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10 Poems by Elinor Wylie

Elinor Wylie (1885 – 1928) was a popular American poet and novelist in the 1920s and 1930s. Also widely known for her tumultuous personal life, many of her works offered insight into the difficulties of marriage and the impossible expectations that come with womanhood. 

Though Wylie is no longer widely read, she was a celebrated author in her lifetime, with a cult following in her pinnacle years. She was known for her passionate writing, fueled by ethereal descriptors, historical references, and feminist undertones. 

Born Elinor Hoyt in Somerville, New Jersey; she was raised in a distinguished family. Though she never pursued higher education, Elinor had a natural talent as a writer. She first began to write seriously and considered publishing during her time in England. This was followed by a scandalous elopement with Horace Wylie, a much older man who had been practically stalking her for years.

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Learn more about Elinor Wylie  
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Wylie anonymously self-published her first collection of poems, Incidental Numbers, in 1912. Soon after, she moved back to the states and began pursuing a serious writing career. Nets to Catch the Wind, was her first traditionally published poetry collection, appeared in 1921, it is heavily anthologized to this day.

During her short span of eight years as a writer, Wylie published four volumes of poetry and four novels, all garnering praise. She died of a stroke at age forty-three, her untimely death coming at the height of her career.

American poet Louis Untermeyer once described Wylie’s writing as “a passion frozen at its source.” Her literary force transcends the marital scandals that once marked her reputation. As subtle as she was bold, her ability to blend contemporary themes within a traditionalist writing style contributed to the developing aesthetic of modernism.

 

Here are the poems in this listing:

Wild Peaches A Crowded Trolley CarVelvet ShoesEpitaphCold Blooded CreaturesWinter SleepSea LullabyValentineFull MoonLittle Elegy

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Wild Peaches

1

When the world turns completely upside down
You say we’ll emigrate to the Eastern Shore
Aboard a river-boat from Baltimore;
We’ll live among wild peach trees, miles from town,
You’ll wear a coonskin cap, and I a gown
Homespun, dyed butternut’s dark gold colour.
Lost, like your lotus-eating ancestor,
We’ll swim in milk and honey till we drown.

The winter will be short, the summer long,
The autumn amber-hued, sunny and hot,
Tasting of cider and of scuppernong;
All seasons sweet, but autumn best of all.
The squirrels in their silver fur will fall
Like falling leaves, like fruit, before your shot.

2

The autumn frosts will lie upon the grass
Like bloom on grapes of purple-brown and gold.
The misted early mornings will be cold;
The little puddles will be roofed with glass.
The sun, which burns from copper into brass,
Melts these at noon, and makes the boys unfold
Their knitted mufflers; full as they can hold
Fat pockets dribble chestnuts as they pass.

Peaches grow wild, and pigs can live in clover;
A barrel of salted herrings lasts a year;
The spring begins before the winter’s over.
By February you may find the skins
Of garter snakes and water moccasins
Dwindled and harsh, dead-white and cloudy-clear.

3

When April pours the colours of a shell
Upon the hills, when every little creek
Is shot with silver from the Chesapeake
In shoals new-minted by the ocean swell,
When strawberries go begging, and the sleek
Blue plums lie open to the blackbird’s beak,
We shall live well—we shall live very well.

The months between the cherries and the peaches
Are brimming cornucopias which spill
Fruits red and purple, sombre-bloomed and black;
Then, down rich fields and frosty river beaches
We’ll trample bright persimmons, while you kill
Bronze partridge, speckled quail, and canvasback.

4

Down to the Puritan marrow of my bones
There’s something in this richness that I hate.
I love the look, austere, immaculate,
Of landscapes drawn in pearly monotones.
There’s something in my very blood that owns
Bare hills, cold silver on a sky of slate,
A thread of water, churned to milky spate
Streaming through slanted pastures fenced with stones.

