Nava Atlas's Blog, page 43
March 23, 2021
6 Classic Early- to Mid-20th Century Lesbian Novels
Though the classic lesbian novels surveyed here – published from the early through mid-twentieth century – seemed truly groundbreaking in their time, they certainly weren’t the first of this genre of literature. From the poetry of Sappho to the secret diaries of Anne Lister to queer re-evaluations of many classic women authors, the books listed here had plenty of forerunners.
The difference? Though some were more forthright than others, there was less of the thinly veiled allusions, and more overt same-sex love and romance. Though by no means the only fine examples of the genre, the six novels presented here were hugely impactful.
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Regiment of Women by Clemence Dane (1917)
The Well of Loneliness, usually said to be the first English-language novel containing veiled lesbianism, was just beaten to the title by Rosamond Lehmann’s Dusty Answer, 1927. But ten years before even that was Regiment of Women, 1917, the debut novel of Clemence Dane, the pseudonym of Winifred Ashton (1888-1965), London-born novelist, playwright, and early feminist.
Dane’s title is obviously ironic but at least two of the book cover designers completely misunderstood the title, or more likely had not read the book: one has a picture of a woman in uniform, depicting a female member of a military regiment, and the other has a picture of a boys’ school. Read more about Regiment of Women.
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The Well of Loneliness by Radclyff Hall (1928)
Since its first appearance in 1928, The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall (1880 – 1943) has spurred much discussion and controversy. The semi-autobiographical novel about a young woman’s coming to terms with her lesbian identity caused a furor when first published in England. Widely banned, it also went to trial for obscenity.
Once denounced as immoral, it has also been praised as a courageous work of literature. It shocked some members “proper” society and served as an awakening to others who felt isolated by repressive social mores. At the time it was published, it told the story of same-sex love between women, a topic that was rarely written about outside of scientific textbooks. Read more about The Well of Loneliness.
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Diana by Diana Fredericks (Frances V. Rummell, 1939)
Frances V. Rummell, an American writer and educator, published Diana: A Strange Autobiography (1939) under the pseudonym Diana Frederics. More of an autobiographical novel than an actual memoir, nonetheless draws upon the author’s life. The story details the title heroine’s discovery of her lesbian sexuality.
Positive portrayal of lesbians was considered shocking when the book was published. It’s now considered groundbreaking as one of the first works of gay fiction to have a happy outcome.
Published squarely between The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall (1928) and the lesbian pulp novels that emerged in the early 1950s, Diana is a worthy, yet often overlooked addition to the genre. More about Diana: A Strange Autobiography.
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The Price of Salt by Claire Morgan (Patricia Highsmith, 1952)
When The Price of Salt was published in 1952, it was a rarity in lesbian literature. Lesbian pulp novels were quite a thing, but in order to pass censors, one of the two protagonists had to either come to a bad end or realize that she was straight, after all. The Price of Salt by Patricia Highsmith was published under the pseudonym Claire Morgan.
Highsmith was at the start of a career writing thrillers about sociopaths (such as the one in her first book, Strangers on a Train, the basis for the 1951 Hitchcock film). The Price of Salt was an early departure from what was to be her preferred genre — psychological thrillers; it would remain an outlier among her works. The novel was adapted as the 2015 film, retitled Carol (2015 film version of The Price of Salt). More about The Price of Salt.
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Spring Fire by Vin Packer (Marijane Meaker, 1952)
1952 was something of an annus mirabilis for the lesbian coming of age novel, seeing the paperback republication of the aforementioned Diana, and the original publication of The Price of Salt and Spring Fire by Vin Packer, the pen name of Marijane Meaker. Spring Fire has the distinction of being the first lesbian paperback-original novel (The Price of Salt was issued as a Bantam paperback in 1953, but this was after the release of the hardback).
The central character of Spring Fire, Susan (Mitch) Mitchell is rich. “She was not lovely and dainty and pretty, but there was a comeliness about her that suggested some inbred strength and grace.” She has been to several different boarding schools over a period of six years with no apparent romantic or any other kind of interest in or from other girls. This changes, of course, as the novel progresses. More about Spring Fire.
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Odd Girl Out by Ann Bannon (Ann Weldy, 1957)
Odd Girl Out by Ann Bannon (the pseudonym of Ann Weldy), came a bit later in the group of the influential and enduring lesbian pulp novels of the 1950s. Odd Girl Out was the first of what became The Beebo Brinker Chronicles: five linked novels from 1957 to 1962, following the same character, Laura, into maturity. Weldy was a very unlikely pioneer of lesbian fiction. She recalled:
“I must have been the most naïve kid who ever sat down at the age of 22 to write a novel. I was a young housewife living in the suburbs of Philadelphia, college graduation just behind me, and utterly unschooled in the ways of the world… To my continuing astonishment, the books have developed a life of their own. They were born in the hostile era of McCarthyism and rigid male/female sex roles, yet still speak to readers in the twenty-first century.” More about Odd Girl Out.
Other notable titles in 20th-Century Lesbian LiteratureDusty Answer by Rosamond Lehmann (1927)Nightwood by Djuna Barnes (1937)The Friendly Young Ladies by Mary Renault (1944)Olivia by Dorothy Strachey (1949)The post 6 Classic Early- to Mid-20th Century Lesbian Novels appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.
Odd Girl Out by Ann Bannon (Ann Weldy), 1957
Odd Girl Out by Ann Bannon (the pseudonym of Ann Weldy), was one of several hugely influential lesbian pulp novels of the 1950s. This appreciation and analysis is excerpted from Girls in Bloom: Coming of Age in the Mid-20th Century Woman’s Novel by Francis Booth, reprinted by permission.
In the introduction to her anthology Lesbian Pulp Fiction, the author Katherine V. Forrest remembers how a book she found in a bookshop in Detroit in 1957 changed not only her writing but her life:
“Overwhelming need led me to walk a gauntlet of fear up to the cash register. Fear so intense that I remembered nothing more, only that I stumbled out of the store in possession of what I knew I must have, a book as necessary to me as air. The book was Odd Girl Out by Ann Bannon. I found it when I was eighteen years old. It opened the door to my soul and told me who I was. It led me to other books that told me who some of us were, and how some of us lived.
Finding this book back then, and what it meant to me, is my touchstone to our literature, to its value and meaning. Yet no matter how many times I try to write or talk about that day in Detroit, I cannot convey the power of what it was like. You had to be there. I write my books out of the profound wish that no one will ever have to be there again.”
Bannon was really Anne Weldy; she had the same editor, Dick Carroll, and the same publisher, Gold Medal Books, as Vin Packer/Marijane Meaker, author of Spring Fire. As Bannon had changed Forrest’s life, so Meaker had changed Bannon/Weldy’s.
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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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Weldy had been in a sorority at college like the characters in Spring Fire and thought she could write a similar kind of novel. She wrote Meaker “a kind of a fan letter.” Even though Meaker had been getting hundreds of fan letters she responded, inviting Bannon to meet her and Carroll, who looked at her novel and saw both problems and promise in it.
“In the view of Dick Carroll, the twinkly old Irishman who was running that show, the manuscript was twice as long as they wanted. He also felt that I hadn’t recognized my story. I had told a kind of straightforward coming of age type novel, and rather cautiously and timidly put a small romance between two young women in the corners of the background. He said cut the length by half and tell the story of the two young women, Beth and Laura, and then maybe we’ll have something.”
Unlike Meaker, Weldy was allowed to write the ending she wanted. In a later interview she said that Meaker “was constrained very heavily in having to end her book on a very negative note. Writing five years later, I found things had loosened up. I was able to, in a sense, have a happy ending.”
Weldy told the same interviewer how difficult life was for homosexuals and lesbians in the early 1950s, in the middle of the Cold War, the McCarthyite anti-communist witch hunts and the paranoia that surrounded them.
“It was a very repressed and frightening time. After World War Two ended, the country had made a frightening turn and embraced the most conservative and traditional roles. All the girls were supposed to be home having babies and making soup and casseroles. Everyone was supposed to be as conventional as is possible to imagine.
People whose nature led them to a same-sex attraction were forced to put up a conventional façade. The danger was very severe, and gay attraction was frankly illegal in a lot of places. You could be jailed, you could certainly be publicly humiliated and everything could be thrown into jeopardy in terms of your job and your family.
You were treated almost as if you had a disease, and if you were known to be gay then your friends had to abandon you because they might catch it too.”
Marijane Meaker put it in a very similar way in a later introduction to a reprint of We Walk Alone.
“In the 50s, we felt no entitlement, and most of us were wary of any organizations. The 50s was famous for its witch-hunts and congressional investigations. In the eyes of the law we were illegal, and religions viewed us as anathema. I wanted to write about what it was like to live in one of the most sophisticated cities in the world, and find yourself unacceptable because of your sexual orientation.”
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Ann Bannon (Ann Weldy) in 1983
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Odd Girl Out was the first of what became The Beebo Brinker Chronicles: five linked novels from 1957 to 1962, of which the second, I Am a Woman, 1959 and third, Women in the Shadows 1959, follow the same character, Laura into maturity. But Weldy was a very unlikely pioneer of lesbian fiction.
“I must have been the most naïve kid who ever sat down at the age of 22 to write a novel. It was the mid-1950s. Not only was I fresh from a sheltered upbringing in a small town, I had chosen a topic of which I had literally no practical experience.
I was a young housewife living in the suburbs of Philadelphia, college graduation just behind me, and utterly unschooled in the ways of the world… To my continuing astonishment, the books have developed a life of their own. They were born in the hostile era of McCarthyism and rigid male/female sex roles, yet still speak to readers in the twenty-first century.”
Originally introduced to it by Marijane Meaker, Weldy spent time in New York’s Greenwich Village. “It was love at first sight. Every pair of women sauntering along with arms around waists or holding hands was an inspiration.”
Odd Girl Out: A brief synopsis
Weldy’s debt to Meaker extends to the plot of Odd Girl Out, which, like Spring Fire, concerns an inexperienced girl, Laura, going to college and falling in love with an older member of her sorority, Beth, but being unsure what her feelings mean and what to do about them.
“There was a vague, strange feeling in the younger girl that to get too close to Beth was to worship her, and to worship was to get hurt.” Beth is a larger-than-life character; Laura “had never met or read or dreamed a Beth before.” One of Beth’s eccentricities is that she never wears underwear. Laura’s “whole upbringing revolted at this… Nobody was a more rigid conformist, farther from a character, than Laura Landon.”
Sharing a room together, Laura is very shy about getting undressed in front of another person, feeling that “Beth’s bright eyes were doting on every button.” Beth makes up the bed for her.
“She helped Laura under the covers and tucked her in, and it was so lovely to let herself be cared for that Laura lay still, enjoying it like a child. When Beth was about to leave her, Laura reached for her naturally, like a little girl expecting a good-night kiss. Beth bent over and said, ‘what is it, honey?’
With a hard shock of realization, Laura stopped herself. She pulled her hands away from Beth and clutched the covers with them.
‘Nothing.’ It was a small voice.
Beth pushed Laura’s hair back and gazed at her and for a heart-stopping moment Laura thought she would lean down and kiss her forehead. But she only said, ‘Okay. Sleep tight, honey.’ And climbed down.”
Laura knows nothing of lesbianism and is simply “fuzzily aware of certain extraordinary emotions that were generally frowned upon and so she frowned upon them too, with no very good notion of what they were or how they happened, and not the remotest thought that they could happen to her.”
