Nava Atlas's Blog, page 42
April 16, 2021
Square Haunting: Five Writers in London Between the Wars by Francesca Wade
Square Haunting: Five Writers in London Between the Wars by Francesca Wade (2020) sheds new light on fascinating female literary figures of twentieth century and their sojourns in the Bloomsbury district of London the interwar years. First, a brief description from the publisher:
“In the pivotal era between the two world wars, the lives of five remarkable women intertwined at this one address: modernist poet H. D., detective novelist Dorothy L. Sayers, classicist Jane Harrison, economic historian Eileen Power, and author and publisher Virginia Woolf. In an era when women’s freedoms were fast expanding, they each sought a space where they could live, love, and—above all—work independently.
With sparkling insight and a novelistic style, Francesca Wade sheds new light on a group of artists and thinkers whose pioneering work would enrich the possibilities of women’s lives for generations to come.”
The following review was contributed by Lynne Weiss:
I visited London for the first time in the fall of 1991. Before my husband and I left, I read that the hotel we had booked in Bloomsbury was on the former site of Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press.
Hoping the building would offer literary inspiration, I was disappointed by the bland budget hotel that was our home for our week-long visit. I didn’t spend a lot of time puzzling over the discrepancy between my expectations and the reality—there were plenty of things to do in London beyond inhaling any imagined remnants of Virginia Woolf’s genius that might have lingered in the air.
I recalled that drab hotel in the course of reading Francesca Wade’s excellent Square Haunting: Five Writers in London Between the Wars (Random House, 2020). I knew about the Blitz, but not the extent of its destruction. As Wade makes clear, the combination of bombs and the growth of educational institutions means that the Bloomsbury of today is architecturally very different from what it was between 1916 – 1940, the period covered in Wade’s book.
Does it matter? I consider this question for my own community (a city founded in 1630, old for an American city). Today it faces a severe housing shortage and thus an ongoing debate on how to provide housing while preserving history. I’m a sucker for wandering about in my hometown as well as elsewhere, reading historic plaques and trying to piece together the connections between the buildings and streets around me and the lives of those who came before.
London is a paradise for that kind of ambling. The city has more than 950 blue plaques marking the locations of people and events significant to the city’s history, as well as hundreds of other historical markers.
“Personally, we should be willing to read one volume about every street in the City, and should still ask for more,” Virginia Woolf declared. Francesca Wade has set out to create one of those volumes, focusing on the women who lived in a particular square over the course of a couple of decades.
But why Bloomsbury, and why Mecklenburgh Square? Bloomsbury was a neighborhood for people “either going up or going down,” according to novelist Margery Allingham. For women longing for independence and freedom from social expectations, such as H.D (Hilda Doolittle), Dorothy L. Sayers, Jane Harrison, Eileen Power, and Virginia Woolf, it was a neighborhood of possibilities.
And yet, Mecklenburgh Square, the focus of Wade’s book, has only a single blue plaque marking the former residence of one of the five (H.D.) whose achievements and contributions Wade profiles in this enlightening book.
The five lived in Mecklenburgh Square at separate times, yet they shared a determination to realize their potential as writers and intellectuals. It was a time when the barriers to such achievement were just beginning to fall. Only in 1918 did property-owning women over the age of thirty win suffrage in Britain. (It was finally extended to all women over twenty-one in 1928). And in 1919, the Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act allowed women to serve as lawyers and civil servants and to receive university degrees.
But changes to laws do not ensure equality of opportunity. The 1919 law did not require that women in the civil service receive the same pay as men performing the same jobs, for example— and they did not.
Educational opportunities for women remained segregated and limited. And the women profiled in this book endured pain of a personal nature, made worse by the prevailing devaluing of women’s experiences—H.D. was reviled after suffering a still birth for taking a hospital bed that she was told should have gone to a soldier; Sayers spent her life hiding the existence of a son born to her out of wedlock; Harrison endured the humiliation of being rebuffed by a male colleague who regarded her as a mother; Power was embarrassed by unwanted marriage proposals.
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H.D. (Hilda Doolittle)
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Wade’s story of the square is bookended by wars, beginning in 1916, when Germany sent huge Zeppelin airships, like something out of science fiction, to drop incendiary bombs on London. In February of that year, H.D. (the pen name of poet Hilda Doolittle)., recently championed by her high school beau Ezra Pound for her Imagist poetry, and her husband, Richard Aldington, moved into a first floor flat at 44 Mecklenburgh Square.
H.D. threw herself into her writing to manage her pain over marital troubles, composing “Eurydice,” the groundbreaking poetic monologue that marked her transition from an impersonal Imagist aesthetic to explorations the inner lives of mythological heroines. She eventually removed herself to Cornwall, which she experienced as a “cold healing mist,” and where she met Bryher, the woman whose money and devotion finally allowed H.D. to find the affirmation and freedom she needed to realize her artistic calling.
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Dorothy Sayers
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Fewer than three years after H.D. left Mecklenburgh Square, Dorothy Sayers, who just a few months earlier had been part of the University of Oxford’s first group of women graduates, moved into H.D.’s former flat. Sayers, then twenty-seven, had completed her studies in modern languages five years earlier, but women were not awarded degrees until 1920.
Despite the hostile atmosphere (one don insisted that women sit behind him so he wouldn’t have to see them as he lectured), Sayers enjoyed her time at Oxford, where she was known for riding a motorbike and dressing in trousers.
In 1920, London’s streets were filled with injured, shell-shocked, and homeless veterans. Yet for young Sayers, it offered possibility. She dreamed of becoming a poet, but determined to support herself through her writing, and drawn to gruesome stories, she created the character of Lord Peter Wimsey, the fictional detective at the center of what would become her best-selling novels.
While living in Mecklenburgh Square, she spent her Saturdays in the nearby British Museum reading about sensational trials and wrote her first novel (Whose Body?), which introduced readers to Wimsey.
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Hope Mirrlees and Jane Ellen Harrison
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Jane Harrison was seventy-five when she arrived at 11 Mecklenburgh Street. I knew little about Harrison, one of the first female academics in Britain, beyond her appearance in Woolf’s extended 1928 essay, A Room of One’s Own, as “a bent figure, formidable yet humble, with her great forehead and her shabby dress” and later in the essay as the author of books on Greek archaeology.
When Harrison moved to Mecklenburgh Street, she did so in the company of Hope Mirrlees, a much younger woman, whom Woolf described in her diaries as a “spoiled prodigy” but also as one who knew “Greek and Russian better than I do French.”
Harrison spent her last years on Mecklenburgh Street, dying there in April 1928, but they may have been her best years. There she was finally freed from the restrictions placed on her as a woman at Cambridge University, to live “alongside intellectuals and revolutionaries, still learning new languages and developing fresh ideas.”
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Eileen Power
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The most surprising and delightful chapter of a book full of delightful surprises is Wade’s account of Eileen Power, someone who was completely unknown to me. Power moved into number 20 in January of 1922 and remained there through August 1940.
After receiving the “perfectly disgusting” news in 1920 that her alma mater, Cambridge, had decided not to grant women full membership in the university, Power accepted a post as a lecturer in economic history at the London School of Economics.
When she moved to Bloomsbury, she had recently returned from a year of traveling around the world as the recipient of a fellowship that allowed her to journey alone to Egypt, India, China, Japan, and North America—sometimes dressed as a man.
Her 1924 Medieval People was a surprise bestseller and pioneered portraying the lives of ordinary artisans, prioresses, and traders as contributors to history. Wade suggests that Woolf likely had Power’s work in mind when she called for “Anon” to be returned to her rightful place in history.
Throughout her life, Power was fascinated by China, which she had visited during her traveling fellowship and returned to in 1929. She became engaged to Reginald Johnston, former tutor to the 13-year-old Puyi, the last emperor of China. The marriage to Johnston never materialized, as Power’s professional commitments repeatedly took priority over domestic stability. She eventually married a much younger student.
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Virginia and Leonard Woolf
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Power’s final year in the square is marked by the arrival of Virginia and Leonard Woolf at 37 Mecklenburgh Square on August 17, 1939. Soon after, Hitler invaded Poland and Britain declared war on Germany. The Woolfs, who had learned that they were on a list of people marked for capture by the Gestapo following Germany’s anticipated invasion of Britain, planned to commit suicide in the event of Britain’s defeat, an event that seemed quite likely.
Despite these anxieties, Woolf completed a great deal of work during her year in Mecklenburgh Square, including a novel, Between the Acts, and a biography of art critic Roger Fry. Her diary entries record a busy life of dinners, parties, writing commissions, and gardening. But on September 7, 1940, Germany began bombing London, and the Woolfs abandoned Mecklenburgh Square for their country house in Sussex. For the first time in her life, Virginia had no home in London.
London had been Woolf’s muse: “London itself perpetually attracts, stimulates, gives me a play & a story & a poem without any trouble, save that of moving my legs through the streets… To walk alone in London is the greatest rest.”
Bombs drove the Woolfs to Sussex. The Blitz drove the London School of Economics temporarily out of London as well, and Power followed it to Cambridge. Most of Mecklenburgh Square was destroyed in the war, but the statue of the Woman of Samaria, the only statue in London depicting a woman at the time these women lived, still stands at the entrance of Mecklenburgh Square.
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Square Haunting on Bookshop.org*
Square Haunting on Amazon.com*
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Francesca Wade has not only uncovered the history of women such as Harrison and Power, who had faded from memory, but adds dimension to figures such as H.D. and Sayers by informing readers of the complexities of their situations and the very real obstacles—personal and social—they overcame.
Square Haunting is a valiant, poignant, and highly readable effort to uncover that history and revive our memories of some of the notable women who worked to bring women’s creativity and thought to the forefront of history. Would that information have been more available to us if Mecklenburgh Square had not been bombed? Probably not. Bombs or no bombs, we need accounts such as Wade’s.
And yet those of us who wander the streets in search of literary or historical inspiration might better recognize it in the buildings where people actually lived and worked. As Lytton Strachey wrote upon Jane Harrison’s death: “What a wretched waste it seems that all that richness of experience and personality should be completely abolished! Why, one wonders, shouldn’t it have gone on and on?”
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.
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*These are Bookshop Affiliate and Amazon Affiliate link. If a product is purchased by linking through, Literary Ladies Guide receives a modest commission, which helps maintain our site and helps it to continue growing!
The post Square Haunting: Five Writers in London Between the Wars by Francesca Wade appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.
April 13, 2021
Mina Loy and the “Crowd” — Modernists in 1920s Paris
Though not as well known today, Mina Loy was well entrenched in the modernist circles that included leading figures of arts and letters of the 1920s. This musing on Mina Loy and the “Crowd” is excerpted from Everybody I Can Think of Ever: Meetings That Made the Avant-Garde by Francis Booth. Reprinted by permission.
Mina Loy (1882 – 1966), who practiced both as a writer and visual artist, was a vital member of the group of creatives that launched the modernist movement. Born in Hampstead, London, she was a painter, poet, novelist, and playwright, and also achieved some renown as a lamp designer.
The core of the “Crowd” was the largely lesbian 1920s New York circle that included Margaret C. Anderson, Jane Heap, and Georgette Leblanc. Djuna Barnes was there too; she was a lesbian by that time but, like Georgette, she hadn’t always been. Barnes was a close friend of the very heterosexual English poet Mina Loy; Djuna told Mina, in the presence of Mina’s teenage daughter Joella, that she had had nineteen male lovers, most of them Americans, before she had given up on men and taken a female lover.
She took many others later, though not Mina, who was famously beautiful, however much she might have wanted to. Margaret Anderson said that the “Crowd” included three “raving beauties”: Mina and her two daughters, Joella and Fabienne.