I love those skies, thin blue or snowy gray,
Those fields sparse-planted, rendering meagre sheaves;
That spring, briefer than apple-blossom’s breath,
Summer, so much too beautiful to stay,
Swift autumn, like a bonfire of leaves,
And sleepy winter, like the sleep of death.

 

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A Crowded Trolley Car

The rain’s cold grains are silver-gray
Sharp as golden sands,
A bell is clanging, people sway
Hanging by their hands.

Supple hands, or gnarled and stiff,
Snatch and catch and grope;
That face is yellow-pale, as if
The fellow swung from rope.

Dull like pebbles, sharp like knives,
Glances strike and glare,
Fingers tangle, Bluebeard’s wives
Dangle by the hair.

Orchard of the strangest fruits
Hanging from the skies;
Brothers, yet insensate brutes
Who fear each others’ eyes.

One man stands as free men stand
As if his soul might be
Brave, unbroken; see his hand
Nailed to an oaken tree.

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Velvet Shoes

Let us walk in the white snow
In a soundless space;
With footsteps quiet and slow,
At a tranquil pace,
Under veils of white lace.

I shall go shod in silk,
And you in wool,
White as white cow’s milk,
More beautiful
Than the breast of a gull.

We shall walk through the still town
In a windless peace;
We shall step upon white down,
Upon silver fleece,
Upon softer than these.

We shall walk in velvet shoes:
Wherever we go
Silence will fall like dews
On white silence below.
We shall walk in the snow.

 

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Epitaph

For this she starred her eyes with salt
And scooped her temples thin,
Until her face shone pure of fault
From the forehead to the chin.

In coldest crucibles of pain
Her shrinking flesh was fired
And smoothed into a finer grain
To make it more desired.

Pain left her lips more clear than glass;
It colored and cooled her hand.
She lay a field of scented grass
Yielded as pasture land.

For this her loveliness was curved
And carved as silver is:
For this she was brave: but she deserved
A better grave than this.

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Cold Blooded Creatures

Man, the egregious egoist,
(In mystery the twig is bent,)
Imagines, by some mental twist,
That he alone is sentient

Of the intolerable load
Which on all living creatures lies,
Nor stoops to pity in the toad
The speechless sorrow of its eyes.

He asks no questions of the snake,
Nor plumbs the phosphorescent gloom
Where lidless fishes, broad awake,
Swim staring at a night-mare doom.

 

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Winter Sleep

When against earth a wooden heel
Clicks as loud as stone on steel,
When stone turns flour instead of flakes,
And frost bakes clay as fire bakes,
When the hard-bitten fields at last
Crack like iron flawed in the cast,
When the world is wicked and cross and old,
I long to be quit of the cruel cold.

Little birds like bubbles of glass
Fly to other Americas,
Birds as bright as sparkles of wine
Fly in the nite to the Argentine,
Birds of azure and flame-birds go
To the tropical Gulf of Mexico:
They chase the sun, they follow the heat,
It is sweet in their bones, O sweet, sweet, sweet!
It’s not with them that I’d love to be,
But under the roots of the balsam tree.

Just as the spiniest chestnut-burr
Is lined within with the finest fur,
So the stoney-walled, snow-roofed house
Of every squirrel and mole and mouse
Is lined with thistledown, sea-gull’s feather,
Velvet mullein-leaf, heaped together
With balsam and juniper, dry and curled,
Sweeter than anything else in the world.

O what a warm and darksome nest
Where the wildest things are hidden to rest!
It’s there that I’d love to lie and sleep,
Soft, soft, soft, and deep, deep, deep!

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Sea Lullaby

The old moon is tarnished
With smoke of the flood,
The dead leaves are varnished
With colour like blood,

A treacherous smiler
With teeth white as milk,
A savage beguiler
In sheathings of silk,

The sea creeps to pillage,
She leaps on her prey;
A child of the village
Was murdered today.

She came up to meet him
In a smooth golden cloak,
She choked him and beat him
To death, for a joke.