She had had crushes on girls in high school but “they were all short and uncertain and secret feelings and she would have been profoundly shocked to hear them called homosexual.” Laura of course considers herself normal even though she “wasn’t attracted to men. She thought simply that men were unnecessary to her. That wasn’t unusual; lots of women live without men.”
Like Mitch in Spring Fire, Laura has to fight off the unwanted attentions of a boy from college who will not take no for an answer; in this case he does not go so far as to rape her, but still, like Mitch, her first experience with a boy is very bad.
Also like Mitch, Laura’s love object Beth has a boyfriend; Laura, as she begins to understand her true nature – as she comes of age – knows she has to give Beth up to him; “you need a man, you always did.”
“‘I’m not wrong about myself, not any more. And not about you, either.’
‘Oh, Laura, my dear –’
‘We haven’t time for tears now, Beth. I’ve grown up emotionally as far as I can. But you can go farther, you can be better than that. And you must, Beth, if you can. I’ve no right to hold you back.’ Her heart shrank inside her at her own words…
‘You taught me what I am, Beth. I know now, I didn’t before. I understand what I am, finally.’”
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Odd Girl Out on Amazon*
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Contributed by Francis Booth,* the author of several books on twentieth-century culture:
Amongst Those Left: The British Experimental Novel 1940-1960 (published by Dalkey Archive); Everybody I Can Think of Ever: Meetings That Made the Avant-Garde; Girls in Bloom: Coming of Age in the Mid-Twentieth Century Woman’s Novel; Text Acts: Twentieth Century Literary Eroticism; and Comrades in Art: Revolutionary Art in America 1926-1938
Francis has also published several novels: The Code 17 series, set in the Swinging London of the 1960s and featuring aristocratic spy Lady Laura Summers; Young adult fantasy series The Watchers; and Young adult fantasy novel Mirror Mirror. Francis lives on the South Coast of England. He is currently working on High Collars and Monocles: Interwar Novels by Female Couples.
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*These are Amazon Affiliate links. If a product is purchased by linking through, Literary Ladies Guide receives a modest commission, which helps maintain our site and helps it to continue growing!
The post Odd Girl Out by Ann Bannon (Ann Weldy), 1957 appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.
March 22, 2021
Margaret C. Anderson, Founder of The Little Review
Margaret C. Anderson (November 24, 1886 – October 18, 1973) was a daring, headstrong writer, editor, and founder of the modernist literary magazine, The Little Review. This modernist journal, published from 1914 to 1929, was dedicated to the best writing and art of the early twentieth century.
Margaret was later known as one of “The Women of the Rope,” a group of writers and artists who studied with the famous Russian mystic Gurdjieff, part of a group seeking transformation and possible enlightenment.
Early life and escape to ChicagoMargaret was born in Indianapolis, Indiana to Arthur Anderson and Jessie Shortridge. The oldest of three girls in an upper-middle-class family, she grew up in a bourgeois household from which she was eager to escape.
She studied at Western College for Women in Oxford Ohio, and afterward convinced her family to allow her to go to Chicago with her sister. Chicago, a bustling city, was so different from Indianapolis, and Margaret loved it. She spent her allowance on coffee, chocolate, and fine clothes.
She bought flowers, books, and beautiful furniture; she attended concerts and performances with the best seats in the house. There were performances of Mary Garden, Isadora Duncan, Arturo Toscanini, and others that opened Margaret’s consciousness to the highest aspirations in art.
Clara Laughlin, a well-known writer and editor, gave Margaret her first writing job. She started meeting writers, artists, anarchists, and bohemians who lived for art and ideas. Her dream came crashing down when her parents demanded that she move her back to Indiana because she was spending all their money. Margaret argued, and her parents finally consented to let her move back to Chicago if she could support herself.
Margaret found work at The Dial magazine, but eventually grew restless and depressed. She knew she needed inspiration. That’s when the idea of a journal dedicated to all the arts came to her. Hers would be a life of service to the highest literature and beauty.
The Little Review was launched in 1914, headquartered in the beautiful Chicago Fine Arts building with many obstacles — not the least of which was finding funding and help in getting it published. After publishing writings in praise of Emma Goldman, the controversial anarchist and feminist, Margaret lost backers and funding.
Margaret never compromised and became resourceful. She convinced her sister to live with her on the shores of Lake Michigan in tents with wooden floors. Writers and artists would pin their works on the tent flaps if they weren’t home. Margaret and her sister swam in the mornings, then drink coffee and have breakfast on the beach. They camped on the shores until November when the cold rains came.
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Margaret C. Anderson, 1930 (photo by Man Ray)
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Jane Heap, a talented cross-dressing artist, joined the staff of The Little Review. She had short hair, dressed like Oscar Wilde, and had the wit to match. Margaret was enthralled when she met her; it felt like destiny, and they became lovers. Jane helped edit the journal; she and Margaret were different, yet they complemented each other.
Margaret had found the one person that understood her ideas. She felt Jane had an incredible mind and utilized it for The Little Review. They discussed and argued ideas, chiefly about art. Margaret found a wick for her flame and Jane sent her ablaze with new energy. The two women had high standards for what they would publish in The Little Review. For one issue, they weren’t happy with the submissions, so they published 64 pages of blank white paper.
Many prominent writers such as Carl Sandburg, T.S Eliot, Ezra Pound contributed their writings to The Little Review for no payment. Some of the notable women who contributed to The Little Review include Djuna Barnes, Gertrude Stein, Mina Loy, and Dorothy Richardson, among many others.
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Jane Heap (photo by Berenice Abbot)
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In 1917, the expatriate poet Ezra Pound joined The Little Review. He was able to get contributions from writers such as Aldous Huxley, William Butler Yeats, James Joyce, among others. Margaret and Jane loved Joyce’s Ulysses and published segments of the novel in the magazine from 1918 to 1920. America wasn’t ready for Joyce, which led to a charged of obscenity.
Margaret and Jane didn’t worry about censors and felt Ulysses should be published for its innovative stream of consciousness technique. Margaret recognized the genius in Ulysses and tried to battle what she felt was the public’s ignorance. She grew discouraged with people who had no taste for beauty.
Women of the Rope
After editing and publishing The Little Review for eleven years, Margaret eventually left, exhausted from the fight to publish great literature. Jane Heap became the sole editor and writer for many years.
Margaret moved to France with the singer Georgette Le Blanc. They struck up a tremendous friendship and became lovers. Georgette was the former mistress of the writer Maurice Maeterlinck, author of The Blue Bird.
Margaret, Georgette, and later Jane became part of a group known as The Women of the Rope. These were woman writers and artists searching for enlightenment by studying the teachings of the great mystic G. I. Gurdjieff in Paris and Fontainebleau France. Other members included Solita Solano, Kathryn Hulme, Alice Roher, and Elizabeth Gordon.
Gurdjieff’s teachings seemed to appeal to women artists. He could be very strict but had a sly sense of humor. Solita Salano had written a detailed, fascinating book about their experience with the famous mystic called Gurdjieff and the Woman of the Rope: Notes of meetings in Paris and New York.
“You are going on a journey under my guidance, an inner-world journey like a high mountain climb where you must be roped together for safety, where each must think of the others on the rope, all for one and one for all.” (— Gurdjieff And The Women Of The Rope)
The short story writer Katherine Mansfield also studied with Gurdjieff but was not part of the group. She felt that Gurdjieff”s teaching gave her hope during her illness. His teaching impacted all of their lives and taught them a new way of seeing that would help them with difficulties. Margaret wrote a book about him called The Unknowable Gurdjieff.
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Later years and World War IIMargaret and Georgette lived in a lighthouse in France. She wrote about this time almost like a fairy tale — days blend with the evening, suffused with light, flowers, wonderful meals, coffee, and wine. Margaret found Georgette’s essence to be sweet, creative, and kind. She considered Georgette a visionary artist/mystic and was devastated when she was diagnosed with cancer.
The two women felt compelled to leave Paris when World War II broke out; in addition, Georgette needed help. They moved from town to town until they ended up in Le Chalet Rose near Cannes. Ernest Hemingway gave them some money to live on since they were broke. Georgette died in 1941.
Margaret was heartbroken and secured a passport to go back to the United States. She met Dorothy Caruso, the widow of the famous tenor Enrico Caruso. They became companions and traveled together.
Despite the challenges, Margaret had lived a full and exciting life on her own terms. She broke barriers in literature and art, and wasn’t afraid to be forthright in her preference for women. She died in Le Cannet, France in 1973.
Quotes by Margaret C. Anderson“My greatest enemy is reality and I have fought it successfully for thirty years.”
“This is the most beautiful thing we’ll ever have to publish. Let us print it if it’s the last effort of our lives!” (on publishing James Joyce’s Ulysses)
“I believe in the unsubmissive, the unfaltering, the unassailable, the irresistible, the unbelievable — in other words, in an art of life.”
“As I look at the human story I see two stories. They run parallel and never meet. One is of people who live, as they can or must, the events that arrive; the other is of people who live, as they intend, the events they create.”
“In real love, you want the other person’s good. In romantic love, you want the other person.”
Books by Margaret C. AndersonMy Thirty Years War (1930)The Fiery Fountains (1951)The Strange Necessity (1962)The Unknowable Gurdjieff (1962)
Contributed by Mame Cotter, who blogs at The Illumination of Art: “My name is Mary Cotter but just call me Mame. I am starting a blog again to find others who share my interests. I am into the arts such as painting, film, theatre and literature. I love children’s books and many of their illustrations.I love walking , daydreaming and thinking about our existence. My favorite filmmakers are Tarkovsky, Bergman, and Dreyer. There are many incredible books, art and films that explore reality and higher dimensions. I am a secret bohemian artist that lives for art, spirit and nature.”
The post Margaret C. Anderson, Founder of The Little Review appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.
March 21, 2021
Spring Fire by Vin Packer (Marijane Meaker), a Lesbian Pulp Classic
1952 was something of an annus mirabilis for the lesbian coming of age novel, seeing the paperback republication of Diana, the original publication of both Patricia Highsmith’s The Price of Salt and Spring Fire by Vin Packer, a pseudonym used by Marijane Meaker. This analysis and synopsis is excerpted from Girls in Bloom by Francis Booth, reprinted by permission.
Meaker wrote about Highsmith in her late memoir Highsmith of 2003; they were on and off lovers in a stormy relationship for many years; Highsmith was much older and more established when Meaker finally plucked up courage to walk up to her in L’s bar.
“Pat had become my idol. Although we were both reviewed in Anthony Boucher’s mystery column in the New York Times, she was published in hardcover by Harper Brothers. As Vin Packer, I was one of Gold Medal Books’ mystery/suspense paperback ‘tough guys,’ and, as Ann Aldrich, a softcover reporter on lesbian life.”
Lesbian paperbacks and the lure of cheap pulp novels
Meaker’s Spring Fire, published under the Vin Packer pseudonym, has the distinction of being the first lesbian paperback-original novel (The Price of Salt was issued as a Bantam paperback in 1953, but this was after the release of the hardback). “Serious” books had mostly been published in hardback and quite expensive; if they were likely to be popular they would later be republished in a cheaper paperback version.
This idea held in the publishing world for a very long time. But in the early 1950s Fawcett Publications had the idea of publishing good books in original paperbacks under an imprint called Gold Medal Books, edited by Dick Carroll. The difference was that paperbacks were affordable by almost anyone.
