
the end    speaking
without breath    one
of us will be lost
to the other

. . . . . . . . . .

Contributed by Nancy Snyder, who writes about women writers and labor women. After working for the City and County of San Francisco for thirty years, she is now learning everything about Henry David Thoreau in Los Angeles.

 

The post Fearless Poems by Grace Paley on Aging appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.

Isabelle Eberhardt, Fearless Nomad and Seeker

Isabelle Eberhardt (February 17, 1877 – October 21, 1904) was a Swiss-born traveler and writer. From an early age she dreamed of escaping to North Africa, a dream that was nourished by the exotic fantasies of desert life that were popular at the time, and in her early twenties, she left Europe to make Algeria her home.

Her exploration of the deserts and cities of the Mahgreb, usually disguised as a man, has become legendary. She was a prolific writer, but much of her work — including travelogues, diaries, and short stories — was only published after her death in a freak accident at the age of twenty-seven.

 

An unconventional early life

Isabelle’s mother, Nathalie, was born into a wealthy Prussian family in Moscow. She married Senator-General Pavel de Moerder, who at the time was a senior advisor to the Tsar, and they had three children for whom they engaged a tutor, Alexander Trophimowsky, a defrocked Orthodox priest.

Less than a year later, in around 1871, Nathalie left her husband to live in Switzerland with Trophimowsky. Another son, Augustin, was born soon after. Who the boy’s father was is unclear, but after a failed attempt at reconciliation with his wife, de Moerder allowed Nathalie to give Augustin his surname.

However, when Isabelle Wilhelmine Marie Eberhardt followed five years later on 17 February 1877, she was registered as the fille naturelle, or illegitimate daughter, of Nathalie. While it’s safe to assume that she was Trophimowsky’s child, there has been speculation as to why he did not accept the outward responsibility of fatherhood. The most likely explanation is that his nihilist beliefs disavowed the traditional concept of family.

. . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . 

Later in life, Isabelle enjoyed weaving fantasies around this ambiguity, claiming variously that her father was a Tartar Muslim, that he was a doctor who had raped her mother, and that he was a Turk. Many years after her death, another, even more outlandish theory was put forward by the French writer Pierre Arnoult, who claimed (with no evidence other than a passing facial resemblance) that she was the daughter of Arthur Rimbaud.

Trophimowsky was a dominant figure and a fervent anarchist. The family had a large house, Villa Nueve, on the shores of Lake Geneva, but despite the luxury, Nathalie’s physical and mental health declined steadily. The eldest three children, who had traveled with Nathalie to Switzerland, were also notably unhappy: the daughter, Nathalie, denounced Trophimowsky to the police for making “disreputable and obscene propositions,” while one of the boys, Vladimir, ultimately took his own life.

Trophimowsky, who believed in equal education for boys and girls, took charge of the children’s home schooling and general deportment. Isabelle was encouraged to dress as a boy, and he taught her to ride and to shoot. Most formal education consisted of horticulture — long hours were spent working in the gardens that surrounded Villa Nueve — and languages.

Brought up to be bilingual in French and Russian, Isabelle was given a thorough grounding in Latin, Italian, Ancient Greek, and classical Arabic. She also loved the novels of Pierre Loti, who fictionalized his travels in Africa, the Middle East, and the South Seas, and together with Augustin, she began to dream of an escape to the Mahgreb.

Augustin was ultimately a disappointment to Isabelle. As an adult, he was indecisive, weak, alcoholic and an opium addict; after attempting to escape the stifling home atmosphere by joining the French Foreign Legion, he was dismissed for criminal behavior and sank into disgrace.

Isabelle, however, continued to dream. One of her first short stories, Visions of the Mahgreb, depicts a young Russian woman’s encounters with an Islamic mystic in Algeria. It was published in the French journal Nouvelle Revue Moderne under a man’s name. The exotic fantasy of north Africa became an obsession, and after she left Switzerland permanently for Algeria this fantasy blended with reality in her fiction, journalism, and diaries.

 

First journey to Africa

Isabelle’s chance finally came when she was around twenty. She had spent several months in contact with two men who had strong ties to the Sahara: Eugène Letourd, a French officer stationed in Algeria who had placed a newspaper advert for a pen pal, and Louis David, an Algerian-French photographer who contacted her after reading her stories.

Both encouraged her to relocate to Algiers, and in around 1896 she made her first trip accompanied by her mother, whom she adored and referred to as the “White Spirit.” The journey, however, was too much for Nathalie, who suffered from heart problems. She died shortly after arriving in Bône, having formally converted to Islam. Isabelle was distraught at her mother’s death.

Trophimowsky, who had been sent for when Nathalie’s health deteriorated but arrived after she had died, showed little sympathy; when Isabelle cried that she wanted to follow her mother into death he responded by offering her his revolver, which she declined. He returned to Switzerland and left Isabelle in Algiers, where she quickly spent the money left to her by her mother. Poverty forced her to return to Geneva in 1899. There she found him seriously ill with throat cancer. She nursed him through his final months, and he died in May 1899.

. . . . . . . . . . 

. . . . . . . . . . 

The wandering years

After some legal wrangling over Trophimowsky’s will and the status of Villa Nueve, Isabelle first mortgaged and then sold the property and returned to North Africa. Free of the toxic environment of the Swiss villa and without any real family ties, she embraced life as a vagabond.

She wandered restlessly, writing her diaries and stories and travelogues, usually alone and always dressed as a man. In the deeply patriarchal and traditional North African societies of the time, traveling as Si Mahmoud Saadi rather than Isabelle Eberhardt afforded her freedoms she would otherwise never have been granted (although she spared little thought for the often powerless situation her female Arab contemporaries found themselves in, which has drawn critique from modern feminists).

The success of her disguise was sometimes doubtful: according to her friend Robert Randau, many of the men she met knew that she was a woman, but their deeply ingrained sense of courtesy meant that none of them ever said anything.

Her lifestyle was not only itinerant but promiscuous. Her early French biographer Claude-Maurice Robert said that she “drank more than a Legionnaire, smoked more than a hashish addict, and made love for the love of making love.”

When passing through cities, she would often walk the streets in search of sex, mostly with sailors and working men, and on a visit to the town of El Oued, her behavior drew the attention of the local colonial administration. But she was also deeply spiritual. Drawn to fatalism, she was convinced that she had been born under an unlucky star, and frequently conjured the idea of maktoub (‘it is written”).

Some years later, Isabelle wrote in her diary that, “It is the inescapable chain of events that has brought me to this point, rather than I who have caused things to happen.” Her spiritual quest was an attempt to find some meaning, and she was eventually initiated into the Qadriya. This was a Sufi brotherhood that wielded immense influence among the desert tribes at the time, and which gave her the sense of familial belonging that had been missing throughout her childhood.

 

Love, and an assassination attempt

Around 1900, on a return visit to El Oued, she met and fell in love with Slimène Ehnni. He was a young Algerian officer and an évolué, an Algerian committed to French rule and who held French citizenship. They took the risk of living together openly, a decision that drew anger and condemnation from the French authorities who had already blacklisted Isabelle because of her previous behavior.

Attempts were made to split the couple up by posting Slimène to Batna instead, and although Isabelle was too poor to accompany him there, their feelings for each other remained undiminished and they were still very much a couple.

In 1901, at a Qadriya meeting in Behima, an attempt was made on Isabelle’s life which resulted in her left arm being almost severed. Whether or not the assassin was hired by the French authorities remains a matter of speculation: certainly, Isabelle believed that that was the case, although others maintained that it was either the result of tribal rivalries or a lover who was tired of her (falling in love with Slimène had not entirely put a stop to her promiscuous lifestyle).

The wounded arm would cause her immense pain for the rest of her life. However, not long afterward, in October of that year, she and Slimène married in Marseilles in both Muslim and civil ceremonies. This entitled her to French citizenship and, the couple hoped, would end the intolerance of the authorities against them.

 

Journalism, writing — and espionage?

The publicity surrounding the assassination attempt reached France, where a Parisian editor called Victor Barracund became aware of the story and Isabelle’s writing. He invited her to contribute to a new newspaper he was starting in Algeria, Al-Akhbar, and she jumped at the opportunity. Her first assignment was in Aïn Sefra, near the western border with Morocco.

Here she met the French officer Hubert Lyautey, and the two became firm if unlikely friends. After her death Lyautey would write, “She was what attracts me most in this world: a rebel.” As with her relationship with Slimène, her friendship with Lyautey was not without its problems: despite her demonstrated commitment to the Arab way of life, she was accused of working for the French as a spy.

Nothing came of the accusation and no involvement with the French authorities was ever proven, although her biographers in later years have generally accepted that she did, on occasion, engage in espionage for Lyautey.

From Aïn Sefra, she traveled along the border, reporting on the Moroccan-Algerian clashes between Berber tribes and the French forces. Her journals and travelogues from this time record her impressions of the landscape, often in romantic and lyrical language: “…black spots of scattered trees, the bluish line of a large palm grove, and a broken minaret appears reddish brown as it towers above the sand in the still-slanting sun.”

Her writing had always occupied a central part of her life, and she viewed it as a welcome respite from the preoccupations with drink, drugs, and sex that she was often unable to prevent overwhelming her. As well as her articles for Al-Akhbar, several of her short stories appeared in the local press, and Barracund eventually gave her a regular column in which she wrote about the customs of the Bedouin tribes.

 

An untimely death

By 1903, Isabelle’s health was starting to fail. Years of heavy drinking and smoking took their toll, along with the deprivations of travel. She had lost all her teeth, suffered bouts of malaria, and also had syphilis. Suffering had never bothered her; she was a natural ascetic who believed that “the human body is nothing, the human soul is all,” but by the late summer of 1904 she was sufficiently weak with fever that she was admitted to the hospital at Aïn Sefra.