Her bright locks were tangled,
She shouted for joy,
With one hand she strangled
A strong little boy.

Now in silence she lingers
Beside him all night
To wash her long fingers
In silvery light.

 

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Valentine

Too high, too high to pluck
My heart shall swing.
A fruit no bee shall suck,
No wasp shall sting.

If on some night of cold
It falls to ground
In apple-leaves of gold
I’ll wrap it round.

And I shall seal it up
With spice and salt,
In a carven silver cup,
In a deep vault.

Before my eyes are blind
And my lips mute,
I must eat core and rind
Of that same fruit.

Before my heart is dust
At the end of all,
Eat it I must, I must
Were it bitter gall.

But I shall keep it sweet
By some strange art;
Wild honey I shall eat
When I eat my heart.

O honey cool and chaste
As clover’s breath!
Sweet Heaven I shall taste
Before my death.

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Full Moon

My bands of silk and miniver
Momently grew heavier;
The black gauze was beggarly thin;
The ermine muffled mouth and chin;
I could not suck the moonlight in.

Harlequin in lozenges
Of love and hate, I walked in these
Striped and ragged rigmaroles;
Along the pavement my footsoles
Trod warily on living coals.

Shouldering the thoughts I loathed,
In their corrupt disguises clothed,
Morality I could not tear
From my ribs, to leave them bare
Ivory in silver air.

There I walked, and there I raged;
The spiritual savage caged
Within my skeleton, raged afresh
To feel, behind a carnal mesh,
The clean bones crying in the flesh.

 

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Little Elegy

Withouten you
No rose can grow;
No leaf be green
If never seen
Your sweetest face;
No bird have grace
Or power to sing;
Or anything
Be kind, or fair,
And you nowhere.

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More About Elinor Wylie Wikipedia The Poetry Foundation Owlcation Britannica 

Contributed by Jess Mendes, a 2021 graduate of SUNY-New Paltz with a major in Digital Media Management, and a minor in Creative Writing.

 

The post 10 Poems by Elinor Wylie  appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.

Olympe de Gouges: An Introduction to Her Life and Work

The French playwright, pamphleteer, women’s rights advocate, abolitionist, and early feminist Olympe de Gouges (1748 – 1793), author of over thirty plays, was savagely criticized by the male French literary establishment for the liberalism of her dramas. She was unrepentant in her response, an open letter To the French Littérateurs.

“What crimes have I committed to merit such infamous treatment: how have I transgressed; how have I wronged anyone in any way? What? A dramatic work, a text full of humanity, sensibility and justice has provoked people unknown to me? Has incited the blackest calumny, has encouraged my enemies, renewed their vigour.”

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“MY DEAREST SISTERS, it is to you that I dedicate all the failings that teem within my works. May I flatter myself that you will have the generosity or the prudence to defend them, or should I fear from you more rigour, more severity, than from the most austere of our Savants, who wish to invade everything and only allow us the right to please. Men insist that we are fit only to manage a household: women who are perceptive and aspire to take up Literature are Beings that society cannot tolerate.” (Preface Pour les Dames)

De Gouges wrote the seminal pre-feminist text Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen during the French Revolution in 1791 – the same year as Thomas Paine’s The Rights of Man and the year before Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. It was written in response to the French revolutionary document Declaration of the Rights of Man of 1789.

This document begins: ‘Man, are you capable of being fair? A woman is asking: at least you will allow her that right. Tell me? What gave you the sovereign right to oppress my sex?’

“Woman, wake up! The toxin of reason is being heard throughout the whole universe; discover your rights. The powerful empire of nature is no longer surrounded by prejudice, fanaticism, superstition, and lies. The flame of truth has dispersed all the clouds of folly and usurpation. Enslaved man has multiplied his strength and needs recourse to yours to break his chains. Having become free, he has become unjust to his companion. Oh, women, women! When will you cease to be blind? What advantage have you received from the Revolution?”