As far as the censors were concerned, anything that happened between the covers of a relatively expensive, limited-run, hardback book was only likely to be read by the mature, educated middle-classes – people like themselves indeed. The censors were therefore quite relaxed about them; high-priced hardbacks would not be likely to deprave or corrupt the pillars of society who would be the only people to read them.
But when books were so cheap as to be disposable, cheap enough to be bought in large quantities by the impressionable, undereducated working classes, or even – heaven forbid – by young people, the censors got much more twitchy. As Anne Weldy, Meaker’s protégée, whose lesbian pulp novel Odd Girl Out, published under the pseudonym Anne Bannon, put it:
“They were sold on the shelves of news stands, available in train stations and airports. Anywhere that you could buy magazines, pulp fiction was available as well. It was kind of an ephemeral literature. People would pick up a paperback novel to read on the train, on their way to work, keep it for a day or two until they finished it and then throw it away…
Readers who weren’t likely to go into bookstores or didn’t have one in their hometown could walk into their drug store and pick up a lesbian novel… Anybody could find them, so you didn’t have to go into the library and request access to the rare and naughty books they held in the back.”
A lot of people did pick up Spring Fire: it sold nearly one and half million copies in its first year of publication; even a well-reviewed, popular hardback might only sell in the low thousands. Publishers were prepared to take a risk with censorship when the costs were relatively low; they knew that if the censors were to seize a book it would be pulped – the origin of the term pulp fiction: fiction published knowing that it might end up being pulped.
At the same time, these cheap paperbacks did not attract the attention of serious reviewers and therefore often escaped the attention of the censors. Anne Weldy said:
“How did we get away with it, those of us writing these books? No doubt it had a lot to do with the fact that we were not even a blip on the radar screens of the literary critics. Not one ever reviewed a lesbian pulp paperback for the New York Times Review of Books, the Saturday Review, The Atlantic Monthly. We were lavishly ignored, except by the customers in the drugstores, airports, train stations, and new stands who bought our books of the kiosk by the millions.”
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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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Marijane Meaker had been one of Dick Carroll’s secretaries at Gold Medal Books; she read books on his behalf and gave him notes. ‘I very often finished reading a new manuscript thinking: I could do that.’ Meaker showed Carroll a novel she had been writing about a girls’ boarding school.
“‘You might have a good story there,’ Dick said, ‘but you have to do two things. The girls would have to be in college, not boarding school. And, you cannot make homosexuality attractive. No happy ending … your main character can’t decide she’s not strong enough to live that life,’ Dick said. ‘She has to reject it knowing that it’s wrong. You see, our books go through the mails. They have to pass inspection.
If one book is considered censurable, the whole shipment is sent back to the publisher. If your book appears to proselytize for homosexuality, all the books sent with it to distributors are returned. You have to understand that. I don’t care about anybody’s sexual preference. But I do care about making this line successful.’”
In those days, authors had very little say in the matter of titles or covers. Meaker had wanted to call it Sorority Girl but Carroll thought that was not racy enough. “I don’t want it to have an unhappy title like The Well of Loneliness,” Meaker said, referring to the only explicitly lesbian novel (by Radclyffe Hall) to have been published by a mainstream publisher, in 1928.
Anne Weldy was one of those whose life was transformed by Meaker/Aldrich’s We Walk Alone, 1955 and We, Too, Must Love, 1958. In her introduction to a reissue of both books, Weldy praised Meaker as a founding sister.
“If you were a lesbian in the 1950s, you were probably married, with children. Or solitarily drudging in the hinterlands . . . Could you be the only woman on the planet with tender feelings for other women? Were you evil? Cursed? Or merely sick? . . . And then a miracle happened. In the drugstore, the train station, the bus stop, the newsstand, you came across a rack of pulp paperbacks. Among the cowboy tales, the cops-and-robbers, and the science fiction, there began to be books about lesbians. Suddenly, you had a name, an identity, and a community of unknown sisters.”
Introducing Susan (Mitch) Mitchell
The central character of Spring Fire, Susan (Mitch) Mitchell is rich. “She was not lovely and dainty and pretty, but there was a comeliness about her that suggested some inbred strength and grace.” She has been to several different boarding schools over a period of six years with no apparent romantic or any other kind of interest in or from other girls.
But because of her wealth, her wardrobe and her cool car, the Tri Epsilon sorority is very keen to have her when she first goes to college.
“An absolute must for Tri Epsilon. The Mitchell girl is 17. Her father is a widower and millionaire. There are no other children. The Mitchell girl owns a brilliant red convertible, Buick, latest model … Susan has been educated in the best private schools. She is not beautiful, but she is wholesome and a fine athlete … Edward Mitchell’s reputation is above reproach. They are definitely nouveaux riches, but their social prestige in Seedmore is tiptop. Susan has a fabulous wardrobe.”
Obviously, the sorority has a very shallow view of its members but Mitch is keen to join anyway; as one of the senior member says: “The purpose of a sorority is to help a girl grow, and if Susan needs our help, it will be our privilege to give it to her.”
A forced first encounter
Susan does have more than one coming of age moment with the sorority, the first of which is meeting and sharing a room with the beautiful Leda, to whom Mitch is attracted at first sight; this seems to be her first same-sex attraction. However, before the relationship has time to go anywhere, she is assigned a date by her sorority with the appalling Bud. Left alone with Mitch by Leda and her date Jake, Bud does not waste time in preliminaries.
“His mouth came on hers and she could feel the roughness of his beard. At first she tried to push him back and she struggled desperately. Then she let him kiss her. ‘Ever been kissed – hard?’ Mitch makes it very clear that she does not want him to go any further, but Bud does not listen.
Fighting desperately with him, she could not stop his hands from pulling her skirt up. A thin wail escaped from her mouth and she began to heighten it into a loud moaning sound.”
Mitch has no Mamma and a very liberal father but has never had sex before, either with a boy or with a girl. The next time he tries it with her she resists but he grabs her arms. “Damn you and your damn innocence!” He shouts drunkenly. Mitch fights back; “grabbing the china vase on the table, she brought it down on his head, and left him staggering back against the wall.”
This public humiliation of a senior fraternity member has to be put right: the fraternity threaten the sorority that unless Mitch invites Bud to their next party and makes it up with him, the sorority will be ostracized. Reluctantly, Mitch agrees, if only because Leda is so unsympathetic: her mother had her when she was very young and did not let the young Leda stand in the way of her seeing men; it is implied that some of her mother’s boyfriends were more interested in the daughter than the mother.
In Greek mythology, Leda is raped by Zeus in the form of a swan; Meaker may have had in mind Yeats’ poem about that rape, which emphasizes its brutality and the power men hold so casually over women.
A sudden blow: the great wings beating still
Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed
By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,
He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.
But, at the end of the poem, Yeats implies that a woman may gain in knowledge from this brutality.
Did she put on his knowledge with his power
Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?
Leda certainly has gained in knowledge from her experiences, as well as in cynicism and bitterness. When Mitch tells Leda that everything seems “so dirty and nasty,” Leda is incensed. “I bet you still think babies grow under cabbage leaves. Well, they don’t. I’ve got news, Mitch, they don’t grow under any goddam cabbage leaves. I had to learn it! I had to learn it the hard way!”
Getting her into the basement at the party, Bud appears to drug Mitch. She comes close to passing out and Bud starts to undress her: “Very softly, almost too softly for her to hear her own words, she said, ‘No,’ but her eyes saw the circles and there was a new feeling in her body when he touched her and she could feel her clothes being pulled.”
She cannot move as he rapes her while she is “down in the mire of pitch black and the quicksand sucking her in and her whole head dizzy and the pain.” Afterwards, he tells her to get dressed, but she tells him to go to hell. He has no remorse. “Look, take a hot bath. You’re not hurt. Go up and take a hot bath and keep your mouth shut.”
. . . . . . . . . . .
Spring Fire on Amazon*
. . . . . . . . . . .
Mitch manages to get back to her room; when Leda comes in she realizes something has happened, and this time she is sympathetic and sleeps in Mitch’s bed with her. But when they both wake up at five o’clock in the morning, sympathy turns to something else.
Mitch has her first experience of heterosexual sex – bad, very bad – and lesbian sex – good, very good – on the same night. But things with Leda do not go unequivocally well. Leda tells Mitch that she is not a lesbian – “I’ve got bisexual tendencies, but by God, I’m no damn Lesbian” – and could not could not love Mitch if she were.
Meanwhile, Leda continues to see Jake, of whom Mitch becomes very jealous. “I may be a little uncertain about it, but men come first with me. What do you think we are – engaged to be married?” Mitch protests. “You said you loved me. Maybe I don’t understand –“ Leda tells Mitch that she had “better get to know men too,” to hide her true sexuality.
Mitch does in fact get to know a man: Charlie, a nice, kind and nerdy young man, the opposite of Bud. He is too shy to initiate sex with her, so she starts things off; although ‘it still was not the way it was with Leda,’ and she feels ‘empty and aimless,’ she goes ahead anyway. ‘He was sweet and shy and he loved her. If it was not now, then when?’
But Charlie cannot do it, even though he has come prepared. “Listen, Susan, I’ve never touched a girl. Honestly, never once in my life. I – I have something in my wallet.” But in the end, he feels Mitch’s coldness.
In the circumstances, Charlie can’t do it; she offers to put on her sweater and let him take his time but he still cannot do it and she drives him back to town in the Buick, the normal roles of driver and passenger reversed, with him crouching, embarrassed in the back seat. That is the end of Charlie, and indeed any further attempts at relationships with men.
The inevitable tragic ending
We already know that we are going to be in for an unhappy ending; the publisher demanded it. The setup for the fall is a letter that Mitch writes to Leda, a Dear Jane letter telling Leda that she loves her, but is calling it off. Reading the letter, Leda decides she cannot be without Mitch and they make love; unfortunately two of their sorority cohorts open the door and see them.
Leda attempts to blame Mitch for forcing her into it, showing the sorority mother the letter. Things then appropriately take on the mythic dimensions of a Greek tragedy; in the Greek myth Leda is associated with the goddess Nemesis; in this story she nearly becomes Mitch’s nemesis. Leda is involved in a car accident and appears to have brain damage.
The truth about the letter then comes out and Leda is seen as the real villain, following which she has a complete mental breakdown; Mitch forgives her but does not attempt to go back to her. As if this is not unhappy enough to satisfy the publishers, the last sentence of the book is: “she didn’t hate her at all, and she knew then that she had never really loved her.”
More about Spring Fire by Vin Packer
Wikipedia Lost Classics of Teen Lit A review of Spring Fire. . . . . . . . . . .
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.
. . . . . . . . . .
*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 Spring Fire by Vin Packer (Marijane Meaker), a Lesbian Pulp Classic appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.
March 20, 2021
10 Poems by Kamala Das, Confessional Poet of India
Kamala Das (1934 – 2009), the renowned Indian writer, wrote poetry and prose both in her mother tongue, Malayalam, and in English. Here, we’ll explore a sampling of poems by Kamala Das, who became known as a confessional poet.
Born Kamala Surayya, she was also known by her pen name, Madhavikutty, though her widest recognition was achieved as Kamala Das, her married name. She was known in her home state of Kerala for her short stories and autobiography, and in the rest of India, for her English poetry.
Her controversial autobiography, My Story, originally written in Malayalam, gained her much fame and notoriety. Later, it was translated into English. PoemHunter.org observes of her work: “Her open and honest treatment of female sexuality, free from any sense of guilt, infused her writing with power, but also marked her as an iconoclast in her generation.”