Meeting William Carlos Williams
William Carlos Williams was among the men attracted to Mina, though he seems never to have done anything about it – he may be the only person in this group who was faithful to a single life-partner, if not entirely voluntarily. In an interview in I Wanted to Write a Poem he said ‘I had a flirtation with Mina – fruitless.’ His wife, Flossie, who was present, said “I don’t think you had enough money for Mina.”
Wiliams had met Loy when she first came to New York in 1916; they had acted together in the Provincetown players, Williams playing Loy’s husband. He said that Mina was “a very English, very skittish, and evasive, long-limbed woman too smart to involve herself, after a first disastrous marriage, with any others – though she was friendly and had written some attractive verse.”
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Mina Loy (front row, center) and some of the “Crowd” in Paris, 1923
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After the failure of her first marriage to artist Stephen Haweis, Loy lived with writer and boxer Arthur Cravan, who broke into Paris society by claiming to be Oscar Wilde‘s nephew. Loy took Williams to meet Cravan at a party in 1916, where Williams also first met Marcel Duchamp.
“I was a bit late and the small room was already crowded – by Frenchmen mostly. I remember of course, Marcel Duchamp. At the end of the room was a French girl, of say eighteen or less, attended by some older woman. She lay reclining upon a divan, her legs straight out before her, surrounded by young men who had each a portion of her body in his possession which he caressed attentively, apparently unconscious of any rival. Two or three addressed themselves to her shoulders on either side, to her elbows, her wrists, hands, to each finger perhaps, I cannot recall – the same for her legs. She was in a black lace gown fully at ease. It was something I had not seen before.”
When she first saw Arthur, Mina had “no premonition of the psychological infinity that he would later offer my indiscreet curiosity as to the mechanism of man,” he was merely “dull and square in merely respectable tweeds; not at all homosexual.”
The next time they saw him he was drunk; Duchamp and Francis Picabia had made sure that he would be in bad shape for a lecture he was giving on “The Independent Artists of France and America.” He swayed and shouted and banged the table, he was arrested and taken to jail; Duchamp said “what a wonderful lecture.”
The next day Mina was present at a costume ball where everyone was watching Arthur. He had come wearing a bedspread as a toga, which he took off before sitting down next to Mina and putting his arm round her. His “unspoken obscenities chilled my powdered skin.”
At the time Cravan was largely homeless and often slept on park benches. He asked if he could stay at her apartment and sleep on the table. Loy agreed, but he didn’t sleep on the table; they became lovers. She stayed with Cravan and went to Mexico with him, where they were married in Mexico City in 1918.
Soon afterward Cravan disappeared in Mexico, presumed drowned off the coast, one of two writers in this book to drown off the coast of Mexico. He was never found and the mystery has never been solved.
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Everybody I Can Think of Ever on Amazon U.S.*
Everybody I Can Think of Ever on Amazon U.K*
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Sylvia Beach said that of the three beauties in the “Crowd” – Mina and her two daughters – Mina “would have been elected the most beautiful of the three” but that, despite his glaucoma, James Joyce, “who could see as well as anyone when he wanted to, observed that Joella was a beauty according to all the standards: her golden hair, her eyes, a complexion, her manners.”
So Joella had Joyce’s vote, although she was born in the same year as Joyce’s own daughter Lucia, who will appear in this story later on. Joella had Robert McAlmon’s vote too; he recalled some of the women in Paris at that time in Being Geniuses Together:
“Mary Reynolds, Mina Loy and her daughter Gioella [sic], Catherine Murphy, Djuna Barnes stand out in my memory as the more elegant, witty, beautiful of the girls or women about at the time.”
His description of Joella as a teenager is rather disturbing, given her age at the time, though not as disturbing as his reference to the ‘lovely twelve-year-old Fabie’ [Fabienne], Joella’s younger sister. (Fabienne was ‘done’ by Berenice Abbott, looking very fetching in a fashionable Louise Brooks bob.) McAlmon here sounds like Humbert Humbert (of Lolita) describing Dolores Haze:
“Gioella was then a bit gangly with adolescence, but very lovely, with sleepy blue eyes, long pale eyelashes, and slender, childish arms which made Mariette Mills [a sculptor who did the head of McAlmon] wish to sculpt her, and abstract painters talk of doing her portrait.
Gioella had a proper youthful scorn for me and used to ask when I was going to pull myself together and why I acted like a cynical old uncle to her. We took long walks in the wood; deer crossed our path from time to time, and Gioella lectured, and she didn’t think for a second that any of us were getting satisfaction out of being ‘intellectual.’ Only occasionally she would cease being patronising and confess wonder and confusion. Generally, however, she preferred scolding me mildly.”
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Encounters with Sinclair LewisMcAlmon published (and misspelt the title of) Mina Loy’s poetry collection The Lost Lunar Baedecker. He was with her when he met Sinclair Lewis, first American winner, in 1930, of the Nobel Prize for literature; his novel Babbit, about middle-American boosterism, was published in 1922.
Lewis introduced his wife to Robert McAlmon. (husband of convenience of Annie Winifred Allerman, better known by her nom de plume, Bryher, and as the longtime lover of H.D., aka Hilda Doolittle). Over gin fizzes, she suddenly “fired three questions at me: if I thought Lewis the greatest American writer, a fine artist, America’s first. Her questions were too fast, and I said so, whereupon she flew out of the door, refusing to drink with me.”
That was their first proper meeting but McAlmon had nearly met Lewis earlier when he was with Djuna Barnes in a bar one night. He had “known Djuna slightly in New York, because Djuna was a very haughty lady, quick on the uptake, and with a wise-cracking tone that I was far too discreet to rival.”
But one night, when he was out with a male friend, after a few drinks “I finally asked her to dance with me, drink having freed me of the fear of rebuff. As we danced she said, ‘Bob McAlmon, why do you act so nice to me? You know you hate my guts’”. He denied it, she wasn’t convinced, but nevertheless, they became friends, if only in the literary sense. One night when he was out with her:
“Sinclair Lewis barged in, some three sheets in the wind. He had once written a story about hobohemia and evidently feared Djuna would believe he had used her as one of the characters in it. Or perhaps he merely had an admiring eye for Djuna or a respect for her undoubted talent, however uneven it may be. But Djuna was well up with drink too and was not going to get chummy. I recall that Lewis looked wistful and went away from the table, with Djuna not having introduced him.”
At the time McAlmon hadn’t read Lewis’s work; when he did he concluded that Lewis didn’t “know a bit more about Main Street, or Minneapolis, or Babbitts, than did I.”
Meeting Djuna Barnes
The only record of Barnes’ and Loy’s first meeting is the fictionalized version in McAlmon’s novella Post-Adolescence, a roman à clef in which they both appear, as does Marianne Moore, thinly disguised. In the novel, the fictional version of Barnes wants to meet Loy and gets McAlmon to introduce them, in a New York cafe on Sixth Avenue that sells bootleg whiskey.
Barnes tells McAlmon that “she doesn’t sound a hell of a lot different from the rest of us, except I suppose she’s more of a lady than I am.”
The two women become confidantes and the fictional Mina tells the fictional Djuna about her lost husband, a fictional version of Arthur Cravan. She tells her she wishes it had been her first husband who had disappeared. Barnes also talks about her disappointments with men. The Loy character says to her: “We’ll have to form a union of women to show the men up.” The Barnes character replies “and make ourselves exhibits A and B.”
Enter Peggy Guggenheim
Fabulously wealthy gallery owner and art patron Peggy Guggenheim was a patron of both Mina Loy and Djuna Barnes. Guggenheim supported Barnes, who lived in the same apartment block as Loy, with a monthly check.
Peggy took Djuna with her to England, where she had rented a large house in Devon; “the bedrooms were simple and adequate except for the beds which were as hard as army cots. One bedroom, however, was rather dressed up in rococo style and it looked so much like Djuna that we gave it to her. It was in this room, in bed, that she wrote most of Nightwood.”
“Mina Loy, who was not only a poetess and a painter, was always inventing something new by which she hoped to make a fortune. She had just created a new, or old, form of papier collé – flower cut-outs which she framed in beautiful old Louis Philippe frames she bought in the flea market. She asked me to take these to New York for her and sell them.”
Peggy did so, and had them exhibited on Madison Avenue, with great success. When she moved back to France and took a villa in a remote area in the south, “one of our first guests was Mina Loy, who came with her daughters, Joella and Faby. Mina painted a fresco in her bedroom. She conceived lobsters and mermaids with sunshades tied to their tails.” Later, back in Paris, Mina and Peggy went into business together: they opened a lampshade shop.
“I had set up in a shop on the Rue du Colisée, and she had a workshop next to Laurence’s studio on the Avenue du Maine where she employed a lot of girls. I ran the shop and she and Joella, her daughter, ran the workshop … We allowed my mother to invite her lingère to exhibit some underwear at the same time, as we then thought to make some money; this upset Mina so much that she refused to be present at the vernissage.”
Peggy eventually relented on the underwear and the shop became very successful, so much so that Mina had no time to write. So instead, she put the celestial imagery that had been in her poetry into the lampshades, designing illuminated globes that she called mappemondes [world maps] and globes célestes [celestial globes] advertised under the name l’Ombre féerique [fairy shadow]. Sadly, as the name suggests, they were very delicate and none are known to have survived.
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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 Mina Loy and the “Crowd” — Modernists in 1920s Paris appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.
April 11, 2021
10 Spring-Themed Poems by Edna St. Vincent Millay
This year, as spring approached I took on the perspective of Emily Dickinson and slowly, tentatively, began to believe that hope — “the thing with feathers, that perches in the soul” — is real and possible. The poet that I instinctively read, and read again, was Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892 – 1950) and her observations on the spring season.
This bouquet of spring poetry that I culled from Millay’s poems seem to have a common thread: Millay is annoyed at spring’s exuberant beauty coming yearly, and becomes indifferent and slightly angry since nature’s exuberant beauty arrives when her heart is under torment once more and is experienced as something of an intrusion upon her grieving.
And yet, Millay loves spring, and, in a slightly dramatic fashion in her poem Assault, she becomes overwhelmed at the breaking of winter’s silence by the sound of the frogs; she is “waylaid by beauty,” and can scarce continue her walk amongst such natural delights.
Millay consistently used nature in her poetry to express her emotional renderings. Whether in free verse, the lyric rhyme, or in the very formal rules of the sonnet, Millay challenges herself and her readers to experience spring’s beauty as solely impermanent; therefore, beware of taking too much pleasure in its transitory pleasures.
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Learn more about Edna St. Vincent Millay
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You’ll find the following poems ahead:
SpringAssaultSonnet IIIThree Songs of ShatteringMariposaPortrait by a NeighborCity TreesSong of a Second AprilDaphneSonnet. . . . . . . . .
SpringTo what purpose, April, do you return again?
Beauty is not enough.
You can no longer quiet me with the redness
Of little leaves opening stickily.
I know what I know.
The sun is hot on my neck as I observe
The spikes of the crocus.
The smell of the earth is good.
It is apparent that there is no death.
But what does that signify?
Not only under ground are brains of men
Eaten by maggots.
Life in itself
Is nothing,
An empty cup, a flight of uncarpeted stairs.
It is not enough that yearly, down this hill,
April
Comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.
(Originally published in Second April, 1921)
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AssaultI
I had forgotten how the frogs must sound
After a year of silence, else I think
I should not so have ventured forth alone
At dusk upon this unfrequented road.
II
I am waylaid by Beauty. Who will walk
Between me and the crying of the frogs?
Oh, savage Beauty, suffer me to pass,
That am a timid woman, on her way
From one house to another!