In language similar to the American Declaration of Independence of 1776, de Gouge’s Declaration sets out seventeen articles that form possibly the first coherent and comprehensive statement of the equality of the sexes.

The sex that is as superior in beauty as it is in courage during the sufferings of maternity recognizes and declares in the presence and under the auspices of the Supreme Being, the following Rights of Woman and of Female Citizens.

Article 1. Woman is born free and lives equal to man in her rights. Social distinctions can be based only on the common utility.

Article 2. The purpose of any political association is the conservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of woman and man; these rights are liberty, property, security, and especially resistance to oppression.

Women were subject to the same laws and punishments as men but did not enjoy the same rights, said de Gouges. “Women have the right to mount the scaffold, they must also have the right to mount the speaker’s rostrum.”

This was very prescient of de Gouges: she was accused of treason and executed by guillotine for writing the pamphlet. Many women have been criticized for writing and publishing their views but few have been executed for it.

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On November 3, 1793, Olympe de Gouges was sentenced to death by the French Revolutionary Tribunal for seditious behavior and attempting to reinstate the monarchy. She was to die by the guillotine. Her last hours were described by an anonymous Parisian:

“Yesterday, at seven o’clock in the evening, a most extraordinary person called Olympe de Gouges who held the imposing title of woman of letters, was taken to the scaffold, while all of Paris, while admiring her beauty, knew that she didn’t even know her alphabet …

She approached the scaffold with a calm and serene expression on her face, and forced the guillotine’s furies, which had driven her to this place of torture, to admit that such courage and beauty had never been seen before …

That woman had thrown herself in the Revolution, body and soul. But having quickly perceived how atrocious the system adopted by the Jacobins was, she chose to retrace her steps. She attempted to unmask the villains through the literary productions which she had printed and put up. They never forgave her, and she paid for her carelessness with her head.”

 Quotes from A Declaration of the Rights of Women (1791)

“Woman is born free and lives equal to man in her rights. Social distinctions can be based only on the common utility.”

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“Marriage is a tomb of trust and love. The married woman can with impunity give bastards to her husband, and also give them the wealth which oes not belong to them. The woman who is unmarried has only one feeble right;  ancient and inhuman laws refuse to her for her children the right to the name and the wealth of their father; no new laws have been made in this matter. If it is considered a paradox and an impossibility on my part to try to give my sex an honorable and just consistency, I leave it to men to attain glory for dealing with this matter; but while we wait, the way can be prepared through national education, the restoration of morals, and conjugal conventions.”

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“Man, are you capable of being just? It is a woman who poses the question, you will not deprive her of that right at least. Tell me, what gives you sovereign over empire to oppress my sex? Your strength? Your talents?”

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“Man alone has raised his exceptional circumstances to a principle. Bizarre, blind, bloated with science and degenerated — in a century of enlightenment and wisdom – into the crassest ignorance, he wants to command as a despot a sex which is in full possession of its intellectual faculties; he pretends to enjoy the Revolution and to claim his rights to equality in order to say nothing more about it.”

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“Male and female citizens, being equal in the eyes of the law, must be equally admitted to all honors, positions, and public employment according to their capacity and without other distinctions besides those of their virtues and talents.”

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“The laws must be the expression of the general will; all female and male citizens must contribute either personally or through their representatives to its formation; it must be the same for all: male and female citizens, being equal in the eyes of the law, must be equally admitted to all honors, positions, and public employment according to their capacity and without other distinctions besides those of their virtues and talents.”

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.

The post Olympe de Gouges: An Introduction to Her Life and Work appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.

When Anaïs Met Henry: Nin’s Tumultuous Affair with Henry and June Miller

In late 1931, the author and diarist Anaïs Nin met Henry Miller and his wife, June. She first fell in love with Henry’s writing, and then with the man himself before being seduced by his wife, June. This excerpt from Everybody I Can Think of Ever: Meetings That Made the Avant-Garde by Francis Booth recounts what would be a fateful, formative affair:

Henry Miller was the author of banned, erotic novels like Tropic of Cancer and Black Spring, originally published by Jack Kahane’s Obelisk Press in 1934 and 1936 respectively. Henry was married at the time he met Anaïs Nin, to June Anderson, the second of his five wives (Nin wasn’t, and would not be, one of the five). Nin was married at the time also, to Hugo Parker Guiler (sometimes known as Ian Hugo).