Professor Santanu Saha of Saltora Netaji Centenary College, West Bengal, summarizes the poetic work of Kamala Das as follows:
“Kamala Das has neither written innumerable numbers of poems nor are these poems varied in themes … She has not applied any complex poetic technique and the mode of expression is very colloquial in manner. Her English is the ultimate form of ‘Indianization of English Language.’
And consciously she is never worried for experimentation in the poems. In spite of these limitations she is very much popular in the Indian subcontinent as well as in abroad. And this is due to her ‘honest’ declaration of self which establishes her as a ‘confessional’ poet. Among her contemporaries she is much debated, disputed and criticized poet. But undoubtedly Kamala Das is accepted as a universal poet whose lived experiences are beautifully portrayed in her poems.”
. . . . . . . . .
More about Kamala Das
. . . . . . . . . .
The poems here are from her first published collection of poems, Summer in Calcutta (1965) and others collections published later. A link to an analysis follows each poem.
Poems included here are:
. . . . . . . . . .
Summer In CalcuttaWhat is this drink but
The April sun, squeezed
Like an orange in
My glass? I sip the
Fire, I drink and drink
Again, I am drunk
Yes, but on the gold
of suns, What noble
venom now flows through
my veins and fills my
mind with unhurried
laughter? My worries
doze. Wee bubbles ring
my glass, like a bride’s
nervous smile, and meet
my lips. Dear, forgive
this moment’s lull in
wanting you, the blur
in memory. How
brief the term of my
devotion, how brief
your reign when i with
glass in hand, drink, drink,
and drink again this
Juice of April suns.
Analysis of Summer in Calcutta
. . . . . . . . . .
An IntroductionI don’t know politics but I know the names
Of those in power, and can repeat them like
Days of week, or names of months, beginning with Nehru.
I am Indian, very brown, born in Malabar,
I speak three languages, write in
Two, dream in one.
Don’t write in English, they said, English is
Not your mother-tongue. Why not leave
Me alone, critics, friends, visiting cousins,
Every one of you? Why not let me speak in
Any language I like? The language I speak,
Becomes mine, its distortions, its queernesses
All mine, mine alone.
It is half English, halfIndian, funny perhaps, but it is honest,
It is as human as I am human, don’t
You see? It voices my joys, my longings, my
Hopes, and it is useful to me as cawing
Is to crows or roaring to the lions, it
Is human speech, the speech of the mind that is
Here and not there, a mind that sees and hears and
Is aware. Not the deaf, blind speech
Of trees in storm or of monsoon clouds or of rain or the
Incoherent mutterings of the blazing
Funeral pyre. I was child, and later they
Told me I grew, for I became tall, my limbs
Swelled and one or two places sprouted hair.
WhenI asked for love, not knowing what else to ask
For, he drew a youth of sixteen into the
Bedroom and closed the door, He did not beat me
But my sad woman-body felt so beaten.
The weight of my breasts and womb crushed me.
I shrank Pitifully.
Then … I wore a shirt and my
Brother’s trousers, cut my hair short and ignored
My womanliness. Dress in sarees, be girl
Be wife, they said. Be embroiderer, be cook,
Be a quarreller with servants. Fit in. Oh,
Belong, cried the categorizers. Don’t sit
On walls or peep in through our lace-draped windows.
Be Amy, or be Kamala. Or, better
Still, be Madhavikutty. It is time to
Choose a name, a role. Don’t play pretending games.
Don’t play at schizophrenia or be a
Nympho. Don’t cry embarrassingly loud when
Jilted in love … I met a man, loved him. Call
Him not by any name, he is every man
Who wants. a woman, just as I am every
Woman who seeks love. In him . . . the hungry haste
Of rivers, in me . . . the oceans’ tireless
Waiting. Who are you, I ask each and everyone,
The answer is, it is I. Anywhere and,
Everywhere, I see the one who calls himself I
In this world, he is tightly packed like the
Sword in its sheath. It is I who drink lonely
Drinks at twelve, midnight, in hotels of strange towns,
It is I who laugh, it is I who make love
And then, feel shame, it is I who lie dying
With a rattle in my throat. I am sinner,
I am saint. I am the beloved and the
Betrayed. I have no joys that are not yours, no
Aches which are not yours. I too call myself I.
. . . . . . . . . .
A Hot Noon in MalabarThis is a noon for beggars with whining
Voices, a noon for men who come from hills
With parrots in a cage and fortune-cards,
All stained with time, for brown Kurava girls
With old eyes, who read palm in light singsong
Voices, for bangle-sellers who spread
On the cool black floor those red and green and blue
Bangles, all covered with the dust of roads,
Miles, grow cracks on the heels, so that when they
Clambered up our porch, the noise was grating,
Strange … This is a noon for strangers who part
The window-drapes and peer in, their hot eyes
Brimming with the sun, not seeing a thing in
Shadowy rooms and turn away and look
So yearningly at the brick-ledged well. This
Is a noon for strangers with mistrust in
Their eyes, dark, silent ones who rarely speak
At all, so that when they speak, their voices
Run wild, like jungle-voices. Yes, this is
A noon for wild men, wild thoughts, wild love. To
Be here, far away, is torture. Wild feet
Stirring up the dust, this hot noon, at my
Home in Malabar, and I so far away …
Analysis of A Hot Noon in Malabar
. . . . . . . . . .
My Grandmother’s HouseThere is a house now far away where once
I received love … That woman died,
The house withdrew into silence, snakes moved
Among books, I was then too young
To read, and my blood turned cold like the moon
How often I think of going
There, to peer through blind eyes of windows or
Just listen to the frozen air,
Or in wild despair, pick an armful of
Darkness to bring it here to lie
Behind my bedroom door like a brooding
Dog…you cannot believe, darling,
Can you, that I lived in such a house and
Was proud, and loved…. I who have lost
My way and beg now at strangers’ doors to
Receive love, at least in small change?
Analysis of My Grandmother’s House
. . . . . . . . .
My Mother at Sixty-SixDriving from my parent’s
home to Cochin last Friday
morning, I saw my mother,
beside me,
doze, open mouthed, her face
ashen like that
of a corpse and realised with pain
that she was as old as she
looked but soon
put that thought away, and
looked out at Young
Trees sprinting, the merry children spilling
out of their homes, but after the airport’s
security check, standing a few yards
away, I looked again at her, wan, pale
as a late winter’s moon and felt that old
familiar ache, my childhood’s fear,
but all I said was, see you soon, Amma,
all I did was smile and smile and
smile …
Analysis of My Mother at Sixty-Six
. . . . . . . . . .
Forest FireOf late I have begun to feel a hunger
To take in with greed, like a forest fire that
Consumes and with each killing gains a wilder,
Brighter charm, all that comes my way. Bald child in
Open pram, you think I only look, and you
Too, slim lovers behind the tree and you, old
Man with paper in your hand and sunlight in
Your hair … My eyes lick at you like flames, my nerves
Consume; and, when I finish with you, in the
Pram, near the tree and, on the park bench, I spit
Out small heaps of ash, nothing else. But in me
The sights and smells and sounds shall thrive and go on
And on and on. In me shall sleep the baby
That sat in prams and sleep and wake and smile its
Toothless smile. In me shall walk the lovers hand
In hand and in me, where else, the old shall sit
And feel the touch of sun. In me, the street-lamps
Shall glimmer, the cabaret girls cavort, the
Wedding drums resound, the eunuchs swirl coloured
Skirts and sing sad songs of love, the wounded moan,
And in me the dying mother with hopeful
Eyes shall gaze around, seeking her child, now grown
And gone away to other towns, other arms.
. . . . . . . . . .
The FreaksHe talks, turning a sun-stained
Cheek to me, his mouth, a dark
Cavern, where stalactites of
Uneven teeth gleam, his right
Hand on my knee, while our minds
Are willed to race towards love;
But, they only wander, tripping
Idly over puddles of
Desire … Can this man with
Nimble finger-tips unleash
Nothing more alive than the
Skin’s lazy hungers? Who can
Help us who have lived so long
And have failed in love? The heart,
An empty cistern, waiting
Through long hours, fills itself
With coiling snakes of silence …
I am a freak. It’s only
To save my face, I flaunt, at
Times, a grand, flamboyant lust.
. . . . . . . . . .
The Sunshine CatThey did this to her, the men who know her, the man
She loved, who loved her not enough, being selfish
And a coward, the husband who neither loved nor
Used her, but was a ruthless watcher, and the band
Of cynics she turned to, clinging to their chests where
New hair sprouted like great-winged moths, burrowing her
Face into their smells and their young lusts to forget
To forget, oh, to forget, and, they said, each of
Them, I do not love, I cannot love, it is not
In my nature to love, but I can be kind to you.
They let her slide from pegs of sanity into
A bed made soft with tears, and she lay there weeping,
For sleep had lost its use. I shall build walls with tears,
She said, walls to shut me in. Her husband shut her
In, every morning, locked her in a room of books
With a streak of sunshine lying near the door like
A yellow cat to keep her company, but soon
Winter came, and one day while locking her in, he
Noticed that the cat of sunshine was only a
Line, a half-thin line, and in the evening when
He returned to take her out, she was a cold and
Half dead woman, now of no use at all to men.
. . . . . . . . .
A Losing BattleHow can my love hold him when the other
Flaunts a gaudy lust and is lioness
To his beast?
Men are worthless, to trap them
Use the cheapest bait of all, but never
Love, which in a woman must mean tears
And a silence in the blood.
Analysis of A Losing Battle (extremely detailed!)
. . . . . . . . .
WordsAll round me are words, and words and words,
They grow on me like leaves, they never
Seem to stop their slow growing
From within… But I tell my self, words
Are a nuisance, beware of them, they
Can be so many things, a
Chasm where running feet must pause, to
Look, a sea with paralyzing waves,
A blast of burning air or,
A knife most willing to cut your best
Friend’s throat… Words are a nuisance, but.
They grow on me like leaves ona tree,
They never seem to stop their coming,
From a silence, somewhere deep within …
. . . . . . . . . .
Kamala Das: Collected Poems on Amazon*
. . . . . . . . . .
Poetry Collections by Kamala Das in English Translation
The Sirens (1964)Summer in Calcutta (1965)The Descendants (1967)The Old Playhouse and Other Poems (1973)The Stranger Time (1977)Collected Poems (1984)The Anamalai Poems (1985)Only the Soul Knows How to Sing (1997)My Mother at Sixty-Six (1999)Yaa Allah (2001). . . . . . . . .
*This is an Amazon Affiliate link. 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!
The post 10 Poems by Kamala Das, Confessional Poet of India appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.
10 Poems by Kamala Das, Confessional Poet from India
Kamala Das (1934 – 2009), the renowned Indian writer, wrote poetry and prose both in her mother tongue, Malayalam, and in English. Here, we’ll explore a sampling of poems by Kamala Das, who became known as a confessional poet.
Born Kamala Surayya, she was also known by her pen name, Madhavikutty, though her widest recognition was achieved as Kamala Das, her married name. She was known in her home state of Kerala for her short stories and autobiography, and in the rest of India, for her English poetry.
Her controversial autobiography, My Story, originally written in Malayalam, gained her much fame and notoriety. Later, it was translated into English. PoemHunter.org observes of her work: “Her open and honest treatment of female sexuality, free from any sense of guilt, infused her writing with power, but also marked her as an iconoclast in her generation.”