(Originally published in Second April, 1921)
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Sonnet IIIMindful 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 the air to view, –
But you were something more than young and sweet
And fair – and the long year remembers you.
(originally published in Renascence and Other Poems, 1917)
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Three Songs of ShatteringI
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!
(originally published in Renascence and Other Poems, 1917)
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MariposaButterflies are white and blue
In this field we wander through.
Suffer me to take your hand.
Death comes in a day or two.
All the things we ever knew
Will be ashes in that hour:
Mark the transient butterfly,
How he hangs upon the flower.
Suffer me to take your hand.
Suffer me to cherish you
Till the dawn is in the sky.
Whether I be false or true,
Death comes in a day or two.
(originally published in Second April, 1921)
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Portrait by a NeighborBefore she has her floor swept
Or her dishes done,
Any day you’ll find her
A-sunning in the sun!
It’s long after midnight
key’s in the lock,
And you never see her chimney smoke
Till past ten o’clock!
She digs in her garden
With a shovel and a spoon,
She weeds her lazy lettuce
By the light of the moon.
She walks up the walk
Like a woman in a dream,
She forgets she borrowed butter
And pays you back cream!
Her lawn looks like a meadow,
And if she mows the place
She leaves the clover standing
And the Queen Anne’s lace!
(originally published in A Few Figs from Thistles, 1922)
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City TreesThe trees along this city street,
Save for the traffic and the trains,
Would make a sound as thin and sweet
As trees in country lanes.
And people standing in their shade
Out of a shower, undoubtedly
Would hear such music as is made
Upon a country tree.
Oh, little leaves that are so dumb
Against the shrieking city air,
I watch you when the wind has come,
I know what sound is there.
(originally published in Second April, 1921)
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Song of a Second AprilApril this year, not otherwise
Than April of a year ago,
Is full of whispers, full of sighs,
Of dazzling mud and dingy snow;
Hepaticas that pleased you so
And here again, and butterflies.
There rings a hammering all day,
And shingles lie about the doors;
In orchards near and far away
The grey wood-pecker taps and bores;
The men are merry at their chores,
And children earnest at their play.
The larger streams run still and deep,
Noisy and swift the small brooks run
Among the mullein stalks the sheep
Go up the hillside in the sun,
Pensively, — only you are gone,
You that alone I cared to keep.
(originally published in Second April, 1921)
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DaphneWhy do you follow me? —
Any moment I can be
Nothing but a laurel-tree.
Any moment of the chase
I can leave you in my place
A pink bough for your embrace.
Yet over hill and hollow
Still it is your will to follow,
I am off; — to heel, Apollo!
(originally published in A Few Figs from Thistles, 1922)
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Sonnet xxviiI know I am but summer to your heart,
And not the full four seasons of the year;
And you must welcome from another part
Such noble moods as are not mine, my dar.
No gracious weight of golden fruits to sell
Have I, nor any wise and wintry thing;
And I have loved you all too long and well
To carry still the high sweet breast of Spring.
Where I say: O love, as summer goes,
I must be gone, steal forth with silent drums,
That you may hail anew the bird and rose
When I come back to you, as summer comes.
Else will you seek, at some not distant time,
Even your summer in another clime.
(originally published in The Harp Weaver, 1923)
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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 10 Spring-Themed Poems by Edna St. Vincent Millay appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.
April 9, 2021
Wild Places Without a Man: H.D. and Bryher
Towards the end of World War I, the American expatriate writer and poet Hilda Doolittle, H.D. met Annie Winifred Ellerman, known as Bryher. H.D. and Breyher became lovers and would remain intimate for the rest of H.D.’s life, supporting and sustaining each other and sharing the responsibility of parenting H.D.’s daughter Perdita.
However, theirs was not an exclusive partnership. Both took other lovers, and in 1921 Bryher entered into a marriage of convenience with the American writer and publisher Robert McAlmon. This arrangement enabled Bryher to keep her traditional family at arm’s length, and allowed McAlmon to use her wealth to set up his own press.
This excerpt, detailing the complex relationships of a circle of modernist literary figures, is from Everybody I Can Think of Ever: Meetings That Made the Avant-Garde by Francis Booth. Reprinted by permission.
A confluence of poets
Robert McAlmon was a penniless writer, publisher, and art-class nude model when the poet William Carlos Williams introduced him to his very wealthy future wife, the writer and editor who named herself Bryher, after one of the British Scilly Isles. Bryher was the lifelong, on and off partner of poet and novelist known as H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), whom Williams had met along with Ezra Pound when they were all in college.
Hilda had first met Ezra Pound even before college, in 1901, when she was fifteen and a schoolgirl in a Philadelphia suburb; they met at a Halloween party. Pound was already a student at the University of Pennsylvania, as was Williams. Pound was dressed as a Tunisian prince. They got to know each other better from 1905 when Hilda went to the women’s liberal arts college Bryn Mawr, where her friend, the poet Marianne Moore also went.
However, Williams didn’t meet Moore until around 1914. Williams said that in those college days Hilda was “a bizarre beauty.” He may have been in love with her himself, but she was attracted to Ezra and they became engaged.
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More about H.D. (Hilda Doolittle)
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“Ezra was the official lover, but Hilda was very coy and invited us both to come and see her. Ezra said to me, ‘are you trying to cut me out?’ I said, ‘no, I’m not thinking of any woman right now, but I like Hilda very much.’ Ezra Pound and I were not rivals, either for the girl or for the poetry. We were pals, both writing independently and respecting each other. I was impressed because he was studying literature and I wasn’t. I was learning from the page when I had a chance.”
Williams had met Pound even before he met H.D. . It was a very significant meeting for him; he was already starting to write poetry but intending to become a doctor. In a series of 1950s interviews with him, published as I Wanted to Write a Poem, he said: ‘Before meeting Ezra Pound is like B.C. and A.D.”
“I don’t recall my first meeting with him. Someone had told me there was a poet in the class. But I remember exactly how he looked. No beard, of course, then. He had a beautiful heavy head of blonde hair of which he was tremendously proud. Leonine. It was really very beautiful hair, wavy. And he had his head held high. I wasn’t impressed but I imagine the ladies were.”
H.D. wrote to Williams in 1905 that she was going to dedicate herself to “one who has been, beyond all others, torn and lonely – and ready to crucify himself yet more for the sake of helping all – I mean that I have promised to marry Ezra.” Williams got the consolation prize of being a best friend: “you are to me, Billy, nearer and dearer than many – than most.”
Hilda invited Ezra and his parents to Sunday lunch at her very conservative parents’ house. Her father was director of the Astronomical Observatory at the University and he didn’t approve of Ezra from the start, though Pound’s parents were socially acceptable – his father was assayer at the Philadelphia Mint – and they seemed to approve of Hilda.
Hilda’s cousin recalled Ezra’s first meeting with Hilda’s parents; he came with no hat over his wild mass of hair and was the first person her cousin had ever seen wearing tortoiseshell glasses. And “while ties were the absolute standard of dress for men, he wore none, but had his shirt open at the neck in true Byronic fashion … After the meal he read his poems to his adoring parents and Hilda, while the rest of us listened in confused wonderment.”
The engagement was soon over – Hilda wrote to Bill that Ezra had met someone else, but that she was “happy now as I was before – and I know that God is good.”
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Annie Winifred Ellerman, known as Bryher
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Bryher’s own first meeting with H.D. , on July 17, 1918, was seismic for both of them. Bryher had read about H.D. in Amy Lowell’s books; she had become a great admirer and knew H.D.’s collection Sea Garden of 1916 by heart. Bryher sought out her idol.
When she found her, Bryher said that Hilda had “the sea in her eyes” when she opened the door of her Cornwall, England cottage and said ‘in a voice all wind and gull notes, I have been waiting for you.’ Hilda asked Bryher if she had seen the puffins in the Scilly Isles, which are off the coast of Cornwall; Bryher asked Hilda if she would go there with her.
Bryher had arrived at the right time: H.D. was poverty-stricken, abandoned by both her husband, Richard Aldington, and her female lover, Frances Gregg. And she was pregnant, possibly with D.H. Lawrence’s child.
Nobody knows if H.D. had a physical affair with D.H. Lawrence – they both burned all their letters to each other – but they were certainly close intellectually and geographically: Lawrence and his wife Frieda lived above her in London. We know they critiqued each other’s manuscripts and often had dinner together; all the rest is speculation.
Relationships turned into fiction
H.D. fictionalized her relationship with Aldington and D.H. and Frieda Lawrence in her novel Bid Me to Live but does not resolve the issue. When Hilda met Bryher, Aldington was not unhappy: they had an open relationship – the stillborn child she had with him had put her off sex, at least with men.
He wrote to her, “damn it, Dooley I believe in women having all the lovers they want if they’re in love with them.” She told him about her new female friend and admirer and on July 28, 1918 Richard wrote to his “wild Dryad”:
“Ah, my dear, how sweet and beautiful you are. Of course I will come to you after the war and we will be ‘wild & free,’ and happy ‘in the unploughed lands no foot oppresses, The lands that are free being free of man,’ I love you, best-beloved and dearest among all the daughters of the half-gods. . . You must tell me more about this new admirer of H.D. She must be very wise since she can love your poems so much. Has she a name or is she just some belle anonyme? Is she truly of the sacred race or merely one to whom it is given to recognise the gods yet not be of them?”
Bryher was certainly not among the gods as a writer, though McAlmon did publish her. Whether or not H.D. was a goddess of writing is another matter; Pound thought she was, but then she was helping him, along with Amy Lowell, in his promotion of Imagism in poetry.
T.S. Eliot, on the other hand, certainly didn’t think so. On November 17, 1921, he wrote to Aldington: ‘I did not conceal from you that I think you overrate H.D.’s poetry. I do find it fatiguingly monotonous and lacking in the element of surprise.”
About Winifred Ellerman, aka Bryher
Bryher’s real name was Winifred Ellerman, and she was the daughter of the secretive shipping tycoon John Ellerman, at that time probably the richest Englishman who had ever lived. He had a huge mansion in Central London near to Selfridges where Winifred grew up – she hated it and called it a “stuffy mansion.”
She told Hilda that if she did not come to the Scilly Isles and live with her she would commit suicide. Hilda agreed, and Bryher nursed her through the pregnancy, this time resulting on December 13, 1919, in a daughter, Perdita – the lost one – whom the two women brought up together.
Ezra Pound turned up at the hospital in London the day before Perdita was born, carrying an ebony stick with which he pounded the floor. He said he was very happy for her, though he told her that in her black lace cap she looked like old Mrs. Grumpy. His only problem, he said, was that the child wasn’t his.
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Everybody I Can Think of Ever on Amazon U.S.*
Everybody I Can Think of Ever on Amazon U.K*
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Soon after Perdita was born, Bryher got married — to Robert McAlmon of all people. It’s hard to imagine a more unlikely couple, but all was not what it seemed. They had first met when Hilda contacted her old college friend William Carlos Williams to say that she and a friend were coming to New York en route to Los Angeles, where they were thinking of setting up; would he like to drop round to their hotel for tea? Williams was working with McAlmon on Contact magazine at the time; he asked Bob if he would like to come along.
Bryher turned out to be a very good thing financially, not only for McAlmon, but for many of his friends. Sylvia Beach, the owner of the legendary Paris bookshop Shakespeare and Company, regularly exchanged letters with her and with H.D; she spoke to Hilda as to a friend, but when she wrote to Bryher she wrote in gratitude, as to a patron. There are several letters extant where Sylvia thanks Bryher for saving her from financial ruin. Many years later, on Bryher’s fiftieth birthday Beach wrote to her:
“It was in one of the earliest days of ‘Shakespeare and Company’ that you came into my bookshop and my life, dear Bryher, and that we became a Protectorate of yours. We might have had the words: ‘By Special Appointment to Bryher’ painted above the door.”