Even before she met Henry, Anaïs and Hugo already had a stormy relationship after seven years of marriage. “We have never been as happy or as miserable. Our quarrels are portentous, tremendous, violent. We are both wrathful to the point of madness: we desire death.” Anaïs discussed her marriage with her lover and cousin Eduardo, and notes his advice in her diary for October 1931.

“We talked for six hours. He reached the conclusion I have come to also: that I needed an older mind, a father, a man stronger than me, a lover who will lead me in love, because all the rest is too much a self-created thing. The impetus to grow and live intensely is so powerful in me I cannot resist it. I will work, I will love my husband, but I will fulfill myself.”

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Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin
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When Anaïs met Henry

So when Anaïs met Henry she was ready for him and he was ready for anything. She describes their first meeting in her journal for December 1931.

“I’ve met Henry Miller. He came to lunch with Richard Osborn, a lawyer I had to consult on the contract for my DH Lawrence book.

When he first stepped out of the car and walked towards the door where I stood waiting, I saw a man I liked. In his writing he is flamboyant, virile, animal, magnificent. He is a man whom life makes drunk, I thought. He is like me. . .

We talked for hours. Henry said the truest and deepest things, and he has a way of saying “hmmm” while trailing off on his own introspective journey. . .

A few days later I met Henry. I was waiting to meet him, as if that would solve something, and it did. When I saw him, I thought, here is a man I could love. And I was not afraid.”

Hugo knew all about her relationship with Henry and feared he would lose Anaïs to him. ‘Hugo admires him. At the same time he worries. He says justly, “you fall in love with people’s minds. I’m going to lose you to Henry.”‘

He did lose her, even though they stayed married. But he lost her to June at least as much as to Henry. Henry had met the dark, exotic June Mansfield, fictionalized in his novels as Mona or Mara (and played by Uma Thurman in the 1992 film Henry and June) in Times Square in 1923.

“It must have been a Thursday night when I met her for the first time at the dance hall,” he wrote in Sexus. She was 21, he was 31 and married. June was born Juliet Smerth in 1902 in Bukovina, a region now divided between Romania and Ukraine, and came to America in 1907.

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June and Henry Miller
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Henry and June

It was June who first took Henry to Paris, having saved the money for the trip; and it was June who encouraged him to write full time and supported him by driving taxis; she also gave him the money she got from other men, though she was at least as interested in women. In 1926 June moved a young poet – the woman she called Jean Kronski, but who was probably really named Martha Andrews – in with them. Miller hated Jean, whom he called Thelma in his short book on Rimbaud, The Time of the Assassins.

Though Rimbaud was the all-engrossing topic of conversation between Thelma and my wife, I made no effort to know him. In fact, I fought like the very devil to put him out of my mind; it seemed to me then that he was the evil genius who had unwittingly inspired all my trouble and misery.

I saw that Thelma, whom I despised, had identified herself with him, was imitating him as best she could, not only in her behaviour but in the kind of verse she wrote … In that state of despair and sterility I was naturally highly sceptical of the genius of a seventeen-year-old poet. All that I heard about him sounded like an invention of crazy Thelma’s. I was then capable of believing that she could conjure up subtle torments with which to plague me, since she hated me as much as I did her.

Henry also fictionalized June’s relationship with Jean in Crazy Cock, the central novel of his autobiographical series, written in 1930, but not published until 12 years after his death. June and Jean left together for Paris in April 1927 but by July their relationship fell apart and June moved back to live with Henry. Perhaps two-way relationships couldn’t satisfy her.