Professor Santanu Saha of Saltora Netaji Centenary College, West Bengal, summarizes the poetic work of Kamala Das as follows:
“Kamala Das has neither written innumerable numbers of poems nor are these poems varied in themes … She has not applied any complex poetic technique and the mode of expression is very colloquial in manner. Her English is the ultimate form of ‘Indianization of English Language.’
And consciously she is never worried for experimentation in the poems. In spite of these limitations she is very much popular in the Indian subcontinent as well as in abroad. And this is due to her ‘honest’ declaration of self which establishes her as a ‘confessional’ poet. Among her contemporaries she is much debated, disputed and criticized poet. But undoubtedly Kamala Das is accepted as a universal poet whose lived experiences are beautifully portrayed in her poems.”
. . . . . . . . .
More about Kamala Das
. . . . . . . . . .
The poems here are from her first published collection of poems, Summer in Calcutta (1965) and others collections published later. A link to an analysis follows each poem.
Poems included here are:
. . . . . . . . . .
Summer In CalcuttaWhat is this drink but
The April sun, squeezed
Like an orange in
My glass? I sip the
Fire, I drink and drink
Again, I am drunk
Yes, but on the gold
of suns, What noble
venom now flows through
my veins and fills my
mind with unhurried
laughter? My worries
doze. Wee bubbles ring
my glass, like a bride’s
nervous smile, and meet
my lips. Dear, forgive
this moment’s lull in
wanting you, the blur
in memory. How
brief the term of my
devotion, how brief
your reign when i with
glass in hand, drink, drink,
and drink again this
Juice of April suns.
Analysis of Summer in Calcutta
. . . . . . . . . .
An IntroductionI don’t know politics but I know the names
Of those in power, and can repeat them like
Days of week, or names of months, beginning with Nehru.
I am Indian, very brown, born in Malabar,
I speak three languages, write in
Two, dream in one.
Don’t write in English, they said, English is
Not your mother-tongue. Why not leave
Me alone, critics, friends, visiting cousins,
Every one of you? Why not let me speak in
Any language I like? The language I speak,
Becomes mine, its distortions, its queernesses
All mine, mine alone.
It is half English, halfIndian, funny perhaps, but it is honest,
It is as human as I am human, don’t
You see? It voices my joys, my longings, my
Hopes, and it is useful to me as cawing
Is to crows or roaring to the lions, it
Is human speech, the speech of the mind that is
Here and not there, a mind that sees and hears and
Is aware. Not the deaf, blind speech
Of trees in storm or of monsoon clouds or of rain or the
Incoherent mutterings of the blazing
Funeral pyre. I was child, and later they
Told me I grew, for I became tall, my limbs
Swelled and one or two places sprouted hair.
WhenI asked for love, not knowing what else to ask
For, he drew a youth of sixteen into the
Bedroom and closed the door, He did not beat me
But my sad woman-body felt so beaten.
The weight of my breasts and womb crushed me.
I shrank Pitifully.
Then … I wore a shirt and my
Brother’s trousers, cut my hair short and ignored
My womanliness. Dress in sarees, be girl
Be wife, they said. Be embroiderer, be cook,
Be a quarreller with servants. Fit in. Oh,
Belong, cried the categorizers. Don’t sit
On walls or peep in through our lace-draped windows.
Be Amy, or be Kamala. Or, better
Still, be Madhavikutty. It is time to
Choose a name, a role. Don’t play pretending games.
Don’t play at schizophrenia or be a
Nympho. Don’t cry embarrassingly loud when
Jilted in love … I met a man, loved him. Call
Him not by any name, he is every man
Who wants. a woman, just as I am every
Woman who seeks love. In him . . . the hungry haste
Of rivers, in me . . . the oceans’ tireless
Waiting. Who are you, I ask each and everyone,
The answer is, it is I. Anywhere and,
Everywhere, I see the one who calls himself I
In this world, he is tightly packed like the
Sword in its sheath. It is I who drink lonely
Drinks at twelve, midnight, in hotels of strange towns,
It is I who laugh, it is I who make love
And then, feel shame, it is I who lie dying
With a rattle in my throat. I am sinner,
I am saint. I am the beloved and the
Betrayed. I have no joys that are not yours, no
Aches which are not yours. I too call myself I.
. . . . . . . . . .
A Hot Noon in MalabarThis is a noon for beggars with whining
Voices, a noon for men who come from hills
With parrots in a cage and fortune-cards,
All stained with time, for brown Kurava girls
With old eyes, who read palm in light singsong
Voices, for bangle-sellers who spread
On the cool black floor those red and green and blue
Bangles, all covered with the dust of roads,
Miles, grow cracks on the heels, so that when they
Clambered up our porch, the noise was grating,
Strange … This is a noon for strangers who part
The window-drapes and peer in, their hot eyes
Brimming with the sun, not seeing a thing in
Shadowy rooms and turn away and look
So yearningly at the brick-ledged well. This
Is a noon for strangers with mistrust in
Their eyes, dark, silent ones who rarely speak
At all, so that when they speak, their voices
Run wild, like jungle-voices. Yes, this is
A noon for wild men, wild thoughts, wild love. To
Be here, far away, is torture. Wild feet
Stirring up the dust, this hot noon, at my
Home in Malabar, and I so far away …
Analysis of A Hot Noon in Malabar
. . . . . . . . . .
My Grandmother’s HouseThere is a house now far away where once
I received love … That woman died,
The house withdrew into silence, snakes moved
Among books, I was then too young
To read, and my blood turned cold like the moon
How often I think of going
There, to peer through blind eyes of windows or
Just listen to the frozen air,
Or in wild despair, pick an armful of
Darkness to bring it here to lie
Behind my bedroom door like a brooding
Dog…you cannot believe, darling,
Can you, that I lived in such a house and
Was proud, and loved…. I who have lost
My way and beg now at strangers’ doors to
Receive love, at least in small change?
Analysis of My Grandmother’s House
. . . . . . . . .
My Mother at Sixty-SixDriving from my parent’s
home to Cochin last Friday
morning, I saw my mother,
beside me,
doze, open mouthed, her face
ashen like that
of a corpse and realised with pain
that she was as old as she
looked but soon
put that thought away, and
looked out at Young
Trees sprinting, the merry children spilling
out of their homes, but after the airport’s
security check, standing a few yards
away, I looked again at her, wan, pale
as a late winter’s moon and felt that old
familiar ache, my childhood’s fear,
but all I said was, see you soon, Amma,
all I did was smile and smile and
smile …
Analysis of My Mother at Sixty-Six
. . . . . . . . . .
Forest FireOf late I have begun to feel a hunger
To take in with greed, like a forest fire that
Consumes and with each killing gains a wilder,
Brighter charm, all that comes my way. Bald child in
Open pram, you think I only look, and you
Too, slim lovers behind the tree and you, old
Man with paper in your hand and sunlight in
Your hair … My eyes lick at you like flames, my nerves
Consume; and, when I finish with you, in the
Pram, near the tree and, on the park bench, I spit
Out small heaps of ash, nothing else. But in me
The sights and smells and sounds shall thrive and go on
And on and on. In me shall sleep the baby
That sat in prams and sleep and wake and smile its
Toothless smile. In me shall walk the lovers hand
In hand and in me, where else, the old shall sit
And feel the touch of sun. In me, the street-lamps
Shall glimmer, the cabaret girls cavort, the
Wedding drums resound, the eunuchs swirl coloured
Skirts and sing sad songs of love, the wounded moan,
And in me the dying mother with hopeful
Eyes shall gaze around, seeking her child, now grown
And gone away to other towns, other arms.
. . . . . . . . . .
The FreaksHe talks, turning a sun-stained
Cheek to me, his mouth, a dark
Cavern, where stalactites of
Uneven teeth gleam, his right
Hand on my knee, while our minds
Are willed to race towards love;
But, they only wander, tripping
Idly over puddles of
Desire … Can this man with
Nimble finger-tips unleash
Nothing more alive than the
Skin’s lazy hungers? Who can
Help us who have lived so long
And have failed in love? The heart,
An empty cistern, waiting
Through long hours, fills itself
With coiling snakes of silence …
I am a freak. It’s only
To save my face, I flaunt, at
Times, a grand, flamboyant lust.
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The Sunshine CatThey did this to her, the men who know her, the man
She loved, who loved her not enough, being selfish
And a coward, the husband who neither loved nor
Used her, but was a ruthless watcher, and the band
Of cynics she turned to, clinging to their chests where
New hair sprouted like great-winged moths, burrowing her
Face into their smells and their young lusts to forget
To forget, oh, to forget, and, they said, each of
Them, I do not love, I cannot love, it is not
In my nature to love, but I can be kind to you.
They let her slide from pegs of sanity into
A bed made soft with tears, and she lay there weeping,
For sleep had lost its use. I shall build walls with tears,
She said, walls to shut me in. Her husband shut her
In, every morning, locked her in a room of books
With a streak of sunshine lying near the door like
A yellow cat to keep her company, but soon
Winter came, and one day while locking her in, he
Noticed that the cat of sunshine was only a
Line, a half-thin line, and in the evening when
He returned to take her out, she was a cold and
Half dead woman, now of no use at all to men.
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A Losing BattleHow can my love hold him when the other
Flaunts a gaudy lust and is lioness
To his beast?
Men are worthless, to trap them
Use the cheapest bait of all, but never
Love, which in a woman must mean tears
And a silence in the blood.
Analysis of A Losing Battle (extremely detailed!)
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WordsAll round me are words, and words and words,
They grow on me like leaves, they never
Seem to stop their slow growing
From within… But I tell my self, words
Are a nuisance, beware of them, they
Can be so many things, a
Chasm where running feet must pause, to
Look, a sea with paralyzing waves,
A blast of burning air or,
A knife most willing to cut your best
Friend’s throat… Words are a nuisance, but.
They grow on me like leaves ona tree,
They never seem to stop their coming,
From a silence, somewhere deep within …
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Kamala Das: Collected Poems on Amazon*
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Poetry Collections by Kamala Das in English Translation
The Sirens (1964)Summer in Calcutta (1965)The Descendants (1967)The Old Playhouse and Other Poems (1973)The Stranger Time (1977)Collected Poems (1984)The Anamalai Poems (1985)Only the Soul Knows How to Sing (1997)My Mother at Sixty-Six (1999)Yaa Allah (2001). . . . . . . . .
*This is an Amazon Affiliate link. 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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March 18, 2021
Elizabeth Cary, Early English Poet, Dramatist, and Scholar
Elizabeth Cary, also known as Viscountess Falkland (1585–1639), was an English poet, dramatist, and scholar. Thought to be the first woman to have written and published a play in English (The Tragedy of Mariam, detailed below), she was acknowledged as an accomplished scholar in her lifetime. This introduction to Elizabeth Cary’s life and work is excerpted from Killing the Angel: Early Transgressive British Woman Writers by Francis Booth ©2021, reprinted by permission.
According to the biography of Elizabeth Cary (née Tanfield, Viscountess Falkland, written by one of her daughters after her death, was quite highly educated, though largely self-taught. Although she had some distinguished tutors she taught herself mainly from books.
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Elizabeth Cary, Viscountess Falkland
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Elizabeth did get a tutor in French at the age of five and according to her biographer-daughter she was speaking it fluently just a few weeks later; she then taught herself Spanish, Italian, Latin, and Hebrew.