When he first met her, McAlmon didn’t know – or said he didn’t know – that Bryher’s family was fabulously wealthy; he seemed to be genuinely attracted to her physically. He knew she wasn’t just another poor poet, though:
“Her family name meant little to me. However, I knew she was connected with great wealth.” At least that was the story that McAlmon, Williams, and others told. Morley Callaghan, a friend and former reporter colleague of Ernest Hemingway believed it; or at least he didn’t believe in looking a gift horse in the mouth: after the divorce McAlmon was left quite wealthy and was known as McAlimony.
“It had been a very nice thing for him to marry a rich girl and get a handsome divorce settlement, but I had always believed his story that he hadn’t been aware it was to be a marriage in name only; he had insisted he was willing to be interested in women. And with the money, what did he do? Spend it all on himself? No, he became a publisher, he spent the money on other people he believed in.”
But McAlmon wasn’t telling the truth, certainly not the whole truth. Kay Boyle, in her edited version of McAlmon’s Being Geniuses Together, prints a letter that he sent to Williams at his home in Rutherford, New Jersey.
“Then you’d better know this, Bill. I didn’t tell you in New York because I thought it wasn’t mine to tell. But Bryher doesn’t mind … The marriage is legal only, unromantic, and strictly an agreement. Bryher could not travel, and be away from home, unmarried. It was difficult being in Greece and other wild places without a man. She thought I understood her mind, as I do somewhat and faced me with the proposition. Some other things I shan’t mention I knew without realising. Well, you see I took on the proposition.”
It was a good proposition, for both of them: McAlmon got access to lots of money and a trip to Europe where he could meet James Joyce; Bryher got both a publisher and a husband as a cloak for her relationship with H.D.
He was presumably not the kind of husband her parents would have wanted: a penniless writer taking his clothes off for a living, but he was probably preferable to a lesbian lover in the eyes of them and the public. This wasn’t cosmopolitan, liberated Paris, this was conservative London and New York.
They were married in New York on February 14, 1921, Valentine’s Day – Williams and his wife Flossie, Marianne Moore, and the painter Marsden Hartley were at the supper afterward. They set off for Europe immediately, sharing the bridal suite, for which Sir John Ellerman had paid. H.D went with them.
Perdita’s last word
It wasn’t entirely a happy family though: McAlmon was a serial womanizer and needed conquests; he once even tried to kiss Sylvia Beach’s formidable partner Adrienne Monnier and got his lip bitten for the effort. And though he didn’t so much mind Hilda he barely tolerated Perdita, whom he called “Hilda Doolittle’s infant. It had black hair and eyes, and utterly blithe disregard in disposition and at the time looked like a Japanese Empress in miniature.” Note his charming use of the word “it” rather than “her.”
In return, many years later, Perdita (Schaffner as she became) wrote about McAlmon in her afterword to a 1984 republication of Bid Me to Live:
“Bryher’s husband Robert McAlmon turned up from time to time. from Paris. He never stayed long. It was a marriage of convenience; no reason why it shouldn’t work as well as any other, but it didn’t. He and Bryher fought constantly. Realizing that something was awry, I never looked on him as a father, even though Bryher was my second mother.”
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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 Wild Places Without a Man: H.D. and Bryher appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.
Brilliant Quotes by Susan Sontag
To contemplate a quote, or a line from one of Susan Sontag’s (1930 – 2004) many essays or novels, will invariably have the reader pause and read the line or paragraph again. Quotes by Susan Sontag have the capability to change the reader’s perception about how we view our lives — especially in regards to art and our own cultural limitations and vanities.
My own literary daydream has been to visit a bookstore, most likely The Strand on Broadway and 12th Street in New York City, and Sontag would be my guide as we strolled the aisles. Sontag’s commitment to literature and art has made an imprint on my life. In my daydream, Sontag would be the one doing all of the talking — I could only contribute my appreciation with a nodding of my head.
These twenty-one quotes by Sontag would be the vital information she would impart to me on our bookstore journey. These perceptive words of great wisdom strike a chord of familiarity with her millions of readers — and yet, Sontag’s quotes seem to be written especially for the one reader contemplating them. That’s a brilliant writer.
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“All understanding begins with our not accepting the world as it appears.”
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“If literature has engaged me as a project, first as a reader, then as a writer, it is an extension of my sympathies to other selves, other domains, other dreams, other worlds, other territories.”
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“Needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted.”
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“Authoritarian political ideologies have a vested interest in promoting fear, a sense of the imminent of takeover by aliens and real diseases are useful material.”
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“It is easier to endure than to change. But once one has changed, what was endured is hard to recall.”
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“In America, the photographer is not simply the person who records the past, but the person who invents it.”
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“Wherever people feel safe — they will be indifferent.”
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“My idea of a writer: someone interested in everything.”
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“A novel worth reading is an education of the heart. It enlarges your sense of human possibility, of what human nature is, of what happens in the world. It is a creator of inwardness.”
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“It hurts to love. It’s like giving yourself to be flayed and knowing that at any moment the other person may just walk off with your skin.”
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“Whoever invented marriage was an ingenious tormentor. It is an institution committed to the dulling of the feelings. The whole point of marriage is repetition. The best it aims for is the creation of strong, mutual dependencies.”
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“To me, literature is a calling, even a kind of salvation. It connects me with an enterprise that is over 2,000 years old. What do we have from the past? Art and thought. That’s what lasts. That’s what continues to feed people and give them an idea of something better. A better state of one’s feelings or simply the idea of a silence in one’s self that allows one to think or to feel. Which to me is the same.”
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“The writer is either a practicing recluse or a delinquent, guilt-ridden one; or both. Usually both.”
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“All great art contains at its center contemplation, a dynamic contemplation.”
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“The fear of becoming old is born of the recognition that one is not living now the life that one wishes. It is equivalent to a sense of abusing the present.”
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“One criticizes in others what one recognizes and despises in oneself. For example, an artist who is revolted by another’s ambitiousness.”
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“I believe that courage is morally neutral. I can well imagine wicked people being brave and good people being timid or afraid. I don’t consider it a moral virtue.”
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Books by and about Susan Sontag on Bookshop.org*
Susan Sontag page on Amazon*
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“Do stuff. Be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration’s shove or society’s kiss on your forehead. Pay attention. It’s all about paying attention. Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. Stay eager.”
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“To have access to literature, world literature, was to escape the prison of national vanity, of philistinism, of compulsory provincialism, of inane schooling, of imperfect destinies and bad luck. Literature was the passport to enter a larger life; that is, the zone of freedom. Literature was freedom. Especially in a time in which the values of reading and inwardness are so strenuously challenged, literature is freedom.”
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“All aesthetic judgment is really cultural evaluation.”
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“Books are funny little portable pieces of thought.”
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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.
More about Susan Sontag Susan Sontag and the Unholy Practice of Biography Susan Sontag on Storytelling, etc. The Books of Susan Sontag, Ranked. . . . . . . . . .
*These are Bookshop Affiliate and Amazon Affiliate links. If the 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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April 8, 2021
Paula Gunn Allen
Paula Gunn Allen (October 24, 1939 – May 29, 2008) was an award-winning Indigenous American poet, novelist, activist, and professor.
She is widely considered a founding figure of contemporary indigenous literature, defining its canon and bringing it to the greater public eye at a time when many denied its existence. She is remembered for her engaging fictional work and groundbreaking critical essays.
Known as one of the key intellectual minds of indigenous literature and history, Paula bridged the literary gap between indigenous writing and feminism. In her lifetime, she published seventeen works, many are still frequently anthologized.
Personal life and educationBorn Paula Marie Francis, she was the daughter of a Lebanese-American father and a Laguna-Sioux-Scottish mother. She found herself identifying with her Laguna Pueblo roots.
Born in Albuquerque, New Mexico in 1939, she was raised in the small New Mexican grant village Cubero, which bordered the Laguna Pueblo reservation. Her father, E. Lee Francis owned a local store there. Later, he served as the lieutenant governor of New Mexico. Her brother, Lee Francis, was a Laguna Pueblo storyteller and teacher. Paula is also related to other prominent Laguna authors. Carol Lee Sanchez is her sister, and Leslie Marmon Silko is her cousin.
Paula Gunn Allen’s early education consisted of attending mission and boarding schools. She graduated from Sisters of Charity in 1957, a religious boarding school just outside of Albuquerque.
Paula left New Mexico for her early college career, receiving a BA in English in 1966 and an MFA in Creative Writing in 1968 at the University of Oregon. She returned to her home state and earned a Ph.D. in American Studies with a concentration in Native American Literature from the University of Mexico in 1976. In the course of her studies, a poetry professor pointed her to some poets who would become her literary inspirations, including Charles Olson, Allen Ginsberg, and Denise Levertov.
She received an NEA Creative Writing fellowship in 1978, and a postdoctoral fellowship to study at UCLA two years later.
Paula married twice and had two children. At one point she identified as a lesbian, but later described herself as “a serial bisexual.” Paula’s experience with her sexuality also contributed to aspects of her works, both critical and fictional.
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Literary LifePaula’s stories sourced many memories and experiences from her childhood, often drawing from Pueblo culture. She utilized oral storytelling within her works, discussing traditional tales such as Grandmother Spider or Corn Maiden. Paula was also influenced by the matriarchal elements of her upbringing, which contributed to the feminist elements in her stories and critical works.
Paula published six volumes of poetry: America the Beautiful (2010), Life Is a Fatal Disease: Selected Poems 1962-1995; Skins and Bones (1988); Wyrds (1987); Shadow Country (1982); A Cannon Between My Knees (1981); and Blind Lion (1974).
She also published a novel titled The Woman Who Owned the Shadows (1983). It tells the survival story of an indigenous woman seeking her future while connecting to her past. The story utilizes traditional rituals and folklore throughout and discusses aspects of racism and sexism.
Wanting to shine a spotlight on other indigenous authors, Paula also helped to establish the indigenous literary canon by publishing several anthologies: Spider Woman’s Granddaughters: Traditional Tales; Contemporary Writing by Native American Women (1989), Voice of the Turtle: American Indian Literature, 1900–1970 (1994), and Song of the Turtle: American Indian Literature, 1974–1994 (1996).
Perhaps what Paula is best known for are her critical and anthropological works. Her anthology, Studies in American Indian Literature: Critical Essays and Course Designs (1983), is considered a foundational work for Indigenous Literature studies.
Also notable is her most recent publication Pocahontas: Medicine Woman, Spy, Entrepreneur, Diplomat (2004), which discusses the tale of Pocahontas from a realistic lens. It explores and dismantles the stereotypes that came with the popular Disney movie. It received a Pulitzer Prize nomination.
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Paula Gunn Allen page on Amazon*
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Paula’s widely anthologized 1986 book, The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions, is arguably her most influential. It was intended to counter many indigenous stereotypes, particularly about gender roles. Paula stated that many indigenous tribes are “gynocentric” — with women and men being considered equals, and argued that western culture placed a patriarchal lens on indigenous cultures.
The Sacred Hoop attempts to destabilize the monolithic narrative of indigenous cultures that western culture often wrongly ascribes to it. Moreover, she disliked the idea that a society can either be matriarchal or patriarchal, the states that these binary options aren’t realistic when examining indigenous cultures.
Her work utilized folklore, ceremonies, and other indigenous literature to discuss such issues. She also believed that this literature is inherently feminist, because many such cultures aren’t patriarchal. To be an indigenous author in itself went against the grain.