Against medical advice, she discharged herself some weeks later to meet Slimène, whom she hadn’t seen for almost a year. The couple rented a small mud house for their reunion, but the next day the town was struck by a flash flood. Slimène survived, but Isabelle’s body was found later, pinned under a beam of the house and surrounded by the soggy pages of her latest manuscript.

Under Lyautey’s orders, soldiers rescued the papers, which were later restored and preserved. He also organized her burial in Aïn Sefra, where a marble headstone was engraved with both her adopted Arabic and given French names.

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Isabelle Eberhardt page on Amazon
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Legacy

Isabelle’s writing brought her little money during her lifetime, and appeared in book form only after her death. Two anthologies of her travel journals, The Oblivion Seekers and In the Shadow of Islam, are still available. Her life, however, has proved more inspiring than her writing.

Hailed as an early advocate of feminism and decolonization (although modern scholarship has drawn attention to her complicity with Lyautey) and as a daring adventurer, she has been the subject of plays, two films, an opera, and a Broadway musical. Ironic, perhaps, for a woman who wrote shortly before her death, “Soon, the solitary, woeful figure that I am will vanish from this earth.”

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Contributed by Elodie Barnes. Elodie is an author, poet, and artist with a serious case of wanderlust. She is originally from the UK, but has spent time abroad in Europe, the United States and the Bahamas.

When not traveling or working on her current projects — a chapbook of poetry, “The Cabinet of Lost Things,” and a novel based on the life of modernist writer and illustrator Djuna Barnes — she can be found with her nose in a book, daydreaming her way back to 1920s Paris. Visit her on the web at Elodie Rose Barnes.

More about Isabelle Eberhardt

Major works

Departures: Selected Writings (2001)In the Shadow of Islam by Isabelle Eberhardt, Peter Owen (2003)The Oblivion Seekers by Isabelle Eberhardt, Peter Owen (2009)

Biography and diaries

The Nomad: Diaries of Isabelle Eberhardt, ed. Elizabeth Kershaw, Interlink Books (2003)Isabelle: The Life of Isabelle Eberhardt by Annette Kobak, Virago (2006)

More information

Wikipedia Reader discussion on Goodreads Feminize Your Canon (Paris Review) Rejected Princesses: Isabelle Eberhardt

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Explore more rad voices in women’s history on this site.

*This is an Amazon Affiliate link. If a product is purchased by linking through, Literary Ladies Guide receives a modest commission, which helps maintain our site and helps it to continue growing!

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Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke

The extraordinary Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke (1561 – 1621), was an almost exact contemporary of Shakespeare and has been one of the candidates in various conspiracy theories for the actual author of Shakespeare’s works, in particular his sonnets.

Even though this is nonsense, Mary Sidney, sister of the more famous Philip, was arguably Shakespeare’s – and almost everyone else’s – equal as a poet.

This introduction to Mary Sidney’s life and work is excerpted from Killing the Angel: Early Transgressive British Woman Writers by Francis Booth ©2021, reprinted by permission.

Background

In her time, Mary was probably known more as a host and patron to other writers than as a writer herself. Mary had grown up attached to the court of Elizabeth I where her mother Lady Mary Dudley – the sister of Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, Elizabeth’s most favored courtier and perhaps the Queen’s lover – was a gentlewoman of the Privy Chamber.

In these surroundings Mary received a liberal education, including scripture, the classics, rhetoric, French, Italian, and Latin, in which she was fluent, and possibly some Greek and Hebrew. Mary was also proficient at the ‘female’ accomplishments of singing and playing the lute as well as needlework, so much so that so that her name was used in endorsing needlework patterns and for books of music.

In 1577, Mary married Henry Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, a family friend and wealthy landowner; among his properties were Wilton House near Salisbury, and Baynard’s Castle in London, where the couple entertained Queen Elizabeth to dinner. Henry died in 1601, leaving Mary less well-off than she had expected, and with the provision in his will that she should not remarry.

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The Psalms of David

Her largest work is her complete translation of the Psalms of David, a form known as a psalter. She and her brother worked on the translations together at first but he died in battle overseas in 1586 when they had only reached Psalm 43 of 150; she finished them by herself, also going back and revising all the earlier ones, so that the whole work may be considered to be hers.

Mary was at the time overshadowed by her famous brother Philip Sidney, who was a courtier, a warrior and considered then to be the ideal gentleman. He was indeed a major literary figure: his sonnet cycle Astrophel and Stella rivals Shakespeare’s sonnets and his critical work The Defence of Poesie introduced the ideas of continental theorists to England.

But The Sidney Psalter, largely the work of Mary, and certainly all overseen by her, is a masterclass of poetic styles and techniques: every conceivable poetic form and structure is included and all brilliantly executed; it is a great tour de force of poetry, one of the greatest extended works of verse of its own age, and indeed of any age.

When the volume of Psalms was published, Mary assumed authorship in her own name, Mary Sidney Herbert, but dedicated it to ‘the Angel Spirit of the Most Excellent Sir Philip Sidney.’ It was highly appreciated at the time; John Donne was a fan and wrote a congratulatory poem.

So though some have, some may some Psalms translate,
We thy Sydnean Psalms shall celebrate …

The Psalms as a collection are known in the Church of England as the Book of Common Prayer, and regular churchgoers will be quite shocked by the Sidney translations of them. In their normal Church of England version, the Psalms as used in church services are almost unchanged since Miles Coverdale’s 1535 translations, which were largely preserved in the King James Bible of 1611. The Sidney versions are not translations so much as poetic reimaginings. The well-known Psalm 110, Dixit Dominus is a good example: the version known to Church of England attendees ever since services were conducted in English goes:

The Lord said unto my Lord, Sit thou at my right hand, until I make thine enemies thy footstool.
The Lord shall send the rod of thy strength out of Zion: rule thou in the midst of thine enemies.
Thy people shall be willing in the day of thy power, in the beauties of holiness from the womb of the morning: thou hast the dew of thy youth.
The Lord hath sworn, and will not repent, Thou art a priest for ever after the order of Melchizedek.
The Lord at thy right hand shall strike through kings in the day of his wrath.
He shall judge among the heathen, he shall fill the places with the dead bodies; he shall wound the heads over many countries.
He shall drink of the brook in the way: therefore shall he lift up the head.

And here is Mary Sidney’s radically different version:

Thus to my lord, the Lord did say:
      Take up thy seat at my right hand,
      Till all thy foes that proudly stand,
I prostrate at thy footstool lay.
      From me thy staff of might
           Sent out of Sion goes:
     As victor then prevail in fight,
           And rule repining foes.

But as for them that willing yield,
      In solemn robes they glad shall go:
      Attending thee when thou shalt show
Triumphantly thy troops in field:
      In field as thickly set
      With warlike youthful train
As pearlèd plain with drops is wet,
      Of sweet Aurora’s rain.

The Lord did swear, and never he
      What once he swear will disavow:
       As was Melchisedech so thou,
An everlasting priest shalt be.
      At hand still ready priest
            To guard thee from annoy,
      Shall sit the Lord that loves thee best,
            And kings in wrath destroy.

Thy Realm shall many Realm contain:
      Thy slaughtered foes thick heaped lie:
      With crushed head even he shall die,
Who head of many Realm doth reign.
      If passing on these ways
      Thou taste of troubled streams:
      Shall that eclipse thy shining rays?
      Nay light thy glories beams.

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Killing the Angel on Amazon US*
Killing the Angel on Amazon UK*
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Praise from fellow poets

Despite living her earlier life in her brother’s shadow, Mary was recognized quite early on as an extraordinary talent and respected by her contemporaries both male and female; in addition to the recognition given to the publication of the Psalms, Mary was the only woman included in John Bodenham’s poetry collection Belvidere, 1600. Æmalia Lanyer’s encomium, from Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, was dedicated to her:

This nymph, quoth he, great Pembroke hight by name,
Sister to valiant Sidney, whose clear light Gives light
to all that tread true paths of Fame,
Who in the globe of heaven doth shine so bright

For to this Lady now I will repair,
Presenting her the fruits of idle hours;
Though many Books she writes that are more rare,
Yet there is honey in the meanest flowers …

Mary was also praised at great length by John Davies in the dedication to The Muses Sacrifice, 1612.

PEMBROKE, (a Paragon of Princely PARTS,
and, of that Part that most commends the Muse,
Great Mistress of her Greatness, and the ARTS,)
Phoebus and Fate makes great, and glorious!
A Work of Art and Grace (from Head and Heart
that makes a Work of Wonder) thou hast done;
Where Art, seems Nature; Nature, seemeth Art;
and, Grace, in both, makes all out-shine the Sun.

Davies understands that even so prominent, so talented a woman as Mary Sidney cannot seek public fame, as male writers can.

And didst thou thirst for Fame. (as all Men do)
thou would’st, by all means, let it come to light;
But though thou cloud it, as doth Envy too,
yet through both Clouds it shines, it is so bright!

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You may also enjoy:
5 Early English Women Writers to Discover
Elizabeth Cary, Early English Poet, Dramatist, and Scholar
The Matchless Orinda: Katherine Philips
The Scandalous, Sexually Explicit Writings of Aphra Behn
Olympe de Gouges: An Introduction
Susanna Centlivre, English Poet and Playwright
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A prominent translator as well

Mary Sidney was not just a poet but a translator; her translation from the French of The Tragedy of Antony, Done into English by the Countess of Pembroke, 1592 revived the use of soliloquy from classical works and is a source of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, 1607. Mary also translated Petrarch’s Triumph of Death and is the probable author of the long poem The Doleful Lay of Clorinda, 1595, a lament for her dead brother.

Woods, hills and rivers, now are desolate,
Sith he is gone the which them all did grace:
And all the fields do wail their widow state,
Sith death their fairest flower did late deface.
      The fairest flower in field that ever grew,
      Was Astrophel: that was, we all may rue.