Elizabeth nevertheless seems to have been an obedient rather than a transgressive daughter and having been married off young, to have been an obedient wife, initially at least; she had eleven children by her husband. She was only fifteen at the time of the marriage and it seems that Henry, Viscount Falkland only married her because she was an heiress.
She had read very exceeding much; poetry of all kinds, ancient and modern, in several languages, all that ever she could meet; history very universally, especially all ancient Greek and Roman historians; all chroniclers whatsoever in her own country, and the French histories very thoroughly; of most other countries something, though not so universally; of the ecclesiastical history very much, most especially concerning its chief pastors.
Of books treating of moral virtue or wisdom (such as Seneca, Plutarch’s Morals, and natural knowledge, as Pliny, and of late ones such as French, Montaigne, and English, Bacon), she had read very many when she was young, not without making her profit of them all. (The Lady Falkland: Her Life)
In her husband’s many absences – Henry was at various times Gentleman of the Bedchamber, Member of Parliament for Hertfordshire, a Justice of the Peace, Master of the Jewels, Comptroller of the Household, and a Privy Councillor – Elizabeth was forced to live with her mother-in-law, who took away all her books.
Since she was not allowed to read books anymore, she decided to transgress her mother-in-law’s, her husband’s, and society’s will and write her own books instead; according to Her Life, Cary was one of the most prolific female authors of her time. She wrote two plays, a life of Tamburlaine and biographies in verse of Saint Mary Magdalene, Saint Agnes and Saint Elizabeth of Portugal.
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Killing the Angel on Amazon US*
Killing the Angel on Amazon UK*
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Cary’s most famous work is The Tragedy of Mariam, printed in 1613 but written earlier, which may be the first original English play to have been published by a woman. It is what became known as a ‘closet drama,’ implying that it was not intended to be performed on a stage, but perhaps to be read out loud by friends; such things regularly happened in Mary Sidney’s Wilton House circle.
Mariam is written in formal, rhyming iambic pentameter, a relatively new form at the time, and a specifically English form, different from the classical and French metres. Marlowe had first perfected iambic pentameter, followed by Shakespeare, but they mostly used unrhymed lines, known as blank verse; Shakespeare’s Sonnets though, published together in 1609, do use rhyming iambic pentameter.
Mariam is the wife of King Herod from the Bible and the central character; it is very unusual for a play of the time to have a female as the sole title character – very unusual for a play of any time. Even more unusually, there are two strong female leads: Mariam and her sister-in-law, Salome – in this case, Herod’s sister not his stepdaughter as in Oscar Wilde’s play.
As in Wilde’s version, Salome is the bad girl, though not in a lustful, sexual sense; John the Baptist’s head does not appear. Salome here is more like Iago in Othello, 1604, telling lies to a jealous, dark-skinned husband about his pale-skinned wife, seeding suspicion, leading to him having her killed. In contrast, Mariam is the good girl, though she is rather too proud of her own famous beauty and she has earlier taken Herod away from his previous wife, Doris, in adulterous transgression of what was then accepted as the laws of God.
DORIS
I’heaven? Your beauty cannot bring you thither.
Your soul is black and spotted, full of sin;
You in adultery lived nine years together,
And heaven will never let adultery in.
Although she does not do the dance of the seven veils, Salome is in her own way quite transgressive, plotting against her sister-in-law and insisting on a woman’s equality; the following passage sounds like a cry from the author’s own heart.
Why should such privilege to man be given?
Or, given to them, why barred from women then?
Are men than we in greater grace with heaven?
Or cannot women hate as well as men?
I’ll be the custom-breaker and begin
To show my sex the way to freedom’s door
Again, very unusually for the time – or any time – Cary writes powerful scenes involving two strong, opposed women, with no men involved. Salome resents Mariam for having married her brother; Mariam looks down on Salome for her low birth and resents her interference in her marriage.
At one point in the play, both women believe that Herod has died abroad; Salome thinks Mariam is pleased to be rid of her husband and ‘hopes to have another King; her eyes do sparkle joy for Herod’s death.’
SALOME
You durst not thus have given your tongue the rein
If noble Herod still remained in life.
Your daughter’s betters far, I dare maintain,
Might have rejoiced to be my brother’s wife.
MARIAM
My ‘betters far’? Base woman, ‘tis untrue!
You scarce have ever my superiors seen,
For Mariam’s servants were as good as you
Before she came to be Judea’s queen.
SALOME
Now stirs the tongue that is so quickly moved;
But more than once your choler have I borne,
Your fumish words are sooner said than proved,
And Salome’s reply is only scorn.
MARIAM
Scorn those that are for thy companions held!
Though I thy brother’s face have never seen,
My birth thy baser birth so far excelled,
I had to both of you the princess been.
Thou parti-Jew and parti-Edomite,
Thou mongrel, issued from rejected race!
Typical antisemitism and racism
The casual anti-Semitism here is probably no worse than in Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta, 1590 or Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, first performed in 1605. There were very few Jews living in England at the time, probably all in London and mostly of Mediterranean descent, a small diaspora escaping Catholic France and Spain (the Spanish Inquisition had begun in the 1480s; in 1483, Jews were expelled from all of Andalusia and royal decrees were issued in 1492 and 1502 ordering Muslims and Jews to convert to Catholicism or leave Castile).
In England, Jews were not welcome either, but English Protestants mostly saw Jews as lost souls waiting to be converted rather than burned in autos da fé (not that the English were averse to burning heretics, as we saw with Anne Askew). John Foxe, famous as the author of The Book of Martyrs, 1563 also published A Sermon Preached at the Christening of a Certain Jew at London, 1578.
The introduction says that it contains ‘a refutation of the obstinate Jews, and lastly touching the final conversion of the same.’ Some people in England went even further in their anti-Semitism though: a 1569 book called Certaine secrete wonders of Nature had accused Jews of poisoning Christian wells and in 1594, Queen Elizabeth’s Portuguese Jewish doctor was accused of plotting to poison her in collaboration with the Spanish.
As for the racism that equates Salome’s slipperiness with her dark skin, echoed by her own husband’s comparison of her to Mariam: ‘you are to her as a sunburnt blackamoor,’ Cary was reflecting the racism and xenophobia of her time.
A draft of a Royal Proclamation of 1601 under Elizabeth I commands expulsion of all ‘negroes and blackamoors,’ many of them Muslims who, like the Jews, were escaping persecution in the Catholic countries of Europe; Elizabeth’s government blamed immigrants for their economic problems, as governments will, and a German merchant had been hired to track them down and deport them.
WHEREAS the Queen’s majesty, tendering the good and welfare of her own natural subjects, greatly distressed in these hard times of dearth, is highly discontented to understand the great number of Negroes and blackamoors which (as she is informed) are carried into this realm since the troubles between her highness and the King of Spain . . . These shall therefore be to will and require you and every one of you to . . . taking such Negroes and blackamoors to be transported as aforesaid as he shall find within the realm of England.
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You may also enjoy:
5 Early English Women Writers to Discover
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In 1625, Elizabeth Cary herself converted to Catholicism, a deeply transgressive act, against both her husband’s will and the laws of the land; Catholics were still treated with extreme suspicion twenty years after the Gunpowder Plot of 1605.
The Act for Restraining Popish Recusants (Catholics who refused to attend Church of England services) to Some Certain Place of Abode had been passed in 1593; then in 1606 a law had been passed requiring all persons to ‘receive the sacrament in the church of the parish where his abroad is, or if there be no such Parish Church then in the church of the next Parish.’
Elizabeth’s husband took away everything from her, including her children, just leaving her with one servant and tried to divorce her; since she had been disinherited by her father, Elizabeth had to apply to the Privy Council to try to force her husband to maintain her financially, but he refused, hoping to make her recant. She won in the end, though: after his death, she converted most of her children to Catholicism; four of the girls became nuns, and one of her sons became a priest.
Along with Mary Sidney, Elizabeth Cary was praised at length by John Davies – he and Michael Drayton were probably her tutors as a girl – in the dedication to his The Muses Sacrifice, 1612 (before Mariam was printed, implying he had read it in manuscript).
CARY (of whom Minerva stands in fear,
lest she, from her, should get ART’S Regency)
Of ART so moues the great-all-moving Sphere,
that every Ore of Science moves thereby.
Thou makest Melpomen proud, and my Heart great
of such a Pupil, who, in Buskin fine,
With Feet of State, dost make thy Muse to mete
the Scenes of Syracuse and Palestine.
Art, Language; yea; abstruse and holy Tongues,
thy Wit and Grace acquired thy Fame to raise;
And still to fill thine own, and others Songs;
thine, with thy Parts, and others, with thy praise
Such nervy Limbs of Art, and Strains of Wit
Times past ne’er knew the weaker Sex to have;
And Times to come, will hardly credit it,
if thus thou give thy Works both Birth and Grave.
More about Elizabeth Cary
More biographical information on Wikipedia More about The Tragedy of Mariam The Tragedy of Mariam (full text) Catalog of English Literary Manuscripts. . . . . . . . . . .
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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You may also enjoy:
The Matchless Orinda: Early English Poet & Playwright Katherine Philips
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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 Elizabeth Cary, Early English Poet, Dramatist, and Scholar appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.
March 17, 2021
The Matchless Orinda — Early English Poet & Playwright Katherine Philips
Known as the “Matchless Orinda,” Katherine Philips (1631/2 – 1664; née Fowler) was the author of the first English-language play written by a woman to be performed on the professional stage and she may also have been the first published lesbian poet in the English language; this seems to be a love poem from her to fellow poet Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea, whose pseudonym was Ardelia.
This introduction to Katherine Philips’ life and work is adapted from Killing the Angel: Early Transgressive British Woman Writers by Francis Booth ©2021, reprinted by permission.
Come, my Ardelia, to this bower,
Where kindly mingling Souls awhile,
Let’s innocently spend an hour
and at all serious follies smile. . .
Why should we entertain a fear?
Love cares not how the world is turned:
If crowds of dangers should appear,
Yet friendship can be unconcerned.
We wear about us such a charm,
No horror can be our offence;
For mischief’s self can do no harm
To friendship and to innocence.
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Killing the Angel on Amazon US*
Killing the Angel on Amazon UK*
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Born to a cloth merchant in the City of London, England, Katherine Philips was a precocious learner; it was said that she could read the Bible by the age of four. From the age of around eight to sixteen she was sent to a boarding school in Hackney in East London, a centre for women’s education at the time, where she learned several languages.
At sixteen Katherine was married to an older, Welsh parliamentarian; he died only eight years later but the couple had two children, only one of whom survived.
Philips’ home in Cardiff became the centre of the Society of Friendship, which Philips founded in 1651 based on the ideals of platonic friendship from French pastoral romance; the members all gave themselves suitably pastoral names.
The Society was a literary association made up mostly of women, though there were also male members, including the poet Henry Vaughan: Philips’ first published work was a preface to his poems in 1651. It is not certain exactly who the members were, since they all used their pastoral pseudonyms; using these names of course meant that the women were not publishing under either their husband’s or their father’s name and could choose to stay anonymous.
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Poems by Mrs Katherine Philips, the Matchless Orinda
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We do, however, know of the membership of Mary Awbrey (Rosania), Elizabeth Boyle (Celimena) and of Anne Owen, called Lucasia, to whom many of Philips’ poems are dedicated. This next poem is called, “To the Excellent Mrs. Anne Owen, upon her receiving the name Of Lucasia, and Adoption into our Society, December 28, 1651.”