Paula Gunn Allen’s LegacyIn 1990, Paula was awarded the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. She also received the Native American Literature Prize, The Susan Koppelman Award, and a Lifetime Achievement Award for her edited short stories by Indigenous authors. She also won two Hubbell Medals.
Paula Gunn Allen is considered a foremother of Indigenous literature. Her passion for Indigenous visibility within a Eurocentric literary canon helped spark an entire range of novels by other Indigenous authors. The nourishment and inspiration she provided for these books, as well as her own, established a new form of Indigenous literature that put new perspectives into the world.
Paula’s exploration of sexuality and feminism helped reshape an inaccurate narrative of Indigenous culture. She placed herself as a liaison between Indigenous and white culture. This position helped her rekindle tales lost by colonization.
A theme in many of Paula’s works is the idea of survival; not of the individual, but of heritage. In many ways, Paula embodied this theme in her own life. She put preservation over everything else. Paula Gunn Allen died of lung cancer on May 29, 2008, survived by her two children.
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Contributed by Jess Mendes, a 2021 graduate of SUNY-New Paltz with a major in Digital Media Management, and a minor in Creative Writing.
More about Paula Gunn AllenMajor Works
Poetry
The Blind Lion (1974)Coyote’s Daylight Trip (1978)A Cannon Between My Knees (1981)Star Child: Poems (1981)Shadow Country (1982)Skins and Bones: Poems 1979-1987 (1988)Grandmother (1991)Life is a Fatal Disease: Collected Poems 1962-1995 (1997)Nonfiction
Studies in American Indian Literature: Critical Essays and Course Designs (1983)The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions (1986)Grandmothers of the Light: A Medicine Women’s Sourcebook (1991)Woman work Bridges: Literature across Cultures McGraw–Hill (1994)As Long As the Rivers Flow: The Stories of Nine Native Americans (1996)Off the Reservation: Reflections on Boundary-Busting Border-Crossing Loose Canons (1998)Pocahontas: Medicine Woman, Spy, Entrepreneur, Diplomat (2004)Anthologies and edited collections
Spider Woman’s Granddaughters: Traditional Tales and Contemporary Writingby Native American Women (1989)Voice of the Turtle: American Indian Literature, 1900-1970 (1994)Song of the Turtle: American Indian Literature, 1974-1994 (1996)Hozho: Walking in Beauty: Short Stories by American Indian Writers (2001)
More information
Official Website Wikipedia L.A. Times Legacy Project Chicago Out History Magazine. . . . . . . . . .
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April 4, 2021
The Infernal World of Branwell Brontë by Daphne du Maurier
The three Brontë sisters — Charlotte, Emily, and Anne — cherished literary ambitions from an early age, and despite lives cut short by illness, earned a prominent place in the English literary canon. The same can’t be said for their brother, Branwell Brontë (1817 – 1848), whose dissipated life ended at age thirty-one, with little to show for his early talent other than thwarted ambition.
The children of Maria Branwell Brontë and Reverend Patrick Brontë, the Brontë siblings grew up in Haworth, England, located in Yorkshire. Maria Branwell Brontë died while the children were still very young, and the two oldest sisters, Maria and Elizabeth, died of illness before reaching adolescence.
The three surviving sisters and Branwell with primarily one another for company, put on plays, told stories, and created journals and magazines about the make-believe realm. Branwell was very much the ringleader. In their teens, they created an imaginary world called Angria.
Branwell’s poetry and drawings display an incipient talent that was never fully developed. With one failure after another as he entered young adulthood, his his promise faded, and he descended into the world of addiction and dissipation.
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Self-portrait by Branwell Brontë, ca.1840 (The Brontë Society)
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“It’s Time to Bring Branwell, the Dark Brontë, into Light” a 2017 article in The Guardian, looked to bring more clarity into this shadowy figure, in the year of his 200th birthday:
“Although his influence was not always positive, Branwell remained a primary muse for his sisters, and we should remember him as a major cog in the Brontë writing machine – even if his own work was always ‘minor.’ And the story of a young, talented fantasist failing to make his way in the world resonates with our experiences of hardship and lost dreams.”
Enter Daphne du Maurier
There is still no full-scale biography of Branwell Brontë, so Daphne du Maurier’s The Infernal World of Branwell Brontë (1960) remains the only serious study of his brief and difficult life.
Du Maurier is best remembered for the half a dozen or so books and stories that were adapted to film, notably, Rebecca, My Cousin Rachel, Jamaica Inn, and others. Her publishing credits went well beyond her more famous works to include nearly forty novels, short story collections, nonfiction works, and plays.
It’s no secret that du Maurier was inspired by the Brontë sisters, — Rebecca, in particular, pays homage to Jane Eyre. It’s fitting, then, that among her nonfiction titles is The Infernal World of Branwell Brontë (1960), a portrait of the troubled brother of the literary sisters that she so admired.
Chapter one of The Infernal World of Branwell Brontë begins:
He died on Sunday morning, the 24th of September, 1848. He was thirty-one years old. He died in the room which he had shared with his father for so long, and in which, as a little boy, he had awakened to find the moon shining through the curtainless windows and his father upon his knees, praying.
The room, for too many months now, had been part refuge and part prison-cell. It had been refuge from the accusing or indifferent eyes of his sisters, refuge from the averted gaze of his father … Eternal reproach, eternal accusation.
“I know only that it is time for me to be something when I am nothing. That my father cannot have long to live, and that when he dies my evening, which is already twilight, will become night. That I shall then have a constitution still so strong that art will keep me years in torture and despair when I should every hour era that I might die.” (Branwell, from a letter to a friend, a year or two before his death)
The Infernal World of Branwell Brontë in brief
From the original 1960 edition (Doubleday and Company):
Branwell Brontë, brother of the celebrated Charlotte, Emily, and Anne, as a child showed the most promise of all the Brontë’s — precocious and exceptionally brilliant, it was his imagination and wild unfettered spirit that led the others. He was worshipped by his sisters and widowed father, and it was Branwell that they all looked for literary success.
And yet, Branwell was the only one who was unable to bridge the gap from childhood fantasy to adulthood, the only one who did not produce a finished, mature book. Daphne du Maurier has written a full-length portrait of the mysterious, elusive Branwell Brontë and of the infernal world of his inner torment which killed him a the age of thirty-one from excessive laudanum and alcohol.
As a child, Branwell fed the willing imaginations of his sisters with the wild, fantastic stories of his mythical, self-invented Kingdom of Angria. There is no question that he was a great influence on the writings of his sisters and that Emily drew on her brother for her portrait of Hindley Earnshaw in Wuthering Heights, as did Anne, for Arthur Huntington in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.
Failing to be admitted to the Royal Academy of Art when he was eighteen, Branwell turned to alcohol and a life of dissipation which he followed fitfully until his life ended in bitterness and despair, conscious of his sisters’ growing success and of his own monumental failure. Haunted by illness and disappointment most of his life, Branwell preferred the wild and joyous world of his own imagination to the world of harsh reality and responsibility.
Miss du Maurier has drawn on the early secret writings of the four Brontës, letters, and other sources and has written a penetrating and revealing study of “the eloquent unpublished poet” that was Branwell Brontë.
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The Infernal World of Branwell Brontë on Amazon*
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When Mrs. Gaskell published her Life of Charlotte Brontë in 1857, she painted so vivid a picture of life at Haworth parsonage, and of the talented, short-lived family who dwelt within its walls, that every Brontë biography written since has been based upon it.
After a hundred years had gone by, the biography was still unsurpassed, but during the intervening time much had come to light about the early writings of the young Brontës, proving that from childhood and on through adolescence they lived a life of quite extraordinary fantasy, creating an imaginary world of their own, peopled with characters more real to them than the inhabitants of their father’s parish.
Charlotte’s Jane Eyre, Emily’s Wuthering Heights, and Anne’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall were all famous novels and their authoresses dead when Mrs. Gaskell came to write about them. What she did not realize was that none of these novels would have come into being had not their creators lived, during childhood, in this fantasy world, which was largely inspired and directed by their only brother, Patrick Branwell Brontë.
Neither Mrs. Gaskell nor the elder Mr. Brontë suspected that under the parsonage roof there were manuscripts, written by Branwell and Charlotte, which ran into many hundreds of thousands of words far— more than the published works of Charlotte, Emily and Anne.
Although, on examination, Branwell’s manuscripts show that he did not possess the amazing talent of his famous sisters, they prove him to have had a boyhood and youth of almost incredible productivity, so spending himself in the process of describing the lives and loves of his imaginary characters that invention was exhausted by the time he was twenty-one.
Mr. Brontë, their father, writing to Mrs. Gaskell after she had published the biography of his daughter Charlotte, told her: “The picture of my brilliant and unhappy son is a masterpiece.”
He did not understand, any more than Mrs. Gaskell, that the “brilliance” existed to a great extent in his own imagination, the pride of a lonely widower in the extraordinary precocity and endearing liveliness of a boy whose supposed genius disintegrated with the coming of manhood; whose unhappiness was caused, not by the abortive love-affair described by Mrs. Gaskell with such gusto, but by his inability to distinguish truth from fiction, reality from fantasy; and who failed in life because it differed from his own “infernal world.”
One day, perhaps, all the manuscripts which poured from Branwell’s pen will be transcribed, not for the Brontë student only, but for the general reader. One day the definitive biography of this tragic young man will be published.
Meanwhile, many years of interest in the subject, and much reading, have prompted the present writer to attempt a study of his life and work which may serve as an introduction to both.
If it brings some measure of understanding for a figure long maligned, neglected and despised, and helps to reinstate him in his original place in the Brontë family, where he was, until the last years of disintegration, so loved a person, then this book will not have been written in vain. ( — Daphne du Maurier, Cornwall, 1960)
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Brontë’s Mistress on Bookshop.org*
Brontë’s Mistress on Amazon*
Branwell Brontë has yet to be the subject of a full biography, but his illicit love affair with the wife of an employer has been given fictional treatment in Brontë’s Mistress by Finola Austin.
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March 31, 2021
Hangsaman by Shirley Jackson, 1951 — an Analysis
This analysis of Hangsaman, Shirley Jackson’s chilling and thought-provoking 1951 novel, is excerpted from Girls in Bloom: Coming of Age in the Mid-20th Century Woman’s Novel by Francis Booth, reprinted by permission.
In a 1956 book called Sex Variant Women in Literature, the academic critic, Jeanette H. Foster referred to Hangsaman as “an eerie novel about lesbians.’ This is a bizarre reading of the novel and Shirley Jackson was incensed. Her biographer, Judy Oppenheimer, quoted her as saying:
“I happen to know what Hangsaman is about. I wrote it. And dammit it is about what I say it is about and not some dirty old lady at Oxford. Because (let me whisper) I don’t really know anything about stuff like that. And I don’t want to know… I am writing about ambivalence but it is an ambivalence of the spirit or the mind, not the sex. My poor devils have enough to contend with without being sex deviates along with being moral and romantic deviates.”
Because she had children of her own, and wrote innocuous books and magazine pieces about her charming but chaotic family life, Shirley Jackson presumably found it quite difficult to write about sex. So she didn’t. Does Natalie Waite in Hangsaman go the whole hog? If so, with whom: is it with an older man, one of her father’s friends, or even perhaps her father himself? We don’t know.
As in Heinrich von Kleist’s The Marquise of O there is a lacuna around Natalie’s first – possible – experience of sex; perhaps the experience was so awful that she has erased from her mind and Jackson has erased it from the novel.