What cruel hand of cursed foe unknown,
Hath cropped the stalk which bore so faire a flower?
Untimely cropped, before it well were grown,
And clean defaced in untimely hour.
      Great loss to all that ever him did see,
      Great loss to all, but greatest loss to me.

 

 Mary Sidney’s legacy as patroness and poet

Under Mary’s vigorously transgressive stewardship, Wilton House became a literary salon for writers known as the Wilton Circle, which included Edmund Spenser, Samuel Daniel, Michael Drayton and Ben Jonson. John Aubrey said that ‘Wilton House was like a college, there were so many learned and ingenious persons. She was the greatest patroness of wit and learning of any lady in her time.’

Other poets agreed: Samuel Daniel said of his poetry that he had received ‘the first notion for the formal ordering of those compositions at Wilton, which I must ever acknowledge to have been my best School,’ andThomas Churchyard said that ‘she sets to school, our Poets everywhere.’ At Wilton house, after Queen Elizabeth’s death in 1603, Mary hosted the new King James I and Queen Anne; it is probable that Shakespeare’s As You Like It was first performed for a royal audience there.

Writers vied for her approval and patronage; she probably received more dedications at the front of published books than any non-royal woman, including from Thomas Nashe, Abraham Fraunce, who incorporated her name into the titles of several works that he presented to her, includingThe Countesse of Pembrokes Emmanuel (1591) and the three parts ofThe Countesse of Pembrokes Ivychurch (1591–2) and Nicholas Breton’s The Countesse of Pembrokes Love and‘The Countess of Pembroke’s Passion.

On her death in 1621, Mary Sidney was given a large funeral at St Paul’s Cathedral – possibly the only female writer ever to have been so honored – and her body was taken by torchlight to be buried at Salisbury Cathedral next to her husband. Her epitaph is probably by Ben Jonson:

Underneath this marble hearse
Lies the subject of all verse;
Sidney’s sister, Pembroke’s mother.
Death! ere thou hast slain another
Wise and fair and good as she,
Time shall throw a dart at thee.

More about Mary Sidney Poetry Foundation Tudor of the Month: Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke Tudor Times: Lady Mary Sidney

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Contributed by Francis Booth,* the author of several books on twentieth-century culture:

Amongst Those Left: The British Experimental Novel 1940-1960 (published by Dalkey Archive); Everybody I Can Think of Ever: Meetings That Made the Avant-Garde;  Girls in Bloom: Coming of Age in the Mid-Twentieth Century Woman’s Novel; Text Acts: Twentieth Century Literary Eroticism; and Comrades in Art: Revolutionary Art in America 1926-1938.

Francis has also published several novels: The Code 17 series, set in the Swinging London of the 1960s and featuring aristocratic spy Lady Laura Summers; Young adult fantasy series The Watchers; and  Young adult fantasy novel Mirror Mirror. Francis lives on the South Coast of England. He is currently working on High Collars and Monocles: Interwar Novels by Female Couples.

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*These are Amazon Affiliate links. If a product is purchased by linking through, Literary Ladies Guide receives a modest commission, which helps maintain our site and helps it to continue growing!

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Allison MacKenzie: Coming of Age in Peyton Place by Grace Metalious

This look at the coming of age of Allison MacKenzie, one of the central characters of Peyton Place, the controversial 1956 novel by Grace Metalious, is excerpted from Girls in Bloom: Coming of Age in the Mid-20th Century Woman’s Novel by Francis Booth, reprinted by permission.

Peyton Place is set in a small New England town where everyone knows everyone’s business. The inhabitants of Peyton Place seemed to have a lot more sex than other novels of the mid-fifties – more than the censors and many critics were prepared to put up with: the novel was banned in Knoxville, Tennessee in 1957 and in Rhode Island in 1959.

But the censors were far too late. Peyton Place was already a bestseller by September 1956, and would remain so well into 1957. It sold over 100,000 copies in its first month, compared to the average first novel which sold 3,000 copies, if lucky, in its lifetime. Peyton Place eventually sold over 12 million copies but even then is most widely remembered for its film and TV adaptations.

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Learn more about Grace Metalious
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A page-to-screen success

Grace Metalious (1924-1964), born Marie Grace DeRepentigny, was born into poverty in New England. She married George Metalious and, unlike most other successful female authors who kept their names, published under her husband’s.

Despite their poverty, George attended university and became principal of a school while Grace continued to write, something she had done since she was a student, and in which George encouraged her. George later said that the novel’s eponymous town and its name were “a composite of all small towns where ugliness rears its head, and where the people try to hide all the skeletons in their closets.”

Grace was thirty when she finished the manuscript; she found a literary agent but had trouble finding a publisher because of the amount of sex it contained. Reviews in serious newspapers condemned the book but that did not stop people buying it. Much later Metalious said, “If I’m a lousy writer, then an awful lot of people have lousy taste.”

She was right. Less than a month after the novel was published, producer and screenwriter Jerry Wald paid her $250,000 for the film rights. He also paid her as a story consultant though she was not in the end responsible for any of the screenplay and in fact she hated Hollywood, hated the way her novel was sanitized and was appalled by the suggestion that Pat Boone – who wrote a bland advice column for teenagers in Ladies Home Journal – be cast in a leading role.

Still, the $400,000 she made from the film was probably some consolation. The film came out in 1957, featuring nineteen-year-old newcomer Diane Varsi who was far too beautiful and mature for the role but was nominated for an Academy Award anyway.

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Girls in Bloom by Francis Booth on Amazon*
Girls in Bloom on Amazon UK*
Girls in Bloom in full on Issuu
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Allison Mackenzie & Selena Cross

The TV series of Peyton Place began in 1964, running for five seasons until 1969. Like the film, it was a very toned down version of the novel, starring , age nineteen when the series began, as twelve-year-old Allison Mackenzie. Unlike Varsi and Farrow, Allison is plain, chubby, and  has very few friends.

Allison hadn’t one friend in the entire school, except for Selena Cross. They made a peculiar pair, those two, Selena with her dark, gypsyish beauty, her thirteen-year-old eyes as old as time, and Allison Mackenzie, still plump with residual babyhood, her eyes wide open, guileless and questioning, above that painfully sensitive mouth.

Selena is indeed entirely different from Allison: in many female coming-of-age novels the blameless, bookish, shy, unattractive central character has a foil who is pretty, popular and outgoing, and very often with looser morals. In this case the contrast is extreme. Selena is by no means a virgin, though we only find out later how and to whom she loses her virginity.

There is also a huge social difference between the two girls: Allison’s mother Constance is discreet and aloof and runs a high-class dress shop – “the women of the town bought almost exclusively from her” – while Selena lives in a rundown shack with her hopeless mother and vile, violent, drunken and lecherous stepfather who rapes her and takes her virginity.

In the original manuscript, he was her birth father; the one change that Metalious agreed with her publisher before publication was that he should become her stepfather – it hardly lessens the shock when the rape happens.

“Selena was beautiful while Allison believed herself an unattractive girl, plump in the wrong places, flat in the wrong spots, too long in the legs and too round in the face.” Selena, on the other hand, is “well-developed for her age, with the curves of hips and breasts already discernible under the too short and often threadbare clothes that she wore.” She has “long dark hair that curled of its own accord in a softly beautiful fashion. Her eyes, too, were dark and slightly slanted, and she had a naturally red, full lipped mouth over well shaped startlingly white teeth.”

Selena is nowhere near as well-read as Allison but she’s much wiser; “wiser with the wisdom learned of poverty and wretchedness. At thirteen, she saw hopelessness as an old enemy, as persistent and inevitable as death.” Selena cannot understand “what in the world ailed Allison that she could be unhappy in surroundings like these, with a wonderful blonde mother, and a pink and white bedroom of her own.”

Unlike Allison, Selena covets the dresses in Constance’s shop. Constance “could understand a girl looking that way at the sight of a beautiful dress. The only time that Allison ever wore this expression was when she was reading.”

When Constance asks Selena to work part-time in her shop, Selena thinks she is in heaven. Wearing one of the dresses, Constance thinks Selena has “the look of a beautifully sensual, expensively kept woman.” Selena adores Constance; she thinks: “Someday, I’ll get out, and when I do, I’ll always wear beautiful clothes and talk in a soft voice, just like Mrs. McKenzie.”

Allison may not be popular with the girls – or indeed the boys, not that she cares about boys – but her teacher Miss Thornton likes her. She has a mission: “If I can teach something to one child, if I can awaken in only one child a sense of beauty, joy in truth, and admission of ignorance and a thirst for knowledge then I am fulfilled. One child, thought Miss Thornton, adjusting her old brown felt, and her mind fastened with love on Allison Mackenzie.”

Allison knows about Miss Thornton’s feelings for her – an unusual example of a teacher having a crush on a girl – but she believes it is “only because Miss Thornton was so ugly and plain herself.”

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Peyton Place — two 1956 reviews
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An absent father

Allison’s mother has never told her the truth about her father, whom Allison believes to be dead, but who is in fact alive and well. Constance had an affair with him but they never married; he is a Scottish businessman and his name was also, confusingly, Allison. But he had a wife at the time of the affair and had no intention of marrying Constance, though he always provided for her and their daughter financially.

Constance left town, pregnant, before Allison’s birth and invented a fictitious, short lived marriage, coming back after Allison was born with a story that her imaginary husband was dead. To make the story work, she has had to subtract a year from Allison’s real age – Allison is a year older than she and everybody else believes.

Allison loves her absent father – or at least the false image she has built up of him – as well as her mother, though they have “little in common with each other; the mother was far too cold and practical a mind to understand the sensitive, dreaming child, and Allison too young and full of hopes and fancies to sympathize with her mother.”

 

Bookish Allison

Allison is bookish but does not get her love of reading from her mother: Constance “could not understand a twelve-year-old girl keeping her nose in a book. Other girls her age would have been continually in the shop, examining and exclaiming over the boxes of pretty dresses and underwear which arrived there almost daily.”