WE are complete, and Fate hath now
No greater blessing to bestow;
Nay, the dull World must now confess,
We have all worth, all happiness.
Annals of State are trifles to our fame,
Now ‘tis made sacred by Lucasia’s name.
Although the society was founded on platonic ideals, Philips’ feelings for Lucasia seem to go beyond the platonic in many of the poems, including ‘To My Excellent Lucasia, on Our Friendship.’
I did not live until this time
Crowned in my felicity,
When I could say without a crime,
I am not thine, but thee. . .
For thou art all that I can prize,
My joy, my life, my rest.
No bridegroom’s nor crown-conqueror’s mirth
To mine compared can be:
They have but pieces of the earth,
I’ve all the world in thee.
Although she was only possibly the first published lesbian poet in English, Philips was certainly the author of the first English-language play written by a woman to be performed professionally, even though it was only a translation; earlier ‘closet dramas’ like Elizabeth Cary’s Mariam were not written for public performance.
While living in Dublin, the francophone Philips translated Pierre Corneille’s play Pompée, which was staged successfully in 1663 in Dublin’s Smock Alley Theatre, founded the previous year; the play was printed in both Dublin and London under the title Pompey. Although other women had translated or written dramas before, Philips’ translation of Pompée broke new ground as the first rhymed version of a French tragedy to be published in English.
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In 1664, an edition of Philips’ poetry entitled Poems by the Incomparable Mrs. K.P. was published but it was not authorized by her and was full of errors; Philips died of smallpox that year and the City of London church in which she was buried was destroyed two years later in the Great Fire of London.
It was not until 1667 that an authorized edition of her poems was published posthumously, entitled Poems by the Most Deservedly Admired Mrs. Katherine Philips, the Matchless Orinda. This included both Pompey and a nearly completed translation of Corneille’s Horace: Philips died before she had chance to finish it. In his preface, Philips’ friend Sir Charles Cotterell is appreciative but patronizing, saying that some of her poems:
“… would be no disgrace to the name of any Man that amongst us is most esteemed for his excellency in this kind, and there are none that may not pass with favour, when it is remembered that they fell hastily from the pen but of a woman. We might well have called her the English Sappho, she of all the female Poets of former Ages, being for her Verses and her Virtues both, the most highly to be valued.”
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More about Katherine Philips
The Matchless Orinda on JSTOR Katherine Philips – British Library. . . . . . . . . . .
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 The Matchless Orinda — Early English Poet & Playwright Katherine Philips appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.
Diana: A Strange Autobiography by Diana Frederics (1939)
Frances V. Rummell, an American writer and educator, published Diana: A Strange Autobiography (1939) under the pseudonym Diana Frederics. More of an autobiographical novel than an actual memoir, nonetheless draws upon the author’s life. The story details the title heroine’s discovery of her lesbian sexuality.
Positive portrayal of lesbians was considered shocking when the book was published. It’s now considered groundbreaking as one of the first works of gay fiction to have a happy outcome.
Published squarely between The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall (1928) and the lesbian pulp novels that emerged in the early 1950s, Diana is a worthy, yet often overlooked addition to the genre. This analysis and appreciation is excerpted from Girls in Bloom by Francis Booth, reprinted by permission:
“This is the unusual and compelling story of Diana, a tantalizingly beautiful woman who sought love in the strange by-paths of Lesbos. Fearless and outspoken, it dares to reveal that hidden world where perfumed caresses and half-whispered endearments constitute the forbidden fruits in a Garden of Eden where men are never accepted.”
This was the blurb for the 1952 paperback edition – republished right at the beginning of the lesbian pulp fiction movement – of Diana: A Strange Autobiography by the pseudonymous Diana Frederics, who kept her identity secret until it was finally revealed on a PBS documentary in 2010.
Long after her death, it was revealed that the author was Frances V Rummell (1907-1969), a teacher of French at Stevens College, a women-only college in Columbia, Missouri (the second-oldest college in America to have remained all-female).
Diana was originally published by Dial Press in 1939 and republished in hardback by City Press of New York in 1948. Both editions contained an introduction by the sexologist Victor Robinson, explaining that lesbianism was:
“… Ancient in the days of Sappho of Lesbos. Yet such is our immunity to information, that when Havelock Ellis collected his various studies on Sexual Inversion (1897), he states that before his first cases were published, not a single British case, unconnected with the asylum or the prison, had ever been recorded.”
Robinson added: “I welcome any book which adds to the understanding of the lesbians in our midst. Among these books, I definitely place the present autobiography.” Unlike Dusty Answer and The Well of Loneliness, both the introduction and the main text use the word “lesbian,” quite astonishing for 1939; it would not be used in a published novel again for years.
Although it purports to be an autobiography and may well reflect the author’s own experiences, Diana is structured much like a novel. It is similar in many ways to Dusty Answer and to Vin Packer’s Spring Fire. Here also the heroine is unsure of her sexuality until she falls in love with a girl at college, but unlike Judith in Dusty Answer she does not subsequently try to revert to heterosexuality and end up alone and miserable.
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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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Diana has always been a tomboy: “I had always played with boys instead of girls, and growing older made no difference; I still did. Girls frankly bored me … I was scarcely conscious of being a girl. The boys accepted me as one of them as tacitly as I assumed that position.” No one, not even her parents, considers her to be a problem, she is just a regular tomboy to them.
“My mother and father had always taken my antics as they came, hopeful that time and age would season my tomboyish nature. Of course, they were indulgent with me; I was their only girl. I was a healthy young animal, full of energy and devilry, and tomboys were common enough. They mature into just as feminine young women as did the little girls who preferred dolls to BB guns.”
Like Carson McCullers’ tomboy Frankie Addams, Diana is very musical; her mother is not sure that her daughter should be attending music theory classes with boys but the music teacher convinces her to let Diana go; he says rightly that age and gender have nothing to do with musical ability, though by the time she is in her senior year her teacher is telling her that her very ‘clean touch’ on the keyboard is “masculine.”
A brief flirtation with a boy
In these classes, as well at home, Diana, like many tomboys, is surrounded by boys – including her brothers and young men from the college who rent rooms in her house – from the age of twelve to sixteen, when she goes to college. All these boys are of course protective of her and she is of course not the slightest bit seductive or provocative but one day, when she is “a hopelessly naïve child of thirteen,” it becomes obvious to her that she is not just one of the boys.
“One boy, a newcomer to our home, called me into his room one rainy Sunday afternoon to admire some snapshots. I hesitated a moment, since I never entered the guest rooms, but, reluctant to appear rude, I went. Ignorant as I was, his intentions were too abrupt to be misunderstood.
I recall only my fury; in spite of my years, it was enough to upset a blundering collegian. Like many people who manage to keep their heads in a tight predicament, I suffered repercussions. For weeks afterward I felt the full impact of sordidness. Despite the sudden exit of the collegian from our home, with no more explanation to my mother on my part than on his, this scene remained indelible.
It is almost incredible to me now to recall the extent of the effects of this assault on my innocence. I was made too abruptly aware that life amounted to something more than front yard games and school and camp.
My would-be seducer had said something to me which made me think more than I had ever honestly thought in my young life. I even got out my dictionary to find out what he’d meant by saying I was ‘seductive-looking.’ What a disturbing thought to one who until that very moment was completely unconscious of her body, despite a maturing physique.
I spent days brooding over the fact that I had been born a girl. I didn’t want to grow up. I didn’t want to be ‘seductive -looking.’ I hated the expression, I hated the vague meaning. Oh, the horror of becoming an adult!
Shocked into the realization that I was growing up in spite of myself, I turned suddenly into an antisocial, introspective, melancholy bookworm. Life took on the proportions of a pitiless hoax. In the diary I kept at this time is entered, in the handwriting of a fourteen-year-old, such a penetrating observation as this: ‘It is cruel of parents to read fairy tales to children. The transition from the delicate fantasy of the fairy tale to real life is painful. Life bumps into children as they grow up.’”
This coming-of-age moment turns her against boys, “for no reason except that they were growing up too. And some of them wrote notes to me in school that seemed silly and embarrassed me.” Diana retreats into her reading and music, though she does attend the school prom with the older boy Gil, whom she allows to kiss her, but that is far as it goes.
Enter Ruth
Gil is swept aside when Ruth enters the school; Diana is smitten with her. ‘She was too thin and her mouth was too large, but she had lovely titian hair, worn in braids around her head, solemn blue eyes, and such a sweet smile that I wondered if anyone could possibly be as angelic as she seemed.’ Ruth and Diana, among others, are invited to a Christmas house party. “I knew I would contrive in every way possible to share a room with her.” She manages it.
“That night when we went to bed alone, tired and happy with the day, Ruth’s thoughtless intimacy and good-night embrace almost took my breath away. I had been surprised to feel curious sensations of longing the few times I had ever touched her, but I could never have imagined the exquisite thrill of feeling her body close to mine. Now I was amazed.
Then, before I knew it, I realized I wanted to caress her. Then I became terrified by a nameless something that froze my impulse. The pain of resisting was torture, but the touch of her hand holding mine against her side was so infinitely sweet that I tensed for fear my slightest movement would make her turn away from me. Long hours I lay awake after she had gone to sleep, scarcely daring to breathe for fear she might move, not daring to hope that I might kiss her lips without startling her …
I never spoke to Ruth of my feelings. Fear restrained me. I had enough sense of proportion to realize that what I felt was extraordinary. I was afraid she would not understand my affection. I did not understand myself.”
Grace: A lost opportunity
Diane later goes to college to study French, and meets Grace, with whom we are expecting her to have an affair; “I had been rather awed by her cool charm and by her oft-repeated refusals to go out on dates with the boys who invited her.”
They read Baudelaire and Verlaine together – very heavy, decadent stuff for two college girls at that time; Baudelaire, of course, wrote The Flowers of Evil, and Verlaine, one of his followers, was the lover of Rimbaud. “Suddenly, inspired no doubt by Verlaine, she began to talk about homosexuality. Obviously, she was trying to sound out my reactions to the subject, and my self-consciously evasive replies made me blush with embarrassment.”
Diana is unprepared for this line of questioning; “As it was, my confusion was my defense. Extremely sensitive, Grace interpreted my awkwardness for reluctance, and, humiliated for having ‘misunderstood,’ she left.”
Considering marriage … to a man?
Before things with Grace have a chance to go anywhere, Diane meets Carl, an older man, who falls in love with her and asks her to marry him. “My first feeling was one of dismay.” She is flattered but confused, thinking she must accept, but “I could not force myself suddenly to end the happiest friendship I had ever known” – with, presumably, Grace.
Nevertheless, when he gives her his fraternity pin and kisses her she feels a “pale emotion – the first I had ever felt for a man.” But even this pale shadow of a feeling is enough to make her feel that perhaps she is after all normal. “When I left him I ran to my room giddily happy. Oh, dear God, it had happened. It was going to be all right.”
But then, the thought of having to have physical sex with Carl enters her head. “I have every possible reason but one to be convinced that Carl and I would be happily married – I did not know whether I loved him physically.” She has heard women talk and has read books on sexology which led her to believe that, even if she does not like having sex with him at first, she will come around. Diane tells Carl that she will live with him but not marry him. At first, all goes well.