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Henry and June by Anaïs Nin
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Seducing Anaïs

Henry left June to go to Paris in 1930; June followed him in 1931 and met Anaïs when she visited him. June seduced Anaïs; whether physically or just psychologically isn’t clear: Nin’s diaries don’t refer to any physical relationship with June, just a passionate, emotional one.

She was as smitten by June as she had been by Henry, but in a completely different way; her passion for June was physical, whether consummated or not, where her passion for Henry was certainly consummated but was mainly intellectual: ‘I am already devoted to Henry’s work, but I separate my body from my mind. I enjoy his strength, his ugly, destructive, fearless, cathartic strength’. If Henry was ugly, June was irresistibly beautiful. Anaïs Nin made their first meeting seem like a stroke of fate.

A startlingly white face, burning eyes. June Mansfield, Henry’s wife. As she came towards me from the darkness of my garden into the light of the doorway I saw for the first time the most beautiful woman on earth. Years ago, when I tried to imagine a pure beauty, I had created an image in my mind of just that woman.

I had even imagined she would be Jewish. I knew long ago the color of her skin, her profile, her teeth. Her beauty drowned me. As I sat in front of her I felt that I would do anything she asked of me. Henry faded, she was color, brilliance, strangeness.

 

A tangled love triangle

The relationship between Anaïs and Henry became three-way: the controlling June seducing the passionate Anaïs. Ironically, though Henry fictionalized June and even Jean, he didn’t write about Anaïs, fictionally or factually; all we know of their relationship is what Anaïs writes about it in her journals, which is quite a lot and often explicit, though entirely from her point of view.

She said in her journal: ‘I want to do [write] June better than Djuna Barnes did Nightwood.‘ But that is a novel. Barnes understood the difference between fiction and non-fiction: her early reportage of New York is totally objective and her fiction, even if closely drawn from the people she knew, totally fictional. Anaïs never did draw that line; the journals are a product of her imagination as much as her novels. Henry and June ends:

Last night I wept. I wept because the process by which I have become woman was painful. I wept because I was no longer a child with the child’s blind faith. I wept because my eyes were opened to reality – to Henry’s selfishness, June’s love of power, my insatiable creativity which must concern itself with others and cannot be insufficient to itself. I wept because I could not believe any more and I love to believe. I can still love passionately without believing. That means I love humanly. I wept because from now on I will weep less. I wept because I have lost my pain and I am not yet accustomed to its absence.

So Henry is coming this afternoon, and tomorrow I am going out with June.

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Everybody I Can Think of Ever on Amazon U.S.*
Everybody I Can Think of Ever on Amazon U.K*
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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 When Anaïs Met Henry: Nin’s Tumultuous Affair with Henry and June Miller appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.

Two Under the Indian Sun: A Memoir by Jon and Rumer Godden

It’s not often that you find two sisters collaborating on a joint memoir, as is the case with Two Under the Indian Sun (1966). That Jon and Rumer Godden did so after becoming successful authors in their own right is all the more interesting.

Among Rumer’s successes were her bestselling novels Black Narcissus and The River, as well as her memoirs, A Time to Dance, No Time to Weep and A House with Four Rooms. Jon’s works include The Bird Escaped, The House by the Sea, and A Winter’s Tale. The two sisters also collaborated on other highly acclaimed works like Shiva’s Pigeon and Indian Dust.

What is remarkable about this memoir is that though it was published in adulthood, the Godden sisters are able to pick up the sheer joy of being two little girls, growing up in India, in a small place called Narayangunj, in undivided Bengal/India, where their father is employed in a shipping company.

The tone of immediacy is so striking that one can almost believe that these two sisters are still children, with their lives still ahead of them, where they could become authors or whatever else that they chose to be.

 

A happy childhood in India

For a few years, the sisters had been sent away to England to school there and be brought up “properly.” This memoir explores the happiness of their return to India, in contrast to their dull and austere time with their very British Quaker aunts, in England.