Unlike Selena, all Allison knows about life she has got from her reading. She has discovered a box of old books in the attic, and is fascinated by them; “she went from de Maupassant to James Hilton without a quiver. She read Goodbye, Mr Chips and wept in the darkness of her room for an hour while the last line of the story lingered in her mind. ‘I said goodbye to Chips the night before he died.’ Allison began to wonder about God and death.”

But what Allison loves most of all, better than books even, is being alone in the countryside just outside the town where she can “be free from the hatefulness that was school … For a little while she could find pleasure here and forget that her pleasures would be considered babyish and silly by older, more mature twelve-year-old girls.”

“Now that she was quiet and unafraid, she could pretend that she was a child again, and not a twelve-year-old who would be entering high school within less than another year, and who should be interested now in clothes and boys and pale rose lipstick… But away from this place she was awkward, loveless, pitifully aware that she lacked the attraction and poise which she believed that every other girl her age possessed …

There would not be many more days of contentment for Allison, for now she was twelve and soon would have to begin spending her life with people like the girls at school. She would be surrounded by them, and have to try hard to be one of them. She was sure that they would never accept her. They would laugh at her, ridicule her, and she would find herself living in a world where she was the only odd and different member of the population.”

 

Resisting the path to womanhood

Allison does not want to turn from a girl into a woman, does not want come of age, mentally or physically; the outward attributes of womanhood repel her. She hates the idea of “hair growing anywhere on her body. Selena already had hair under her arms which she shaved off once a month.” Selena tells Allison that she gets it all over with at once, “my period and my shave.”

Allison agrees this is a good idea but “as far as she was concerned, ‘periods’ were something that happened to other girls. She decided that she would never tolerate such things in herself.’ Allison sends off for a sex education book which she reads carefully to find out about periods; she clearly cannot contemplate asking her mother.

“Phooey, she thought disdainfully when she had finished studying the pamphlet. I’ll be the only woman in the whole world who won’t, and it’ll be written up in all the medical books.

She thought of ‘It’ as a large black bat, with wings outspread, and when she woke up on the morning of her thirteenth birthday to discover that ‘It’ was nothing of the kind, she was disappointed, disgusted and more than a little frightened.

But the reason she wept that she was not, after all, going to be as unique as she had wanted to be.”

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Peyton Place by Grace Metalious on Amazon*
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A book that’s better than its reputation

Despite its mauling by “serious” critics and its mangling by film and TV producers, the original novel’s reputation for lowbrow sleaze is completely unjustified: in its sensitive and perceptive treatment of both Allison and Selena it is as good a coming of age novel as many more vaunted classics.

It is certainly much better than Grace Metalious’s later novels, including its hastily written sequel, Return to Peyton Place, 1959, which follows Allison as she grows up to become a writer, writing scurrilous, thinly disguised portraits of the people in Peyton Place and, like her mother, has an affair with a married man. Success did not bring happiness to Metalious and she died of liver failure following years of heavy drinking at the age of thirty-nine in 1964.

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Contributed by Francis Booth,* the author of several books on twentieth-century culture:

Amongst Those Left: The British Experimental Novel 1940-1960 (published by Dalkey Archive); Everybody I Can Think of Ever: Meetings That Made the Avant-Garde;  Girls in Bloom: Coming of Age in the Mid-Twentieth Century Woman’s Novel; Text Acts: Twentieth Century Literary Eroticism; and Comrades in Art: Revolutionary Art in America 1926-1938

Francis has also published several novels: The Code 17 series, set in the Swinging London of the 1960s and featuring aristocratic spy Lady Laura Summers; Young adult fantasy series The Watchers; and  Young adult fantasy novel Mirror Mirror. Francis lives on the South Coast of England. He is currently working on High Collars and Monocles: Interwar Novels by Female Couples.

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*These are Bookshop.org and Amazon Affiliate links. If a product is purchased by linking through, Literary Ladies Guide receives a modest commission, which helps maintain our site and helps it to continue growing!

The post Allison MacKenzie: Coming of Age in Peyton Place by Grace Metalious appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.

Selections from Songs of the Elder Sisters (the Therīgāthā)

Songs of the Elder Sisters were composed during the Buddha’s lifetime, about 2,500 years ago. These women renounced home life and society, and joined the group of nuns founded by the Buddha. This selection of 14 poems from the Buddhist text known as the Therīgāthā were translated from Pāli by Francis Booth. See more of this translation of Songs of the Elder Sisters on Issuu.

These poignant songs are about loss of beauty, wealth and family, balanced by the greater gains of peace and wisdom through enlightenment in old age. All the songs are ascribed to particular women, whose names we know. They speak as individuals, not as wives, mothers and daughters.

Although Buddhist in intent, the songs are highly personal rather than pious and formal and are full of character and personality. They were passed down orally through chanting for 600 years before being written down and are among the earliest extant poems written by women. They also form the only canonical work in any religion written entirely by women.

Referring to a collection known as Verses of the Elder Nuns, the Therīgāthā, (Pāli: therī: elder in feminine form + gāthā: verses) consists of short poems dating from a three hundred year span beginning in the late 6th century BCE.

This collection of poems is believed to be the earliest text to record women’s spiritual journeys, and is the earliest known collection of women’s literature from India. What’s truly remarkable is that contrary to Virginia Woolf‘s famous (and often correct) claim that “anonymous was a woman,” the names of these ancient female poets are recorded.

This excellent analysis of the Therīgāthā from Zen Mountain Monastery gives a good historic background to this ancient text:

“… The adjective “first” and the Therīgāthā seem to go together. It is easy to see why. The Therīgāthā is an anthology of poems composed by some of the first Buddhists; while the poems of the Therīgāthā are clearly nowhere near as old as the poetry of the Rig Veda, for example, they are still some of the first poetry of India; the Therīgāthā ’s poems are some of the first poems by women in India; as a collection, the Therīgāthā is the first anthology of women’s literature in the world.” Read the rest in full here.

 

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Lost Beauty

Ambapali’s Song
Ah but when I was young I had beautiful hair
Glossy, curly and black like the colour of bees
Now my hair is like hemp or the bark of the trees
Ah, not false are the words of the teller of truth
With my hair filled with flowers and perfumed with scent
Thick as trees in the forest adorned with gold pins
Now my hair smells like dog’s fur all matted and thin
Ah, not false are the words of the teller of truth
I had eyebrows like crescents an artist would paint
And my eyes flashed like precious and radiant jewels
But the passing of time and the wrinkles were cruel
Ah, not false are the words of the teller of truth
With my beautiful nose and my features refined
And my ear lobes so soft how my teeth brightly shined
Now all yellow and ruined by age and by time
Ah, not false are the words of the teller of truth
Then my singing was sweet as the call of a bird
Like a cuckoo that warbles in the branches of trees
Now the music is broken and cracked with disease
Ah, not false are the words of the teller of truth
With my neck like a conch shell and smooth rounded arms
On my delicate hands rings and bracelets of gold
Now all withered and dried like an onion turned old
Ah, not false are the words of the teller of truth
In my young days my body was burnished and fine
And my breasts stood up proudly all shapely and round
Now my skin has turned baggy and sags to the ground
Ah, not false are the words of the teller of truth
In my youth I had thighs like an elephant’s trunk
And my calves and my ankles and feet were adorned
But with age all my limbs are now knotted and worn
Ah, not false are the words of the teller of truth
This magnificent body so beautiful then
Shows with time and with age how the truth is revealed
As a mansion looks fine ‘til the plaster has peeled

Ah, not false are the words of the teller of truth

 

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Anopama’s Song
The daughter of a house of wealth and fame
Well born in fortune and exalted name
A beauty celebrated through the land
A prize beyond a price to win my hand
Pursued and courted by the sons of kings
While merchant princes made rich offerings
A ruler promised treasuries of gold
And jewels equal to my weight eightfold
Gautama, worthy and enlightened one
In pity showed me life with passion gone
I shaved my head and left the world behind
Since seven nights all craving left my mind

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Vimala’s Song
Young and fine and drunk with beauty
Famous for my flawless face
Richly dressed and acting haughty
Putting others in their place

Painted and adorned with jewels
Standing at the brothel door
Like the hunter’s trap is cruel
Showing men delights in store
Teaching them my secret magic
Showing them my secret part
Now I see my life was tragic
Hating people in my heart
Now I live without possessions
Shaven headed, beg for alms
Now I conquered all obsession
Thoughts all gone now, cool and calm

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2 Grieving Mothers

Kisogotami’s Song
The noblest friends can even make
The wisdom of a fool increase
So cultivate the wisest ones
And see the tide of pain decrease
The driver of the chariot
Says women’s lives are full of grief
He drives and tames the hearts of men
Heals suffering and brings relief
To share a husband, bear a child
The pain of being second wives
Make some take poison, slit their throats
So suffering through many lives
I lost a husband and two sons
I laid them on the funeral pyre
My mother, father, brother too
Have burned to ashes in that fire
Through tears of a thousand lives
I reached the final state of peace
My dart cut out, my burden shed
From suffering at last released

 

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Vasitthi’s Song
Crazy with grief for the death of my son
Wandering far with my senses all gone
Naked and ragged and living in dirt
Three years I suffered with hunger and thirst
One day the Buddha was travelling near
Tamer of hearts and defeater of fear
Hearing the teacher’s true wisdom explained
Now I’ve cast out all the causes of pain

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3 A Woman Freed

Punna’s Song
Woman full is like the moon
Ripened on the fifteenth day
Full of wisdom, calm of mind
Darkness torn and thrown away

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Mutta’s Song
Woman freed is like the moon
Free from darkness and eclipse
Free in mind and free from debt
Free to live on alms and gifts