“Some indescribable emotion pulled at me as I looked at him, and all I could think of was something I had read – of a woman happy that her lover need no longer sigh with unrest; she would give him ecstasy. I understood that now. Suddenly I gloried in an unexpected sense of possession. It seemed to me that I had never been so happy. There was no need to question. My place was with Carl.
It did not matter that first physical intimacy had been disappointing. I could not expect a miracle of chemistry to follow the mere act of defloration; I understood that it frequently took some little time for a woman to become adjusted, for her to learn rhythm, to grow together. At least I had managed the first pain. Now I could look forward.”
For some time, Diana feels as though she is becoming “normal,” though never in their time together had “physical intimacy meant anything to me but the giving of pleasure to Carl… the very words ‘desire,’ ‘passion,’ ‘ecstasy,’ were but fugitive words to me, symbols of unscented experience.”
Looking inwardDiana has become “a slave to dissimulation,” as she knows many married women are, whether or not they have lesbian tendencies.
When she goes to a women’s college in Massachusetts to take a Masters in German, the “number of lesbians I met there impressed me not only because my consciousness of them was sharpened, but because they were unmistakably frequent.” But even in this environment, she decides to hide her feelings: she learns “the grace of a lie and a new admiration for hypocrisy;” she vows that “no one would ever have such an easy clue to my own lesbianism.”
This self-imposed isolation of course makes her lonely. “I was approaching a future whose peculiar loneliness I could already understand.” What Diana cannot understand is what it would be like to indulge her preferences. “What was lesbian love like? Its intellectual pleasures were easy enough to guess at, but what physical pleasure did women achieve of one another… Vaguely I wondered how I would learn to know all the things I needed to know.”
Then she meets Elise and has her first physical experience with another woman. But Elise is already spoken for.
“I was released of all feeling, submerged in a glorious lethargy, timeless and in a dream. I could make no effort to open my eyes. I hadn’t expected it to be something like dying… I told her a little wildly that she had been my first; that she could not leave me, could not. Very gently she told me she had known, and that she had known all the while that Katherine was coming so soon. Now I knew why she had left me. For Elise that had been a gesture of fidelity – lesbian fidelity. I had made no difference.”
Diana reacts to these twin experiences – her first physical experience with a woman and her first emotional experience of betrayal – by leaving that night for Paris, wiser if not much older. “I realized that the incident with Elise had, for all its humiliation, given me a kind of assurance that I had needed desperately. Before Elise I had not known whether women could have sexual gratification of one another … Elise had completed my knowledge.”
Coming of age physically and emotionally
Diana has come of age physically and emotionally, and her next relationship, with Jane, is much more straightforward. “We wanted a normal domestic life and we wanted our happiness together. We asked nothing of anyone. We hurt no one. We were mature, free, and perfectly sure of ourselves.” Diana now realizes that to accept her “lesbianism and my circumstances without fear, without distaste, would be my ultimate freedom.”
Unfortunately, even though she is free within herself and she and Jane are free within their relationship, the outside world intrudes. After her first term teaching, her relationship with Jane is remarked upon and she is offered the choice between moving by herself into the single women’s accommodation or leaving the college. She chooses to leave. But Jane is not her final lover; she meets Leslie and leaves Jane – physically, though not emotionally, until the end of the book, when Leslie finally replaces Jane.
“I knew that Jane had been swept into time, into the forgotten. Even the thought of her seemed obscure. Leslie and I extricated ourselves; no longer need there be anything at all to remind us of Jane. I could feel how it had happened, but I could not have foreseen it. Slowly, half-prayerful, half-exultant, it had come to me – the testimony of her patience was enough – I could turn toward Leslie and know that her loyalty was no less than my own.”
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 Diana: A Strange Autobiography by Diana Frederics (1939) appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.
March 13, 2021
The Only Bookstore in the County: The Book End, Blackstone, Virginia
This musing on The Book End, a used book shop in Blackstone Virginia, highlights the importance of a local bookstore, even a modest one, to a town’s cultural life. Contributed by Tyler Scott:
Two years ago my husband and I realized we needed a change. We had grown tired of city life after raising our children in Richmond, Virginia, our hometown, so one Sunday we drove southside to go antiquing in Blackstone, where my mother-in-law spent part of her childhood.
We met a distant cousin for the first time, and explained we were looking for a small place to move not too far away from family and friends; she took us around to look at real estate, and a week later we put a contract on a Queen Anne Revival built in 1896. By fall, we had put our house on the market and rented a residence while we renovated the Victorian. I also had to explain to several people we were not getting a divorce.
Adjusting to small-town lifeGranville and I moved from a city with a metro area population of 1,105,000 to a town of 3,400 plus a National Guard base. The change took some getting used to, yet we acclimated quickly. Our adventure had begun.
At a certain time of day, under a smoke-blue sky, if you drive down Blackstone’s Main Street, it looks like the 1950s – other than the traffic. The welcoming stark white spire of St. Luke’s Episcopal Church; the monotonous brick façade of the Wedgewood Motor Inn; and turn-of-the-century homes, some showplaces, some mummified and depressing.
This is a town where most people drive pickup trucks and we all wave to each other, strangers included. A contractor told me Blackstone was so small they would all know what I was going to do before I did, and he was right. I learned it may only take fifteen minutes to do my errands whereas I needed an extra half hour so I could talk to everyone I met. This is just what we do.
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The Book End in Blackstone, VA
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One of the best parts about Blackstone is our bookstore, The Book End (gently used books), on Maple Street, next door to the Sanitary Barber Shop and down the way from our newspaper the Courier Record. My husband and I frequent the store more than Amazon or the library and I am sure he is one of their best customers since he buys at least eight books a month.
The prices haven’t changed since they opened in 2007; unless you buy a first edition online, the in-store prices range from 25 cents to 4 dollars. The store, 15 by 15 feet, is so small that I must move the coffeepot if I want to look at the biographies.
Finding treasures to read
Pat Conroy called a bookstore “a wonderland” and a “portal to the world” and I agree with him one hundred percent. One of my favorite pastimes is to browse. The moment I walk through the front door, I can feel life’s stress lift from my shoulders.
Where books there is fellowship so I can study the shelves to my heart’s content and talk to anyone nearby. I rarely go with a list of hope-to-finds and all those inexpensive books make me feel heady; stories of love and triumph, heartbreak and devastation, the glories of victory and the results of despair, not to mention just good old-fashioned storytelling at its best. This is a trip to a foreign land and you never know what you will stumble upon.
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A well-loved copy of The Yearling found at The Book End
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The last time I visited The Book End, I bought To Begin Again, one of M.F.K. Fisher’s early memoirs; Blue Nights by Joan Didion (which I will return because I can’t bring myself to read about the tragedy of losing a daughter); and a 1939 copy of The Yearling by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings with illustrations— Thoreauian-toned prints by Edward Shenton. The inside cover of the Rawlings is inscribed as follows: “To Courtney – on her 11th Birthday- written over 60 years ago and enjoyed by millions of young people just like you— With love, Grandma”
And what have the volunteers (who are paid a book each day they work) found in donated books? “Bookmarks, letters, airline tickets, and bills,” remembers volunteer Arrol Lund, Secretary of the Friends, and reported to know the inventory thoroughly. Granville had the biggest find of all: a one hundred dollar bill that was being used as a bookmark. He promptly donated this to the library.
How it all began
Volunteers opened the bookstore to serve the Louis Spencer Epes Memorial Library and encourage school-aged children to read. At the time, the library needed to expand and wanted to sell books they no longer needed; they had no money or space, so a group of volunteers organized Friends of the Library and decided to open a used bookstore.
A benevolent businessman, Bobby Daniels, offered the building for free and the ladies had a contest where people submitted names like The Bookshelf, The Book Depot, Unwinders Books, The Dusty Page, and the Book End. Hence, a paradise was born for readers.
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Mission and community supportAccording to the Friends of the Library pamphlet, the mission is to generate community support; volunteer at the library when needed; operate and maintain The Book End; conduct book sales and special events like discussions and storytellers; buy necessary equipment and books the library may need; cultivate donors; and host special events and book giveaways.
Projects have been extensive – $10,000 was given to the library a few years ago for carpet and computers and last year the Friends split the cost of online services like hoopla and OverDrive with Crewe, a neighboring town. Every year the Friends host several children’s book giveaways including Halloween and the Grand Illumination event at Christmas.
Customers like the once-a-month Purple Bag Sale: a bag of books for $5. Moreover, on a sweet note, every third grader in Blackstone has received an inscribed dictionary from The Friends of the Library. (If I had been one of those students, I would still have my dictionary.)
A loyal following
The Book End can count on customers like my husband. His study is a sea of murder mysteries with titles like Bad Business, The Skull Beneath the Skin, and Wicked Prey. (For a mild-mannered man he certainly does have violent tastes in reading.) I asked him once what made The Book End unique and he says it’s local and easy to drop in on: “I can go through the entire store in ten minutes and the stock turns over quickly.”
Granville considers this a way of giving back, calling it “penny philanthropy. I can buy a book for a dollar,” he explains as he puts down the Robert Parker mystery he is reading, and “the dollar goes over to the library and then I will take it back and they can sell it for another dollar. Every time I go, I donate twice.”
The Book End sells mostly westerns, science fiction, and romance. The hours are generous, though if you call and leave a message, they’ll open just for you. They put their best books on the website Alibris, where they list nearly one thousand books; the rest of the inventory, about 4,500 books, comes from not only donations but also library purges.
Dedicated volunteers
Any non-profit reflects the dedication of its volunteers and The Book End is run by a core of women of a certain hallowed age. According to Lauren Watkins, Treasurer of the Friends and a neighbor, “running The Book End would be impossible without them.”
Tilly Conley is a longtime volunteer and current Vice President of the Friends who helps with pricing and does most of the computer work. A former English, theater arts, and photojournalism high school teacher, she is loquacious on the phone and interviews herself for the most part. “I like to read so much I’ll read the back of a cereal box,” she chuckles. Books have been a part of her life growing up in Blackstone (she lives in her childhood home) and she reminisces about the town librarian Mrs. Franny Jones who would take a book away from you if she thought you were too young for it.
What does the future hold for The Book End? The building has been sold to Molly Black, owner of the Sanitary Barbershop, and the good news is the store will remain as tenants and the rent will not be increased from $200 a month.
The Friends are still discussing financial details with Blackstone and Nottoway County and they plan on holding more fundraisers. The shop is also looking for volunteers because many of them have cut back on responsibilities like manning booths, baking to raise money, and carrying hundreds of heavy books. Or sadly, they have died.
Support local bookstores
The day draws to a close and Main Street is starting to quiet down. The horizon has a lilac tint – spring is on the way – and I see a few people walking towards the Farmer’s Café for an early supper. I turn left on Maple Street and park in front of The Book End to gaze at the books beckoning from the windows. Who would have thought such a modest place could have an impact on so many? In life, I have learned, sometimes it is the small endeavors that are inspirational.
Please support your local used bookstores and consider a donation to The Book End. Make checks payable to Friends of the Library, Blackstone. Mail to The Book End, 102 Maple Street, Blackstone, Virginia 23824.
Contributed by Tyler Scott. Tyler lives in Blackstone, Virginia with her husband and Norfolk Terrier. Her essays and articles have appeared in numerous magazines and newspapers and her novel The Excellent Advice of a Few Famous Painters* is available on Amazon.
*This is an Amazon Affiliate links. If a product is purchased by linking through, Literary Ladies Guide receives a modest commission, which helps maintain our site and helps it to continue growing!
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