It feels almost as if some clumsy censor has excised a whole section that would have described her experience. But neither at the time it happens nor later in the novel are we given any idea of what actually happened; we know Natalie has been irrevocably changed but not by what exactly.
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More about Shirley Jackson
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The critics at the time were not always kind to Hangsaman: The Saturday Review, May 5, 1951, compared Hangsaman to Jackson’s notorious short story The Lottery, where villagers choose one person a year to be stoned to death, which had been published not long before and caused an enormous – almost entirely negative – response.
“Now in the novel Hangsaman and on its much larger scale Miss Jackson again proceeds from realism to symbolic drama. Here the method fails. The tones do not flow into one another … Like many another story, this one is about the maturing of an adolescent. Natalie Waite, though, is a very special seventeen; not so much in her un-adult trick of occasionally blurting out exactly what she is thinking as in the quality of her thinking and in her literary background.
Natalie is an exceptionally talented, intellectual child, already supervised by her father, who is apparently a sort of critic and certainly an egotistical fool … Natalie was raped or seduced offstage at her father’s cocktail party.
Presumably the emotional effects were profound, but we don’t know any more about them than we know, for instance, about the effects of a flock of martinis Natalie absorbed one afternoon and for the first time. Miss Jackson’s method of not-quite-telling begins to show its disadvantages.”
Another review of the time, in The Age, from Melbourne Australia, February 1952, was titled “A Novel of Emotional Bewilderment”:
“Shirley Jackson, with the acuteness of a surgeon, lays bare the tissue and nerves of adolescent emotions in her novel, Hangsaman. She portrays the period between childhood and maturity in the life of an American girl when self assumes immense proportions and demands constant dramatization, gaining importance and size in these imaginary flights …
This story is one to bring terror to the heart of a parent sending an unadaptable child out among her fellows. One would think that it must surely be autobiographical, so deeply has the author plunged in her description of the cruelty girls can deal one to another and of the brutality with which the can win a place in the mob.
It is a harrowing and particularly vicious picture and not an easily assimilated one. Incidents are part of the general emotional bewilderment of scenes that build to a climax, leaving the reader to wonder to the last moment whether Natalie will escape.”
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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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Despite the critics, the writing in Hangsaman is controlled and masterly; it is one of the finest of all coming of age novels. There is a wonderful passage where Jackson describes the crucial moment of adolescence where the girl becomes the woman, with her own will and a personality separate from that of her parents and family. For Jackson, naturally, this transition is effected by creativity, in this case, as in Jackson’s, the creativity of writing.
There was a point in Natalie, only dimly realized by herself, and probably entirely a function of her age, where obedience ended and control began; after this point was reached and passed, Natalie became a solitary functioning individual, capable of ascertaining her own believable possibilities.
Sometimes, with a vast aching heartbreak, the great, badly contained intentions of creation, the poignant searching longings of adolescence overwhelmed her, and shocked by her own capacity for creation, she held herself tight and unyielding, crying out silently something that might only be phrased as, “Let me take, let me create.”
If such a feeling had any meaning to her, it was as the poetic impulse which led her into such embarrassing compositions as were hidden in her desk; the gap between the poetry she wrote and the poetry she contained was, for Natalie, something unsolvable.
Along the same lines, one of Natalie’s father’s friends says to her: “Little Natalie, never rest until you have uncovered your essential self. Remember that. Somewhere, deep inside you, hidden by all sorts of fears and worries and petty little thoughts, is a clean pure being made of radiant colors.” This is “so much like the things that Natalie sometimes suspected about herself,” that she asks, “how do you ever know?”
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Hangsaman by Shirley Jackson: A Review
Hangsaman on Bookshop.org*
Hangsaman on Amazon*
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Like a true creative spirit, Natalie lives mainly in her head, in a fantasy world which includes, as the novel opens, a kind of noir detective story where she is a suspect. Whatever she is doing, the story keeps playing out in her mind and in the narrative, a story where she is the central figure, the protagonist, the heroine.
This is a very common adolescent fantasy and Natalie’s character in her own story is rather like the many girl detective stories of the time, though at seventeen she is rather too old for this kind of fiction, at which her writer father would no doubt sneer.
“Natalie, fascinated, was listening to the secret voice which followed her. It was the police detective and he spoke sharply, incisively, through the gentle movement of her mother’s voice. ‘How,’ he asked pointedly, ‘Miss Waite, how do you account for the gap in time between your visit to the rose garden and your discovery of the body?’”
This particular fantasy stops when she goes to college, to be replaced by another, her imaginary friend Tony (female, despite her name); more of her shortly. Natalie is about to leave for college as the novel opens; she is “desperately afraid,” even though the college is only thirty miles away and is the one that her father has chosen for her. Here Jackson describes the unbridgeable gulf between a teenager and her parents:
“Natalie Waite, who was seventeen years old but who felt that she had been truly conscious only since she was about fifteen, lived in an odd corner of a world of sound and sight past the daily voices of her father and mother and their incomprehensible actions. For the past two years – since, in fact, she had turned around suddenly one bright morning and seen from the corner of her eye a person called Natalie, existing, charted, inescapably located on a spot of ground, favored with sense and feet and a bright-red sweater, and most obscurely alive – she had lived completely by herself, allowing not even her father access to the farther places of her mind.”
The father-daughter dynamic
Nevertheless, like other teenage girls in Girls in Bloom, she is close to her father, a writer, who critiques her writing as if he were her mentor rather than her father. In this she is very close to Cassandra Mortmain in I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith, a novel which also prefigures Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle. Her father is kindly but patronizing towards Natalie, who he says is ‘too untaught for literature and too young for drink.”
Natalie’s father is also no doubt to some extent a portrait of Jackson’s husband, Edgar Hyman, a critic and book reviewer whose relationship with Jackson is presumably in some ways portrayed in Natalie’s relationship with her father. “Do you realize I’m two weeks behind in my work?’ he asks his wife. ‘I’ve got to review four books by Monday; four books no one in this house has read but myself… Not to mention the book.”
At the mention of his book, “his family glanced at him briefly, in chorus, and then away;” no doubt Hyman and Jackson’s family reacted similarly. Hyman’s heavyweight The Armed Vision: A Study in the Methods of Modern Literary Criticism was published in 1947, his next book, The Critical Performance: An Anthology of American and British Literary Criticism in Our Century was published in 1956, nine years later and his third, Poetry and Criticism: Five Revolutions in Literary Taste in 1961.
Shirley Jackson’s life in the period of this novel
In this period, Jackson published five novels (with another in 1962), two collections of her lightweight – as both she and Hyman saw them – magazine pieces, a collection of short stories and numerous individual stories in magazines.
But this was at a time when a woman’s place was in the kitchen and her role was, as Virginia Woolf said, to magnify her man’s reflection in the mirror of her self; no doubt both Hyman and their friends saw his work as the most important thing, as do Natalie’s family.
Unlike Woolf, Jackson did not have a room of her own and had to be Woolf’s ‘angel in the house,’ though she was hardly the soft, gentle, beautiful, radiant type of angel. In the introduction to Just an Ordinary Day, a posthumous collection of Jackson’s stories, two of her children wrote about how she balanced domesticity and creativity.
“Our mother tried to write every day, and treated writing in every way as her professional livelihood. She would typically work all morning, after all the children went off to school, and usually again well into the evening and night. There was always the sound of typing. And our house was more often than not filled with luminaries in literature and the arts. There were legendary parties and poker games with visiting painters, sculptors, musicians, composers, poets, teachers, and writers of every leaning. But always there was the sound of her typewriter, pounding away into the night.”
This is very much a description of the literary garden parties that Natalie’s father hosts on Sundays, which are rather reminiscent of the Ramsay’s dinner party in Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, whose modernist pretensions Jackson nicely deflates. It is after one of these parties that Natalie – probably – has her first sexual experience; it is foreshadowed when her father says to her: “Daughter mine … has anyone yet corrupted you?”
Someone is about to:
“… She was almost sure of this, the preliminary faint stirrings of something about to happen. The idea once born, she knew it was true; something incredible was going to happen, now, right now, this afternoon, today; this was going to be a day she would remember and look back upon, thinking, That wonderful day … the day when that happened.”
An older man, who is not named and whom she does not seem to know, asks her to sit down: “He was old, she could see now, much older than she had thought before. There were fine disagreeable little lines around his eyes and mouth, and his hands were thin and bony, and even shook a little.”
He tells Natalie that her father has described her as “quite the little writer … Obviously meaning to make her sound less like her mother and more like a frightened girl not yet in college.”
Natalie is hurt by this and responds, “I suppose you probably want to write too?” Natalie tries to get up to leave but he holds onto her. “A little chill went down Natalie’s back at his holding her arm, at the strange unfamiliar touch of someone else.” In Natalie’s head the detective says to her: “This you will not escape.” The “strange man” leads Natalie away. She has been telling him about “how wonderful I am.”
They end up in the woods where Natalie used to play when she was a child: “The trees were really dark and silent, and Natalie thought quickly. The danger is in here, in here, just as they stepped inside and were lost in the darkness.”
They sit down the grass. Oh my dear God sweet Christ, Natalie thought, so sickened she nearly said it aloud, is he going to touch me? If he does, Jackson does not tell us.
The next paragraph has Natalie waking up the next morning, “to bright sun and clear air,” before burying her head in the pillow and saying:
“‘No, please no’.
‘I will not think about it, it doesn’t matter,’ she told herself, and her mind repeated idiotically, It doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter, until, desperately, she said aloud, ‘I don’t remember, nothing happened, nothing that I remember happened.’
Slowly she knew she was sick; her head ached, she was dizzy, she loathed her hands as they came toward her face to cover her eyes. ‘Nothing happened,’ she chanted, ‘nothing happened, nothing happened, nothing happened, nothing happened.’
… Someday, she thought, it will be gone. Someday I will be sixty years old, sixty-seven, eighty, and, remembering, will perhaps recall that something of this sort happened once (where? when? who?) and will perhaps smile nostalgically thinking, What a sad silly girl I was, to be sure.’”
Before whatever happened, happened, the detective in Natalie’s head had said to her: ‘No one can live through such things and not remember them,’ but Natalie is determined not to remember and Jackson is determined not to tell us.
She does tell us that “the most horrible moment of that morning or any morning in her life, was when she first looked at herself in the mirror, at her bruised face and her pitiful, erring body,” but none of her family notice anything wrong with her face and perhaps the bruising is entirely internal. Later, at college, she writes in her private journal, where she splits off a separate personality and talks to herself in the third person:
“Perhaps, you thought, Natalie is frightened and perhaps she even thinks sometimes about a certain long ago bad thing that she promised me never to think about again. Well, that’s why I am writing this now. I could tell, my darling, that you are worried about me. I could feel you being apprehensive, and I knew what you were thinking about was you and me.
And I even knew that you thought I was worried about that terrible thing, but of course – I promise you this, I really do – I don’t think about it at all, ever, because both of us know that it never happened, did it? And it was some horrible dream that caught up with us both. We don’t have to worry about things like that, you remember we decided we didn’t have to worry.”
She does leave for college, where, unlike her mother and her author, Natalie has a room of her own, “the only room she had ever known where she would be, privately, working out her own salvation.” The college is described as being very much like the liberal, girls-only Bennington College in Vermont where Jackson’s husband Edgar Hyman taught.
There Natalie meets a professor, Arthur Langdon, who seems to be another portrait of Hyman (even their names are concordant). Langdon has a wife who, like Natalie’s mother but completely unlike Jackson herself is entirely subsumed under her husband’s ego and has, as Hyman undoubtedly did, a circle of young, devoted female admirers. Langdon soon steps into the role that had been filled by Natalie’s father, and gives Jackson another chance to muse on the absurdity of being a writer.