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Patacara’s Song
As men find wealth by planting crops
By ploughing fields and sowing seeds
By nourishing their wives and sons
They satisfy their earthly needs
So why could I, with virtuous mind
A woman pure in words and thoughts
Not find my peace and quench my thirst
By doing what the teacher taught?
Then one day as I bathed my feet
And watched the water run its course
I vowed to purify my mind
As men would train a noble horse
So in my cell I took the lamp
And from my bed I watched the flame
I grasped the wick and pulled it down
The light extinguished, peace remained

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Mettika’s Song
Walking weak and weary now
Youthful step long gone
Leaning on my walking staff
Trudging slowly on
Climbing up the mountain peak
Robe cast to the ground
Overturn my begging bowl
Freedom all around

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4 The Temptations of Mara, the Evil One

Sela’s Song

Mara:
The solitary life brings no escape
Enjoy the world before it gets too late
Sela:
The pleasures of the body are like spears
And nothing you call joy do I hold dear
My love of earthly pleasure disappears
Go, tempter, you will gain no victory here

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Soma’s Song
Mara:
The wisdom of the sage is hard to gain
Beyond a woman’s nature to attain
Soma :
How can a woman’s nature interfere?
Our hearts are set, our way ahead is clear
My love of earthly pleasure disappears
Go, tempter, you will gain no victory here

 

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Khema’s Song
Mara:
As you are beautiful and I am young
Let us go in delight where songs are sung
Khema:
My body only fills me with disgust
Like swords and stakes to me are thoughts of lust
My love of earthly pleasure disappears
Go, tempter, you will gain no victory here

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Uppalavanna’s Song
Mara:
You stand under the blossoms in the wood
Exposed to evil men who mean no good
Uppalavanna:
A hundred thousand rascals could appear
I would not shake nor turn a hair in fear
Into your belly I could disappear
And in between your eyes could reappear
For I can rule the body with my thought
By following the way the Buddha taught
My love of earthly pleasure disappears
Go, tempter, you will gain no victory here

 

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Subha’s Song
Subha:
I was walking one day
In the beautiful woods
When a rascal appeared
Who was up to no good
So I said to him
Why do you stand in my way
Knowing purity’s rule
I have sworn to obey
For all passion has gone
From my unblemished mind
But the sensual pleasures
Have made your heart blind
The Man:
How can one as sweet as you
Give up life to be a nun
Dressing in the saffron robe
Come with me and have some fun
Trees exude the smell of spring
Forest beds are overgrown
Flowers bloom and pollen spreads
How can you go all alone?
Beasts of prey live in the woods
Elephants about to mate
Women unaccompanied
Risk a very frightening fate
You could be my golden doll
Wearing jewels, silk and pearls
In my palace in the wood
Waited on by serving girls
Garlanded and bathed in scent
On a bed of sandalwood
Like a lotus in the stream
Living long in maidenhood
Subha:
But what is it you see in this body of mine?
And what beauty appears in my face
When the cemetery calls and the body breaks down
Beauty vanishes without a trace
The Man:
Like a nymph inside the mountain
Spirit creature, my delight
Eyes like lotus blossoms blooming
Eyes that shine with radiant light
Like a spotless, golden vision
Long eyelashes, gentle gaze
Eyes that drive me wild with passion
Eyes to haunt me all my days
Subha:
Travel in the wrong direction
Try to leap the mountainside
Seek the moon to be your plaything
Try to trap the Buddha’s child
Purified myself of passion
Struck like sparks from blazing coal
Thrown down like a cup of poison
Truth has always been my goal
Just as puppets can dance
With their sticks and their strings
So my body is made
Of impermanent things
Like a beautiful painting
Seduces the mind
So illusions confused you
And rendered you blind
If you still want my body
To make me your prize
Then I’ll pluck out and give
To you one of my eyes
So your object of worship
You hold in your hand
And the true face of beauty
You now understand
The Man:
Try to hold a blazing fire
Try to grasp a poisonous snake
Lady, live without desire
Now I see my cruel mistake
Subha:
In the presence of the Buddha
There my sight will be regained
By the power of his merit
Passion conquered, peace attained

 

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More about the Elder Sisters and the Therīgāthā

Wikipedia The First Free Women: Poems of the Early Buddhist Nuns

More English Translations of the Therīgāthā

Therīgāthā translation  by Anagarika Mahendra Therīgāthā translation  by Bhikkhu Sujato Therīgāthā Verses of the Elder Nuns  Anthology of selected passages by Thanissaro Bhikkhu Psalms of the Early Buddhists: I. Psalms of the Sisters , London: Pali Text Society, 1909. Caroline A. F. Rhys Davids’ 1909 translation of the complete Therīgāthā

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Contributed by Francis Booth,* the author of several books on twentieth-century culture:

Amongst Those Left: The British Experimental Novel 1940-1960 (published by Dalkey Archive); Everybody I Can Think of Ever: Meetings That Made the Avant-Garde;  Girls in Bloom: Coming of Age in the Mid-Twentieth Century Woman’s Novel; Text Acts: Twentieth Century Literary Eroticism; and Comrades in Art: Revolutionary Art in America 1926-1938.

Francis has also published several novels: The Code 17 series, set in the Swinging London of the 1960s and featuring aristocratic spy Lady Laura Summers; Young adult fantasy series The Watchers; and  Young adult fantasy novel Mirror Mirror. Francis lives on the South Coast of England. He is currently working on High Collars and Monocles: Interwar Novels by Female Couples.

 

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*These are Amazon Affiliate links. If a product is purchased by linking through, Literary Ladies Guide receives a modest commission, which helps maintain our site and helps it to continue growing!

The post Selections from Songs of the Elder Sisters (the Therīgāthā) appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.

Renascence and Other Poems by Edna St. Vincent Millay (full text)

Renascence and Other Poems by Edna St. Vincent Millay (1917) was the first published collection by this eminent American poet. The book’s title reflects Millay’s 1912 poem of the same name, published when she was just nineteen, and still considered one of her finest. Here you’ll find the full text of this work.

From Dover, a recent publisher of this work that’s now in the public domain:

The poems of Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892–1950) have been long admired for the lyric beauty that is especially characteristic of her early works. “Renascence,” the first of her poems to bring her public acclaim, was written when she was nineteen. Now one of the best-known American poems, it is a fervent and moving account of spiritual rebirth.

In 1917, “Renascence” was incorporated into her first volume of poetry, which is reprinted here, complete and unabridged, from the original edition. The 23 works in this first volume are fired with the romantic and independent spirit of youth that Edna St. Vincent Millay came to personify.

From the introductory Note by Joslyn Pine from this edition:

At Vassar, College Millay enjoyed significant celebrity not only as a literary light, but also for her work in theatre where, it is generally believed, she began having intimate relationships with women. In addition to her acting and poetry, she gained an awareness of social issues like the suffragist movement and women’s rights …

In 1917, the year of her graduation from Vassar, she published her first book, Renascence and Other Poems. She also moved to Greenwich Village in New York City where she dwelt in a 9-foot-wide attic, leading a rather bohemian and “poor but merry” life among fellow writers and intellectuals.

Here she devoted herself to writing poetry and prose pieces to bolster her perpetually scant finances, publishing the latter in various magazines under the pseudonym “Nancy Boyd” to keep her poetry pure from the taint of her “hack work,” as it was called by some.

More of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s poetry on this site:

A Few Figs From Thistles (1921; full text) 10 Spring-Themed Poems by Edna St. Vincent Millay 12 Poems by Edna St. Vincent Millay

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More background on the title poem, “Renascence” (1912)

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 ContentsRenascenceInterimThe SuicideGod’s WorldAfternoon on a HillSorrowTavernAshes of LifeThe Little GhostKin to SorrowThree Songs of ShatteringThe ShroudThe DreamIndifferenceWitch-WifeBlightWhen the Year Grows OldSonnets

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Renascence

All I could see from where I stood
Was three long mountains and a wood;
I turned and looked another way,
And saw three islands in a bay.
So with my eyes I traced the line
Of the horizon, thin and fine,
Straight around till I was come
Back to where I’d started from;
And all I saw from where I stood
Was three long mountains and a wood.
Over these things I could not see;
These were the things that bounded me;
And I could touch them with my hand,
Almost, I thought, from where I stand.
And all at once things seemed so small
My breath came short, and scarce at all.
But, sure, the sky is big, I said;
Miles and miles above my head;
So here upon my back I’ll lie
And look my fill into the sky.
And so I looked, and, after all,
The sky was not so very tall.
The sky, I said, must somewhere stop,
And—sure enough!—I see the top!
The sky, I thought, is not so grand;
I ‘most could touch it with my hand!
And reaching up my hand to try,
I screamed to feel it touch the sky.
I screamed, and—lo!—Infinity
Came down and settled over me;
Forced back my scream into my chest,
Bent back my arm upon my breast,
And, pressing of the Undefined
The definition on my mind,
Held up before my eyes a glass
Through which my shrinking sight did pass
Until it seemed I must behold
Immensity made manifold;
Whispered to me a word whose sound
Deafened the air for worlds around,
And brought unmuffled to my ears
The gossiping of friendly spheres,
The creaking of the tented sky,
The ticking of Eternity.
I saw and heard, and knew at last
The How and Why of all things, past,
And present, and forevermore.
The Universe, cleft to the core,
Lay open to my probing sense
That, sick’ning, I would fain pluck thence
But could not,—nay! But needs must suck
At the great wound, and could not pluck
My lips away till I had drawn
All venom out.—Ah, fearful pawn!
For my omniscience paid I toll
In infinite remorse of soul.
All sin was of my sinning, all
Atoning mine, and mine the gall
Of all regret. Mine was the weight
Of every brooded wrong, the hate
That stood behind each envious thrust,
Mine every greed, mine every lust.
And all the while for every grief,
Each suffering, I craved relief
With individual desire,—
Craved all in vain! And felt fierce fire
About a thousand people crawl;
Perished with each,—then mourned for all!
A man was starving in Capri;
He moved his eyes and looked at me;
I felt his gaze, I heard his moan,
And knew his hunger as my own.
I saw at sea a great fog bank
Between two ships that struck and sank;
A thousand screams the heavens smote;
And every scream tore through my throat.
No hurt I did not feel, no death
That was not mine; mine each last breath
That, crying, met an answering cry
From the compassion that was I.
All suffering mine, and mine its rod;
Mine, pity like the pity of God.
Ah, awful weight! Infinity
Pressed down upon the finite Me!
My anguished spirit, like a bird,
Beating against my lips I heard;
Yet lay the weight so close about
There was no room for it without.
And so beneath the weight lay I
And suffered death, but could not die.

Long had I lain thus, craving death,
When quietly the earth beneath
Gave way, and inch by inch, so great
At last had grown the crushing weight,
Into the earth I sank till I
Full six feet under ground did lie,
And sank no more,—there is no weight
Can follow here, however great.
From off my breast I felt it roll,
And as it went my tortured soul
Burst forth and fled in such a gust
That all about me swirled the dust.

Deep in the earth I rested now;
Cool is its hand upon the brow
And soft its breast beneath the head
Of one who is so gladly dead.
And all at once, and over all
The pitying rain began to fall;
I lay and heard each pattering hoof
Upon my lowly, thatched roof,
And seemed to love the sound far more
Than ever I had done before.
For rain it hath a friendly sound
To one who’s six feet underground;
And scarce the friendly voice or face:
A grave is such a quiet place.

The rain, I said, is kind to come
And speak to me in my new home.
I would I were alive again
To kiss the fingers of the rain,
To drink into my eyes the shine
Of every slanting silver line,
To catch the freshened, fragrant breeze
From drenched and dripping apple-trees.
For soon the shower will be done,
And then the broad face of the sun
Will laugh above the rain-soaked earth
Until the world with answering mirth
Shakes joyously, and each round drop
Rolls, twinkling, from its grass-blade top.
How can I bear it; buried here,
While overhead the sky grows clear
And blue again after the storm?
O, multi-colored, multiform,
Beloved beauty over me,
That I shall never, never see
Again! Spring-silver, autumn-gold,
That I shall never more behold!
Sleeping your myriad magics through,
Close-sepulchred away from you!
O God, I cried, give me new birth,
And put me back upon the earth!
Upset each cloud’s gigantic gourd
And let the heavy rain, down-poured
In one big torrent, set me free,
Washing my grave away from me!

I ceased; and through the breathless hush
That answered me, the far-off rush
Of herald wings came whispering
Like music down the vibrant string
Of my ascending prayer, and—crash!
Before the wild wind’s whistling lash
The startled storm-clouds reared on high
And plunged in terror down the sky,
And the big rain in one black wave
Fell from the sky and struck my grave.
I know not how such things can be;
I only know there came to me
A fragrance such as never clings
To aught save happy living things;
A sound as of some joyous elf
Singing sweet songs to please himself,
And, through and over everything,
A sense of glad awakening.
The grass, a-tiptoe at my ear,
Whispering to me I could hear;
I felt the rain’s cool finger-tips
Brushed tenderly across my lips,
Laid gently on my sealed sight,
And all at once the heavy night
Fell from my eyes and I could see,—
A drenched and dripping apple-tree,
A last long line of silver rain,
A sky grown clear and blue again.
And as I looked a quickening gust
Of wind blew up to me and thrust
Into my face a miracle
Of orchard-breath, and with the smell,—
I know not how such things can be!—
I breathed my soul back into me.
Ah! Up then from the ground sprang I
And hailed the earth with such a cry
As is not heard save from a man
Who has been dead, and lives again.
About the trees my arms I wound;
Like one gone mad I hugged the ground;
I raised my quivering arms on high;
I laughed and laughed into the sky,
Till at my throat a strangling sob
Caught fiercely, and a great heart-throb
Sent instant tears into my eyes;
O God, I cried, no dark disguise
Can e’er hereafter hide from me
Thy radiant identity!
Thou canst not move across the grass
But my quick eyes will see Thee pass,
Nor speak, however silently,
But my hushed voice will answer Thee.
I know the path that tells Thy way
Through the cool eve of every day;
God, I can push the grass apart
And lay my finger on Thy heart!

The world stands out on either side
No wider than the heart is wide;
Above the world is stretched the sky,—
No higher than the soul is high.
The heart can push the sea and land
Farther away on either hand;
The soul can split the sky in two,
And let the face of God shine through.
But East and West will pinch the heart
That can not keep them pushed apart;
And he whose soul is flat—the sky
Will cave in on him by and by.

 

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Interim

The room is full of you!—As I came in
And closed the door behind me, all at once
A something in the air, intangible,
Yet stiff with meaning, struck my senses sick!—

Sharp, unfamiliar odors have destroyed
Each other room’s dear personality.
The heavy scent of damp, funereal flowers,—
The very essence, hush-distilled, of Death—
Has strangled that habitual breath of home
Whose expiration leaves all houses dead;
And wheresoe’er I look is hideous change.
Save here. Here ’twas as if a weed-choked gate
Had opened at my touch, and I had stepped
Into some long-forgot, enchanted, strange,
Sweet garden of a thousand years ago
And suddenly thought, “I have been here before!”

You are not here. I know that you are gone,
And will not ever enter here again.
And yet it seems to me, if I should speak,
Your silent step must wake across the hall;
If I should turn my head, that your sweet eyes
Would kiss me from the door.—So short a time
To teach my life its transposition to
This difficult and unaccustomed key!—
The room is as you left it; your last touch—
A thoughtless pressure, knowing not itself
As saintly—hallows now each simple thing;
Hallows and glorifies, and glows between
The dust’s grey fingers like a shielded light.

There is your book, just as you laid it down,
Face to the table,—I cannot believe
That you are gone!—Just then it seemed to me
You must be here. I almost laughed to think
How like reality the dream had been;
Yet knew before I laughed, and so was still.
That book, outspread, just as you laid it down!
Perhaps you thought, “I wonder what comes next,
And whether this or this will be the end”;
So rose, and left it, thinking to return.

Perhaps that chair, when you arose and passed
Out of the room, rocked silently a while
Ere it again was still. When you were gone
Forever from the room, perhaps that chair,
Stirred by your movement, rocked a little while,
Silently, to and fro…

And here are the last words your fingers wrote,
Scrawled in broad characters across a page
In this brown book I gave you. Here your hand,
Guiding your rapid pen, moved up and down.
Here with a looping knot you crossed a “t”,
And here another like it, just beyond
These two eccentric “e’s”. You were so small,
And wrote so brave a hand!
How strange it seems
That of all words these are the words you chose!
And yet a simple choice; you did not know
You would not write again. If you had known—
But then, it does not matter,—and indeed
If you had known there was so little time
You would have dropped your pen and come to me
And this page would be empty, and some phrase
Other than this would hold my wonder now.
Yet, since you could not know, and it befell
That these are the last words your fingers wrote,
There is a dignity some might not see
In this, “I picked the first sweet-pea to-day.”
To-day! Was there an opening bud beside it
You left until to-morrow?—O my love,
The things that withered,—and you came not back!
That day you filled this circle of my arms
That now is empty. (O my empty life!)
That day—that day you picked the first sweet-pea,—
And brought it in to show me! I recall
With terrible distinctness how the smell
Of your cool gardens drifted in with you.
I know, you held it up for me to see
And flushed because I looked not at the flower,
But at your face; and when behind my look
You saw such unmistakable intent
You laughed and brushed your flower against my lips.
(You were the fairest thing God ever made,
I think.) And then your hands above my heart
Drew down its stem into a fastening,
And while your head was bent I kissed your hair.
I wonder if you knew. (Beloved hands!
Somehow I cannot seem to see them still.
Somehow I cannot seem to see the dust
In your bright hair.) What is the need of Heaven
When earth can be so sweet?—If only God
Had let us love,—and show the world the way!
Strange cancellings must ink th’ eternal books
When love-crossed-out will bring the answer right!
That first sweet-pea! I wonder where it is.
It seems to me I laid it down somewhere,
And yet,—I am not sure. I am not sure,
Even, if it was white or pink; for then
‘Twas much like any other flower to me,
Save that it was the first. I did not know,
Then, that it was the last. If I had known—
But then, it does not matter. Strange how few,
After all’s said and done, the things that are
Of moment.
Few indeed! When I can make
Of ten small words a rope to hang the world!
“I had you and I have you now no more.”
There, there it dangles,—where’s the little truth
That can for long keep footing under that
When its slack syllables tighten to a thought?
Here, let me write it down! I wish to see
Just how a thing like that will look on paper!

“*I had you and I have you now no more*.”

O little words, how can you run so straight
Across the page, beneath the weight you bear?
How can you fall apart, whom such a theme
Has bound together, and hereafter aid
In trivial expression, that have been
So hideously dignified?—Would God
That tearing you apart would tear the thread
I strung you on! Would God—O God, my mind
Stretches asunder on this merciless rack
Of imagery! O, let me sleep a while!
Would I could sleep, and wake to find me back
In that sweet summer afternoon with you.
Summer? ‘Tis summer still by the calendar!
How easily could God, if He so willed,
Set back the world a little turn or two!
Correct its griefs, and bring its joys again!

We were so wholly one I had not thought
That we could die apart. I had not thought
That I could move,—and you be stiff and still!
That I could speak,—and you perforce be dumb!
I think our heart-strings were, like warp and woof
In some firm fabric, woven in and out;
Your golden filaments in fair design
Across my duller fibre. And to-day
The shining strip is rent; the exquisite
Fine pattern is destroyed; part of your heart
Aches in my breast; part of my heart lies chilled
In the damp earth with you. I have been torn
In two, and suffer for the rest of me.
What is my life to me? And what am I
To life,—a ship whose star has guttered out?
A Fear that in the deep night starts awake
Perpetually, to find its senses strained
Against the taut strings of the quivering air,
Awaiting the return of some dread chord?