“‘I find your criticisms very helpful,’ Natalie said demurely. ‘My father discusses my work with me very much as you do.’ She thought of her father with sudden sadness; he was so far away and so much without her, and here she was speaking to a stranger.
‘Do you plan to be a writer?’
A what? Natalie thought; a writer, a plumber, a doctor, a merchant, a chief; the best-laid plans of; a writer the way I might plan to be a corpse? ‘A writer?’ she repeated, as though she had never heard the word before.”
Natalie make some friends at the college and fits in well enough, though she is never part of any crowd, too bookish and self-sufficient for the rest of the girls. One friend says that the other girls accuse her of sitting in her room all day and never going out; “They say you’re crazy. You sit in your room all day and all night and never go out and they say you’re crazy… you’re spooky.”
Natalie’s answer to this comes in her own private journal, which Jackson allows us limited access to:
“Dearest dearest darling most important dearest darling Natalie – this is me talking, your own priceless own Natalie, and I just wanted to tell you one single small thing: you are the best and they will know it someday, and someday no one will ever dare laugh again when you are near, and no one will dare even speak to you without bowing first. And they will be afraid of you. And all you have to do is wait, my darling, wait and it will come, I promise you.”
Later it seems that Natalie has split herself into two in a different way: by inventing a female friend named Tony. It’s not entirely clear at first that Tony is imaginary but after much romantic talk – not romantic in the lesbian sense, despite what Jackson’s Oxford critic said – about traveling the world together they end up alone in a dark wood, where Tony disappears.
This time, nothing bad happens to Natalie in the woods and a friendly couple in a car pick her up and take her back to town, drop her off at the bridge where she appears for a moment to contemplate suicide. But then, one with herself again, she heads back to the college; she has come of age. “As she had never been before, she was now alone, and grown-up, and powerful, and not at all afraid.”
More about Hangsaman by Shirley Jackson
Reader discussion on Goodreads You Might Never Find Your Way Back: Shirley Jackson’s Hangsaman Shirley Jackson’s Hangsaman — what does it mean?. . . . . . . . .
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 Hangsaman by Shirley Jackson, 1951 — an Analysis appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.
March 30, 2021
9 Classic Pakistani Women Novelists And Poets to Discover
Discover some of the best-known classic women Pakistani novelists and poets who challenged society’s norms and made invaluable contributions to literature.
Many classic Pakistani women authors were born before the partition and lived through the horrors of migration. They had to adjust to a new life in the new country, and these extraordinary life experiences seep into their writings. (Pictured here, Fahmida Riaz.)
With their fiery words, they bent social norms and challenged patriarchy and debauchery long before the concept of feminism or human rights became a part of living room discussions.
“Words can be like x-rays. If you use them properly – they’ll go through anything. You read, and you’re pierced.” (Aldous Huxley, Brave New World)
The authors and poets have been listed in chronological order of their birth.
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Ada Jafri
Ada Jafri (1924 – 2015) is regarded as the pioneer of Urdu poetry. She is known as The First Lady of Urdu Poetry. Her preferred genre was ghazal, but she also experimented with free verse poetry. Her notable works include Main Saaz Dhundti Rahi and Shahr-i-Dard under the pen name Ada.
Jazib Qureshi, the famous Urdu poet, and critic once said, “Ada Jafarey is the first and only lady poet who carries in her poetry the eternal colors of Ghalib, Iqbal, and Jigar.”
Ada Jafri expressed herself in Urdu. Though her works were never formally translated into English, some die-hard fans translated a few of her poems to English and compiled them with other renowned poets. Ada Jafri’s poetry revolves around feminism, gender discrimination, and the dehumanization of women in society.
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Altaf Fatima
Altaf Fatima (1927 – 2018) was an Urdu novelist, short story writer, and teacher. She lived a life of penmanship, devoting every moment towards the progress of Urdu literature. She left behind a formidable amount of creative and thought-provoking writings.
Though she never received any recognition for her immense dedication and contributions to Urdu literature, she was too dignified to care for awards and continued with her struggle for its progress and revival.
Having experienced the partition herself, Altaf Fatima had tons of stories to tell. Her writings explore the post-partition struggles, especially how women became a solid shield to protect their children and themselves against the horrendous atrocities during migration.
Her best work, Dastak Na Do, was translated into English as The One Who Did Not Ask by Heinemann, and Herald also published its abridged version. In the early days after the partition, the novel was also televised by Pakistan Television Corporation (PTV).
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Khadija Mastoor
Khadija Mastoor (1927 – 1982) was one of the leading Pakistani novelists who made a prominent mark on Urdu literature. She started her journey by inscribing short stories. Her five short stories and two novels have been published and recognized all over the world to date.
Khadija Mastoor is known for her incredible writing style and themes based on observation and experience. She wrote from her life experiences, whether they be about politics, society, or morals.
Among her many novels, Aangan (translated to English as The Women’s Courtyard ) was her most significant work, which was also dramatized for Pakistan Television. The novel won her the prestigious Adamjee Literary Award and is considered one of Urdu’s most prominent literacy achievements. Many of her other books have been translated into English.
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Bano Qudsia
Bano Qudsia (1928 – 2017) is one of the most renowned Pakistani novelists, playwrights, and spiritualists. Recipient of multiple awards, including Sitara-i-Imtiaz, Hilal-i-Imtiaz, and Lifetime Achievement Award, Bano Qudsia is considered the epitome of classic Urdu literature. She wrote many thought-provoking short stories, incredible novels, and provocative dramas.
The wife of renowned author Afshaq Ahmed, Bano Qudsia, credits her husband for her success and wide recognition. Her five-decade marriage empowered her to devote her life to writing. Her words take a jab at the uneven distribution of power across genders and encourage women to stand against oppression and find their voice.
Though every piece of writing by Bano Qudsia is laudable, Raja Gidh (King Buzzard) gave her true success and recognition. Raja Gidh is such a significant literary piece that it has been a basis of research by the University of North Texas scholars.
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Afzal Tauseef
Afzal Tauseef (1936 – 2014), the Pride of Performance award recipient, was a Punjabi language writer, columnist, and journalist. She served as Vice President of the Punjabi Adabi Board (PAB) as well.
From political stigma to social issues, and art and literature, Tauseef’s words are a revolution for the people of Pakistan against the oppressive landowners aided by bureaucracy and games played by corrupt politicians.
She was born in Hoshiarpur (India) before the partition. Although she migrated to Pakistan, her writings influenced both countries’ literature. Therefore, many of her books were translated into Gurmukhi for the Indian audience. Amrita Pritam from India gave Afzal Tauseef the title of True Daughter of Punjab due to her bold stance against the treason accusations and self-proclaimed status of a revolutionary freedom fighter.
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Khalida Hussain
Khalida Hussain (1937 – 2019) is regarded as one of Pakistan’s finest fiction writers who blurs the line between political and aesthetic writing. Recipient of the Pride of Performance award, Khalida Hussain started her writing career with short stories and focused on them primarily. However, it was her first and only novel Kaghazi Ghat that brought her the recognition she deserved.
What makes Khalida Hussain unique is that her writing defies any boundaries. Her stories revolve around the exploration and interrogation of themes that are predominantly political and revolutionary. Her writings are imbued in the fluidity of time and life, genderless, and in harmony with the outer and the inner world.
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Fahmida Riaz
Fahmida Riaz (1946 – 2018) was a phenomenal poet, writer, feminist, and human rights activist. The Pride of Performance Award recipient, Riaz, had been the center of controversies throughout her lifetime. Her poetry is believed to be ahead of her time. She was accused of using sensual and erotic expressions in her poetry, the themes that were taboo at that time (and even today).
Despite all the hardships and accusations, Fahmida Riaz has a powerful presence in the literary world. Her prominence stands alongside Jean-Paul Sartre, Pablo Neruda, Simone de Beauvoir, and Nazim Hikmet.
Riaz is also credited for translating Shaikh Ayaz and Shah Abdul Latif Bhitai’s work from Sindhi to Urdu and Maulana Jalaluddin Rumi’s work from Persian to Urdu.
Read her poetry translated into English in Four Walls and a Black Veil and The Body Torn and Spanish in Es Una Mujer Impura: Antología Poética.
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Parveen Shakir
Parveen Shakir (1952 – 1994) became one of the greatest poets of Pakistan in her short life span. She rose to prominence due to her incredible feminine voice, which won her the prestigious Adamjee Literary Award and Pride of Performance Award. What makes Parveen Shakir stand out is her distinctive feminine voice that explores and expresses the world and all the experiences from a girl’s eyes, pure and innocent in her visage.
Parveen Shakir was loved and celebrated for her soulful poetry in the ghazal and free verse style. Her poetry’s central theme has always been a woman sharing the female perspective on life, love, marriage, motherhood, repression, and social restraints. Her poetry explored beauty, separation, intimacy, distances, heartbreaks, infidelity, and adultery with a rare mystical perfection.
An unfortunate accident took away her life, but her life, poetry, and charisma are celebrated all over Pakistan to date. Naima Rashid translated some of her selected poems and compiled them under the cover, Defiance of the Rose.
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Sara Shagufta
Sara Shagufta (1954 – 1984) was a beautiful poet who lost her life to suicide at an early age. She was a 20th-century postmodern poet, feminist, visionary, and revolutionist whose polemic work frequently attracted criticism.
Mubarak Ali, a known Pakistani historian, and activist hailed her as Ghalib’s better half while Amrita Pritam, an Indian novelist, called her Sylvia Plath of the Subcontinent.
She gained posthumous recognition when her poetry compilation was published. To make sure her voice was heard far and wide, Asad Alvi translated her poetry into the English language. You can read many of Sara Shagufta’s translated poetry in Columbia Journal, at The Blank Garden, and in We Sinful Women published by The Women’s Press to celebrate the lives of badass Pakistani women poets.
Contributed by Sonia Ahmed. Sonia is a short story writer and editor of Penslips Magazine. She is an avid reader and loves a good story that inspires readers and challenges their core beliefs. A dreamer at heart, she writes tales of the ordinary people of the society and believes that every story is worth telling. She also writes non-fiction on subjects ranging from eco-friendly lifestyle to religion, science, and healthy living.
Explore more roundups of global literature:
10 Classic Indian Women Authors 10 Classic Cuban Women Authors to Discover 10 Classic Latina Poets to Discover and ReadThe post 9 Classic Pakistani Women Novelists And Poets to Discover appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.
March 29, 2021
Solitude vs Self-Isolation: Women Authors and the Sacred Inner Space
Most artists and writers keep their inner space sacred and inviolate. It’s the core from where their creativity springs. Some keep their inner world more private than others.
While plenty of male writers have suffered from (or have preferred) isolation, this musing will focus on well known female writers. Confinement periods can be an advantage for women writers, as their extra-curricular activities may slow down.
Seeking solitude doesn’t make a writer antisocial. Perhaps periods of quarantines made it easier for writers to carve out specific periods of time where they can work in blissful solitude. A brief look at women authors of the past shows that self-imposed sequestration isn’t such a crazy thing to do, after all.
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Jane Austen
Though Jane Austen (1775 – 1817) had a portable desk on which she would scratch away with her quill, it was hidden from most visitors to her home. Even if Jane had shared her juvenile writings with her family, when it came to novels, the act of creating them was a private affair. Except for her sister Cassandra, most of her family were unaware of the contents of her novels while she was penning them in a secluded corner of her childhood home at Steventon.
After losing the love of her life, and having subsequently rejected a potential husband because she didn’t care for him (like her most famous character, Elizabeth Bennet of Pride and Prejudice) Jane must have experienced not just emotional loneliness, but possibly an intellectual one as well.