Dark, Dark, is all I find for metaphor;
All else were contrast,—save that contrast’s wall
Is down, and all opposed things flow together
Into a vast monotony, where night
And day, and frost and thaw, and death and life,
Are synonyms. What now—what now to me
Are all the jabbering birds and foolish flowers
That clutter up the world? You were my song!
Now, let discord scream! You were my flower!
Now let the world grow weeds! For I shall not
Plant things above your grave—(the common balm
Of the conventional woe for its own wound!)
Amid sensations rendered negative
By your elimination stands to-day,
Certain, unmixed, the element of grief;
I sorrow; and I shall not mock my truth
With travesties of suffering, nor seek
To effigy its incorporeal bulk
In little wry-faced images of woe.

I cannot call you back; and I desire
No utterance of my immaterial voice.
I cannot even turn my face this way
Or that, and say, “My face is turned to you”;
I know not where you are, I do not know
If Heaven hold you or if earth transmute,
Body and soul, you into earth again;
But this I know:—not for one second’s space
Shall I insult my sight with visionings
Such as the credulous crowd so eager-eyed
Beholds, self-conjured, in the empty air.
Let the world wail! Let drip its easy tears!
My sorrow shall be dumb!

—What do I say?
God! God!—God pity me! Am I gone mad
That I should spit upon a rosary?
Am I become so shrunken? Would to God
I too might feel that frenzied faith whose touch
Makes temporal the most enduring grief;
Though it must walk a while, as is its wont,
With wild lamenting! Would I too might weep
Where weeps the world and hangs its piteous wreaths
For its new dead! Not Truth, but Faith, it is
That keeps the world alive. If all at once
Faith were to slacken,—that unconscious faith
Which must, I know, yet be the corner-stone
Of all believing,—birds now flying fearless
Across would drop in terror to the earth;
Fishes would drown; and the all-governing reins
Would tangle in the frantic hands of God
And the worlds gallop headlong to destruction!

O God, I see it now, and my sick brain
Staggers and swoons! How often over me
Flashes this breathlessness of sudden sight
In which I see the universe unrolled
Before me like a scroll and read thereon
Chaos and Doom, where helpless planets whirl
Dizzily round and round and round and round,
Like tops across a table, gathering speed
With every spin, to waver on the edge
One instant—looking over—and the next
To shudder and lurch forward out of sight—

. . . . . . .

Ah, I am worn out—I am wearied out—
It is too much—I am but flesh and blood,
And I must sleep. Though you were dead again,
I am but flesh and blood and I must sleep.

 

. . . . . . . . . .

The Suicide

“Curse thee, Life, I will live with thee no more!
Thou hast mocked me, starved me, beat my body sore!
And all for a pledge that was not pledged by me,
I have kissed thy crust and eaten sparingly
That I might eat again, and met thy sneers
With deprecations, and thy blows with tears,—
Aye, from thy glutted lash, glad, crawled away,
As if spent passion were a holiday!
And now I go. Nor threat, nor easy vow
Of tardy kindness can avail thee now
With me, whence fear and faith alike are flown;
Lonely I came, and I depart alone,
And know not where nor unto whom I go;
But that thou canst not follow me I know.”

Thus I to Life, and ceased; but through my brain
My thought ran still, until I spake again:

“Ah, but I go not as I came,—no trace
Is mine to bear away of that old grace
I brought! I have been heated in thy fires,
Bent by thy hands, fashioned to thy desires,
Thy mark is on me! I am not the same
Nor ever more shall be, as when I came.
Ashes am I of all that once I seemed.
In me all’s sunk that leapt, and all that dreamed
Is wakeful for alarm,—oh, shame to thee,
For the ill change that thou hast wrought in me,
Who laugh no more nor lift my throat to sing!
Ah, Life, I would have been a pleasant thing
To have about the house when I was grown
If thou hadst left my little joys alone!
I asked of thee no favor save this one:
That thou wouldst leave me playing in the sun!
And this thou didst deny, calling my name
Insistently, until I rose and came.
I saw the sun no more.—It were not well
So long on these unpleasant thoughts to dwell,
Need I arise to-morrow and renew
Again my hated tasks, but I am through
With all things save my thoughts and this one night,
So that in truth I seem already quite
Free and remote from thee,—I feel no haste
And no reluctance to depart; I taste
Merely, with thoughtful mien, an unknown draught,
That in a little while I shall have quaffed.”

Thus I to Life, and ceased, and slightly smiled,
Looking at nothing; and my thin dreams filed
Before me one by one till once again
I set new words unto an old refrain:

“Treasures thou hast that never have been mine!
Warm lights in many a secret chamber shine
Of thy gaunt house, and gusts of song have blown
Like blossoms out to me that sat alone!
And I have waited well for thee to show
If any share were mine,—and now I go!
Nothing I leave, and if I naught attain
I shall but come into mine own again!”
Thus I to Life, and ceased, and spake no more,
But turning, straightway, sought a certain door
In the rear wall. Heavy it was, and low
And dark,—a way by which none e’er would go
That other exit had, and never knock
Was heard thereat,—bearing a curious lock
Some chance had shown me fashioned faultily,
Whereof Life held content the useless key,
And great coarse hinges, thick and rough with rust,
Whose sudden voice across a silence must,
I knew, be harsh and horrible to hear,—
A strange door, ugly like a dwarf.—So near
I came I felt upon my feet the chill
Of acid wind creeping across the sill.
So stood longtime, till over me at last
Came weariness, and all things other passed
To make it room; the still night drifted deep
Like snow about me, and I longed for sleep.

But, suddenly, marking the morning hour,
Bayed the deep-throated bell within the tower!
Startled, I raised my head,—and with a shout
Laid hold upon the latch,—and was without.

 

. . . . . . .

Ah, long-forgotten, well-remembered road,
Leading me back unto my old abode,
My father’s house! There in the night I came,
And found them feasting, and all things the same
As they had been before. A splendour hung
Upon the walls, and such sweet songs were sung
As, echoing out of very long ago,
Had called me from the house of Life, I know.
So fair their raiment shone I looked in shame
On the unlovely garb in which I came;
Then straightway at my hesitancy mocked:
“It is my father’s house!” I said and knocked;
And the door opened. To the shining crowd
Tattered and dark I entered, like a cloud,
Seeing no face but his; to him I crept,
And “Father!” I cried, and clasped his knees, and wept.
Ah, days of joy that followed! All alone
I wandered through the house. My own, my own,
My own to touch, my own to taste and smell,
All I had lacked so long and loved so well!
None shook me out of sleep, nor hushed my song,
Nor called me in from the sunlight all day long.

I know not when the wonder came to me
Of what my father’s business might be,
And whither fared and on what errands bent
The tall and gracious messengers he sent.
Yet one day with no song from dawn till night
Wondering, I sat, and watched them out of sight.
And the next day I called; and on the third
Asked them if I might go,—but no one heard.
Then, sick with longing, I arose at last
And went unto my father,—in that vast
Chamber wherein he for so many years
Has sat, surrounded by his charts and spheres.
“Father,” I said, “Father, I cannot play
The harp that thou didst give me, and all day
I sit in idleness, while to and fro
About me thy serene, grave servants go;
And I am weary of my lonely ease.
Better a perilous journey overseas
Away from thee, than this, the life I lead,
To sit all day in the sunshine like a weed
That grows to naught,—I love thee more than they
Who serve thee most; yet serve thee in no way.
Father, I beg of thee a little task
To dignify my days,—’tis all I ask
Forever, but forever, this denied,
I perish.”
“Child,” my father’s voice replied,
“All things thy fancy hath desired of me
Thou hast received. I have prepared for thee
Within my house a spacious chamber, where
Are delicate things to handle and to wear,
And all these things are thine. Dost thou love song?
My minstrels shall attend thee all day long.
Or sigh for flowers? My fairest gardens stand
Open as fields to thee on every hand.
And all thy days this word shall hold the same:
No pleasure shalt thou lack that thou shalt name.
But as for tasks—” he smiled, and shook his head;
“Thou hadst thy task, and laidst it by”, he said.

 

. . . . . . . . . .

God’s World

O world, I cannot hold thee close enough!
Thy winds, thy wide grey skies!
Thy mists, that roll and rise!
Thy woods, this autumn day, that ache and sag
And all but cry with colour! That gaunt crag
To crush! To lift the lean of that black bluff!
World, World, I cannot get thee close enough!

Long have I known a glory in it all,
But never knew I this;
Here such a passion is
As stretcheth me apart,—Lord, I do fear
Thou’st made the world too beautiful this year;
My soul is all but out of me,—let fall
No burning leaf; prithee, let no bird call.

. . . . . . . . . .

Afternoon on a Hill

I will be the gladdest thing
Under the sun!
I will touch a hundred flowers
And not pick one.

I will look at cliffs and clouds
With quiet eyes,
Watch the wind bow down the grass,
And the grass rise.

And when lights begin to show
Up from the town,
I will mark which must be mine,
And then start down!

. . . . . . . . . .

Sorrow

Sorrow like a ceaseless rain
Beats upon my heart.
People twist and scream in pain,—
Dawn will find them still again;
This has neither wax nor wane,
Neither stop nor start.

People dress and go to town;
I sit in my chair.
All my thoughts are slow and brown:
Standing up or sitting down
Little matters, or what gown
Or what shoes I wear.

 

. . . . . . . . . .

Tavern

I’ll keep a little tavern
Below the high hill’s crest,
Wherein all grey-eyed people
May set them down and rest.

There shall be plates a-plenty,
And mugs to melt the chill
Of all the grey-eyed people
Who happen up the hill.

There sound will sleep the traveller,
And dream his journey’s end,
But I will rouse at midnight
The falling fire to tend.

Aye, ’tis a curious fancy—
But all the good I know
Was taught me out of two grey eyes
A long time ago.

. . . . . . . . . .

Ashes of Life

Love has gone and left me and the days are all alike;
Eat I must, and sleep I will,—and would that night were here!
But ah!—to lie awake and hear the slow hours strike!
Would that it were day again!—with twilight near!

Love has gone and left me and I don’t know what to do;
This or that or what you will is all the same to me;
But all the things that I begin I leave before I’m through,—
There’s little use in anything as far as I can see.

Love has gone and left me,—and the neighbors knock and borrow,
And life goes on forever like the gnawing of a mouse,—
And to-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow
There’s this little street and this little house.

. . . . . . . . . .

The Little Ghost

I knew her for a little ghost
That in my garden walked;
The wall is high—higher than most—
And the green gate was locked.

And yet I did not think of that
Till after she was gone—
I knew her by the broad white hat,
All ruffled, she had on.

By the dear ruffles round her feet,
By her small hands that hung
In their lace mitts, austere and sweet,
Her gown’s white folds among.

I watched to see if she would stay,
What she would do—and oh!
She looked as if she liked the way
I let my garden grow!

She bent above my favourite mint
With conscious garden grace,
She smiled and smiled—there was no hint
Of sadness in her face.

She held her gown on either side
To let her slippers show,
And up the walk she went with pride,
The way great ladies go.

And where the wall is built in new
And is of ivy bare
She paused—then opened and passed through
A gate that once was there.

 

. . . . . . . . . .

Kin to Sorrow

Am I kin to Sorrow,
That so oft
Falls the knocker of my door—
Neither loud nor soft,
But as long accustomed,
Under Sorrow’s hand?
Marigolds around the step
And rosemary stand,
And then comes Sorrow—
And what does Sorrow care
For the rosemary
Or the marigolds there?
Am I kin to Sorrow?
Are we kin?
That so oft upon my door—
*Oh, come in*!

. . . . . . . . . .

Three Songs of Shattering

I

The first rose on my rose-tree
Budded, bloomed, and shattered,
During sad days when to me
Nothing mattered.

Grief of grief has drained me clean;
Still it seems a pity
No one saw,—it must have been
Very pretty.

II

Let the little birds sing;
Let the little lambs play;
Spring is here; and so ’tis spring;—
But not in the old way!

I recall a place
Where a plum-tree grew;
There you lifted up your face,
And blossoms covered you.

If the little birds sing,
And the little lambs play,
Spring is here; and so ’tis spring—
But not in the old way!

III

All the dog-wood blossoms are underneath the tree!
Ere spring was going—ah, spring is gone!
And there comes no summer to the like of you and me,—
Blossom time is early, but no fruit sets on.

All the dog-wood blossoms are underneath the tree,
Browned at the edges, turned in a day;
And I would with all my heart they trimmed a mound for me,
And weeds were tall on all the paths that led that way!

. . . . . . . . . .

The Shroud

Death, I say, my heart is bowed
Unto thine,—O mother!
This red gown will make a shroud
Good as any other!

(I, that would not wait to wear
My own bridal things,
In a dress dark as my hair
Made my answerings.

I, to-night, that till he came
Could not, could not wait,
In a gown as bright as flame
Held for them the gate.)

Death, I say, my heart is bowed
Unto thine,—O mother!
This red gown will make a shroud
Good as any other!

 

. . . . . . . . . .

The Dream

Love, if I weep it will not matter,
And if you laugh I shall not care;
Foolish am I to think about it,
But it is good to feel you there.

Love, in my sleep I dreamed of waking,—
White and awful the moonlight reached
Over the floor, and somewhere, somewhere,
There was a shutter loose,—it screeched!

Swung in the wind,—and no wind blowing!—
I was afraid, and turned to you,
Put out my hand to you for comfort,—
And you were gone! Cold, cold as dew,

Under my hand the moonlight lay!
Love, if you laugh I shall not care,
But if I weep it will not matter,—
Ah, it is good to feel you there!

. . . . . . . . . .

Indifference

I said,—for Love was laggard, O, Love was slow to come,—
“I’ll hear his step and know his step when I am warm in bed;
But I’ll never leave my pillow, though there be some
As would let him in—and take him in with tears!” I said.
I lay,—for Love was laggard, O, he came not until dawn,—
I lay and listened for his step and could not get to sleep;
And he found me at my window with my big cloak on,
All sorry with the tears some folks might weep!

. . . . . . . . . .

Witch-Wife

She is neither pink nor pale,
And she never will be all mine;
She learned her hands in a fairy-tale,
And her mouth on a valentine.

She has more hair than she needs;
In the sun ’tis a woe to me!
And her voice is a string of colored beads,
Or steps leading into the sea.

She loves me all that she can,
And her ways to my ways resign;
But she was not made for any man,
And she never will be all mine.

. . . . . . . . . .

Blight

Hard seeds of hate I planted
That should by now be grown,—
Rough stalks, and from thick stamens
A poisonous pollen blown,
And odors rank, unbreathable,
From dark corollas thrown!

At dawn from my damp garden
I shook the chilly dew;
The thin boughs locked behind me
That sprang to let me through;
The blossoms slept,—I sought a place
Where nothing lovely grew.

And there, when day was breaking,
I knelt and looked around:
The light was near, the silence
Was palpitant with sound;
I drew my hate from out my breast
And thrust it in the ground.

Oh, ye so fiercely tended,
Ye little seeds of hate!
I bent above your growing
Early and noon and late,
Yet are ye drooped and pitiful,—
I cannot rear ye straight!

The sun seeks out my garden,
No nook is left in shade,
No mist nor mold nor mildew
Endures on any blade,
Sweet rain slants under every bough:
Ye falter, and ye fade.

 

. . . . . . . . . .

When the Year Grows Old

I cannot but remember
When the year grows old—
October—November—
How she disliked the cold!

She used to watch the swallows
Go down across the sky,
And turn from the window
With a little sharp sigh.

And often when the brown leaves
Were brittle on the ground,
And the wind in the chimney
Made a melancholy sound,

She had a look about her
That I wish I could forget—
The look of a scared thing
Sitting in a net!

Oh, beautiful at nightfall
The soft spitting snow!
And beautiful the bare boughs
Rubbing to and fro!

But the roaring of the fire,
And the warmth of fur,
And the boiling of the kettle
Were beautiful to her!

I cannot but remember
When the year grows old—
October—November—
How she disliked the cold!

. . . . . . . . . .

Sonnets

I

Thou art not lovelier than lilacs,—no,
Nor honeysuckle; thou art not more fair
Than small white single poppies,—I can bear
Thy beauty; though I bend before thee, though
From left to right, not knowing where to go,
I turn my troubled eyes, nor here nor there
Find any refuge from thee, yet I swear
So has it been with mist,—with moonlight so.

Like him who day by day unto his draught
Of delicate poison adds him one drop more
Till he may drink unharmed the death of ten,
Even so, inured to beauty, who have quaffed
Each hour more deeply than the hour before,
I drink—and live—what has destroyed some men.

II

Time does not bring relief; you all have lied
Who told me time would ease me of my pain!
I miss him in the weeping of the rain;
I want him at the shrinking of the tide;
The old snows melt from every mountain-side,
And last year’s leaves are smoke in every lane;
But last year’s bitter loving must remain
Heaped on my heart, and my old thoughts abide!

There are a hundred places where I fear
To go,—so with his memory they brim!
And entering with relief some quiet place
Where never fell his foot or shone his face
I say, “There is no memory of him here!”
And so stand stricken, so remembering him!

III

Mindful of you the sodden earth in spring,
And all the flowers that in the springtime grow,
And dusty roads, and thistles, and the slow
Rising of the round moon, all throats that sing
The summer through, and each departing wing,
And all the nests that the bared branches show,
And all winds that in any weather blow,
And all the storms that the four seasons bring.

You go no more on your exultant feet
Up paths that only mist and morning knew,
Or watch the wind, or listen to the beat
Of a bird’s wings too high in air to view,—
But you were something more than young and sweet
And fair,—and the long year remembers you.

IV

Not in this chamber only at my birth—
When the long hours of that mysterious night
Were over, and the morning was in sight—
I cried, but in strange places, steppe and firth
I have not seen, through alien grief and mirth;
And never shall one room contain me quite
Who in so many rooms first saw the light,
Child of all mothers, native of the earth.

So is no warmth for me at any fire
To-day, when the world’s fire has burned so low;
I kneel, spending my breath in vain desire,
At that cold hearth which one time roared so strong,
And straighten back in weariness, and long
To gather up my little gods and go.

V

If I should learn, in some quite casual way,
That you were gone, not to return again—
Read from the back-page of a paper, say,
Held by a neighbor in a subway train,
How at the corner of this avenue
And such a street (so are the papers filled)
A hurrying man—who happened to be you—
At noon to-day had happened to be killed,
I should not cry aloud—I could not cry
Aloud, or wring my hands in such a place—
I should but watch the station lights rush by
With a more careful interest on my face,
Or raise my eyes and read with greater care
Where to store furs and how to treat the hair.

VI       Bluebeard

This door you might not open, and you did;
So enter now, and see for what slight thing
You are betrayed…. Here is no treasure hid,
No cauldron, no clear crystal mirroring
The sought-for truth, no heads of women slain
For greed like yours, no writhings of distress,
But only what you see…. Look yet again—
An empty room, cobwebbed and comfortless.
Yet this alone out of my life I kept
Unto myself, lest any know me quite;
And you did so profane me when you crept
Unto the threshold of this room to-night
That I must never more behold your face.
This now is yours. I seek another place.

 

 

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