Though her family was quite well-educated, perhaps she lacked the stimulus that mingling with other writers, in London, for example, might have sparked her bright mind. Except for the fact that there were few women writers in those days, anyway.
There weren’t any other brains around as sharp as hers with whom she could have shared her keen observations on society, even if she’d wanted to. Her main confidante was her sister Cassandra, (who burnt most of Jane’s letters after the latter’s death). Reduced to genteel poverty after her father retired, Jane couldn’t write in Bath in houses that kept getting increasingly smaller, and dingy, as they had to move around a lot.
Both Jane and Cassandra had to cope with all attendant problems that come from descending the economic ladder, whilst trying to keep up appearances of social gentility. How many novels were lost in the years when Jane couldn’t find that safe secure unmoving shell where she could retreat and produce her warm characters whose brilliant wit continues to delight readers even today?
Though her desk was portable, (gifted to her by her father), perhaps she needed that still, silent point where she could find her center, and from where she could start exploring the minutiae and intricate web of her characters, and the complex social rules that they had to follow.
Her pen started flying again when her oldest brother Edward finally bestowed a cottage at Chawton to his mother and unmarried sisters, and where they could settle down without having fears of moving yet again due to financial constraints. There’s a story (which may be a myth) that Jane wouldn’t let the hinges of the door to her room be greased; whenever anyone entered it, the sound alerted her to that fact, and she could quickly hide her manuscript from prying eyes. Whether this is true or not, it’s a good metaphor for the woman writer’s desire for privacy.
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The Brontë sisters
The Brontë sisters toiled away at their oeuvres in relative secrecy in Haworth, in the West Riding area of Yorkshire in England. Though their cooperative ventures in childhood produced the Empire of Angria, and Gondal along with minute maps, sketches, and schemes, they grew increasingly apart even in the cramped quarters of the Parish house at Haworth.
Charlotte, the eldest Brontë, was the first to propose venturing into the world of publishing, but her younger sister Emily at first resisted. Emily, the middle and most reclusive of the three sisters (the youngest was Anne) has remained the most mysterious one as well. Ironically, she sought seclusion in the open moors near Haworth where she found solace far away from the confines of the tightly-knit, family web with its tangled and complicated emotional life. Her dog, Keeper, was perhaps her closest companion.
In modern times, perhaps the Brontë sisters might be called word nerds and social misfits. Aware of the fact that they were different from the ordinary folks surrounding them, possibly they suffered from emotional and increasingly intellectual loneliness as they grew more competitive with age.
In Charlotte Brontë’s most well-known novel, Jane Eyre, the madwoman in the attic, Bertha Mason could personify one part of the author’s own psyche which could have become increasingly complex after her unrequited love for Professor Héger in Brussels (where she taught at his school) ended with bitterness on her part.
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Jean Rhys
In her 1966 novel Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys (1890 – 1979) speculates as to who this mad woman, Bertha Mason, might have been. As it turns out, Antionette Cosway, a Creole heiress from West Indies (another misfit due to being mixed) was gradually driven into insanity by the excesses of her British husband — the young Mr. Rochester — due to his negligence, cruelty, displacement, and racism towards her.
Bertha wasn’t just socially isolated, but physically, emotionally, and spiritually as well. Was Bertha Mason in Jane Eyre Charlotte’s shadow double (as a Jungian analyst would have surmised)?
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Emily Dickinson
Emily Dickinson (1830 – 1886) was an extreme case, the epitome of the solitary brilliant poet, as she spent nearly the last two decades of her short life as a recluse in her own home. Only around eleven of her poems (out of about 1,800) were published in her lifetime. Even if women authors weren’t exactly encouraged in those days, she deliberately kept hundreds of poems hidden even from her own family until these gems were discovered after her death.
It’s impossible to know why Emily Dickinson kept her work so secret, though usually, artists tend to be much more sensitive than the ordinary (wo)man on the street, and therefore, any kind of criticism can be taken too much to heart. Perhaps her writings didn’t fall on ears that were appreciative enough. Or perhaps writing these poems was an intensely personal experience, which couldn’t be shared by others.
Emily might be called a Highly Sensitive Person (HSP) now, and perhaps her life and work should be examined by this lens. Perhaps all the authors mentioned here were HSPs to varying degrees.
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Virginia Woolf
Dickinson was already living Virginia Woolf’s famous lines illustrating the concept that “a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.” Apart from the feminist slant given to Woolf’s well-known statement, perhaps a woman didn’t need just independence, but also a degree of privacy in which to create.
Despite belonging to the Bloomsbury Group, and living a relatively social life, some of Woolf’s inner aloneness may have bled onto the page, and found an echo in Clarissa Dalloway’s inner despondent landscape.
Woolf (1882 – 1941), best known for taking the stream of conscious style of writing to exquisite heights, held onto the idea of keeping a part of her inner core inviolate, as a writer can’t possibly share all her thoughts with the public, or even with those who are close to her. Though she suffered from mental illness, partly due to her mother’s premature death, partly due to the abuse she endured at the hands of her stepbrother), and/or chemical imbalances, her bipolar disorder may have been augmented by her overly sensitive nature.
One sign of her insanity was that she believed that birds were speaking to her in ancient Greek. If only she’d been able to note down whatever it was that they’d said. Existential issues (inherent to the human condition) could have started looming like huge grey clouds. Her increasing emotional and spiritual loneliness could have pushed her to commit suicide.
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Colette
Unlike the other writers mentioned here, Colette (1873 – 1954) who had an outgoing, exuberant personality, delighted in swirling through the artistic and intellectual circles of Paris, when her much older husband, Henry Gauthier-Villars (Willy) brought her there in 1893.
The couple lived together from 1893 to 1906. Colette was literally locked into a room by Willy to compel her to produce writings that he could sell (these turned out to be the Claudine stories). If anything, this proves that writing tends to be a solitary exercise, even under duress — unless one is part of a purposeful duo or team.
For many years, Willy passed the Claudine novels off as his own writings. In the end, he took credit and royalties for these books that Colette had written originally. However, after she left him, due to her straitened circumstances, Colette must have finally learned to resist the temptation of the stage and bright lights and sit down to write, as she produced numerous major works, with Cheri and The Last of Cheri being among the best known.
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Agatha Christie
Was Agatha Christie’s (1890 – 1976) need for privacy so great that in December of 1926, she disappeared for about ten days? This lead to a nationwide hunt, and furor in the press. Perhaps Christie wasn’t expecting that. But she didn’t step forward. Instead, she was discovered at a hotel in Harrogate. Perhaps she was growing so lonely in her marriage due to her husband’s affair that she preferred to run away.
It’s not clear whether it was to punish him, take some personal time off, or if she’d staged her own disappearance to humiliate her spouse, or for publicity, or if she’d genuinely lost her memory. In any case, sequestration was preferable for her at that period of her life.
She then took refuge in her sister’s house, and early next year went to the Canary Isles to recuperate. She’d find fodder for her books during her travels in subsequent years. She would remain unattached until 1930, when she met her second husband.
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Daphne du Maurier
Known for being reclusive and even frosty, Daphne du Maurier (1907 – 1989), was supposedly quite cold towards her two daughters, but warmer towards her son. Perhaps her complicated relationships, which may have led to a double life, and accusations of plagiarism may not have been conducive to being gregarious.
Given the balancing act that her emotional and professional lives may have been, du Maurier must have preferred that some equations of her life remain unsolved, like the character of Rachel in My Cousin Rachel.
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P.L. Travers
Though P.L. Travers (1899-1966) maintained she didn’t know how Mary Poppins had popped onto her pages, at least she knew where these stories had evolved. In 1934, since she was suffering from pleurisy, she retreated to a cottage in Sussex to recover. Since she started making up a story to entertain two visiting children during this period of semi-confinement, she ended up with the first book of Mary Poppins.
For most of her life, Travers kept her personal life under wraps, as in her youth, many of her acquaintances in London didn’t even know she was Australian. At age forty she adopted a son, Camillus Hone, but that relationship didn’t go well. Was her solitude alleviated somewhat because of this relationship? While only Travers might answer to that question, she drew a lot of flak for her adopted son’s subsequent problems with alcoholism.
The TV documentary, The Secret Life of Mary Poppins: A Culture Show Special touches upon her turbulent relationship with Camillus. On the one hand, she’s been justifiably criticized for not telling him that he had a twin brother, only finding out when his twin tracked him down.
On the other hand, the Hone family has not been held responsible for allowing her to adopt just one twin, and for leaving Camillus in her supposedly incompetent hands, despite his many problems. Just because she wrote about a magical nanny, Mary Poppins, does that mean she should’ve had those excellent child-rearing skills herself?
Writing can be exhausting and draining for some writers, as it can be an emotionally demanding, and soul-searching activity. It leaves little room for “normal” family life. While most male writers can conveniently leave the rearing of their off-springs to their spouses, or other female relatives, women writers are held more accountable for how they bring up their children. This is not an easy job in the best of circumstances.
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Conclusion: The solitary female writerThe solitary female has traditionally been stigmatized as being either problematic or undesirable. Perhaps that’s the reason female writers struggle with loneliness more. However, the quarantine may have liberated some from the need to socialize to fit better into society.
Since writers are a part of society, they have to keep a foot in it. However, if they’re going to depict humanity and associated social structures in all their myriad forms in their work, authors have to be somewhat removed from them. Not just to be able to observe society, but also to comment on it via their creative endeavors.
So, is the unconscious act of self-isolation a necessary part of the creative process? Not to mention that not many “normal” people have trouble understanding writers and artists, and where they’re coming from in the first place. These kinds of solitary activities may even arouse some sort of suspicion in their entourage.
On one hand, the act of writing is necessarily a solitary one. On the other, if the artist is to portray, or critique, or comment on society through their work, they must observe social phenomena to recreate a version of it in their texts. Some of us prefer to live in seclusion or tend to lead semi-sequestered lives under normal circumstances.
According to Barbara Sher (1935 – 2020), author of Refuse to Choose, “Isolation is the dream killer, not your attitude.” So it’s a question of creating a balancing act as away to succeed as a writer. Though many extrovert writers do well in their lifetimes — being good at networking, and building their images — it’s the quality of the work that ensures a long shelf life.
The quarantines of the year 2020 proved to be a blessing in disguise for many artists and writers, as it offered quiet time to create, write, edit, or submit their works for publication. Yet, it was difficult to keep one’s sanity through the many uncertainties that arose during this worrisome time. At the same time, every major change in the social, economic, and political climate can provide fuel for the writer’s imagination, which constantly needs to be ignited.
This piece originally ran on Literary Yard
Contributed by Sultana Raza: Of Indian origin, Sultana Raza’s creative non-fiction has appeared in countercurrents.org, Litro, Gnarled Oak, Kashmir Times, and A Beautiful Space. Her 100+ articles (on art, theatre, film, and humanitarian issues) have appeared in English and French. An independent scholar, Sultana Raza has presented many papers related to Romanticism (Keats) and Fantasy (Tolkien & GRR Martin) in international conferences.
Her poems have appeared in numerous journals, including Columbia Journal, The New Verse News, London Grip, Classical Poetry Society, spillwords, Poetry24, Dissident Voice, and The Peacock Journal. Her fiction has received an Honorable Mention in Glimmer Train Review (USA), and has been published in Coldnoon Journal, Szirine, apertura, Entropy, and ensemble (in French). She has read her fiction/poems in India, Switzerland, France, Luxembourg, England, Ireland, the U.S.
The post Solitude vs Self-Isolation: Women Authors and the Sacred Inner Space appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.