The Foreword by the Indian author, Paro Anand describes this memoir “as purely an experiential story of little girls who revel in the colour, flavour and chaos that was and still is India.” This memoir is all about the freedom and warmth of their Indian years, where they can just be children, enjoying the moment and free of any great responsibility:

“Then everything was clear, each thing was only itself: joy was joy, hope was hope, fear and sorrow were fear and sorrow; pain was simply pain; they had not yet trespassed into one another, not merged. Afterwards, life inevitably thickened, became hazed and alloyed, but then it was clear.”

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Learn more about Rumer Godden
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Matters of voice

Some of the interesting aspects of this book are that the authors refer to one or the other’s name throughout so much so that one wonders whether the narrator is a third person, until you chance upon the “we,” when it dawns on the reader that Jon and Rumer are speaking of themselves.

As you read on, you probably figure out that the dominant voice is that of the reticent Rumer, with an unquestioning admiration for her older sibling, Jon, who is fearless and is able to call a spade a spade. One such instance is when the family dog is shot because of a broken leg and Jon is bold enough to tell her father, “It wasn’t better this way. If you broke your leg, wouldn’t you bear the pain to live? Would you want to be shot?”

As the memoir unfolds, it becomes clear that the sisters are a contrast with Jon being admired by her siblings for her ability to say things that the others dared not, while Rumer is self-effacing. Yet, the joint effort of two sets of memories and perhaps notes are so well-meshed that they almost seem like one voice.

. . . . . . . . .

You may also enjoy:
A House With Four Rooms by Rumer Godden
. . . . . . . . .

Caste, class, and hierarchies

The India of then, perhaps more than now, was riddled with differences of caste, class and hierarchies. But the Godden duo write of them matter-of-factly, with the innocence and lack of judgement of children, as when they speak of the lusciously beautiful Laforte children, who being Anglo-Indian, enjoyed secondary status:

“We were not allowed to play with them. They were Anglo-Indian; there was a danger of the accent and, too, Fa and Mam had to think of the opinion of Fa’s office babus and colleagues… (but paradoxically) we were quite sure that the Lafortes were infinitely superior.”

The sisters seem to share similar feelings about some of their domestic help, like the gatekeeper, Guru, who humours them and whom they view as their friend, bodyguard and mentor. In the Preface, Jon and Rumer say:

“We only know we have tried to tell the truth about ourselves as we thought we were, and about other people, perhaps not as they really were, but as we remember them or think we do. Our own and other people’s errors or memory will not matter if we have succeeded in evoking, if not the reality, the significance.”

There is no doubt that the sisters have done a marvelous job of capturing the sights and sounds around them, while picking up the human emotions of a time gone by, which is now only a part of their memories. It is the ability to achieve clarity with the pure innocence of childhood that sets this book apart and is a must read.

Written from the viewpoint of two young girls, one must but end with their own quote:

“Children in India are greatly loved and indulged and we never felt that we were foreigners, not India’s own; we felt at home, safely held in her large warm embrace, content as we were never to be content in our own country.”

Contributed by Melanie P. Kumar, a  Bangalore, India-based independent writer who has always been fascinated with the magic of words. Links to some of her pieces can be found at gonewiththewindwithmelanie.wordpress.com.

. . . . . . . . . .

Two Under the Indian Sun on Amazon*
. . . . . . . . . .

More about Two Under the Indian Sun  Reader discussion on Goodreads Original review on Kirkus Reviews Neglected Books

. . . . . . . . .

*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 Two Under the Indian Sun: A Memoir by Jon and Rumer Godden appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.

“The Disappointment” by Aphra Behn (1680)

“The Disappointment” by Aphra Behn, a poem first published in 1680, is arguably among the best known and enduring of her works. Considered scandalous in her lifetime, Behn (1640 – 1689), a playwright, poet, and novelist, is recognized as the first British woman to earn a living by her writing. 

In this lengthy poem, the shepherd Lisander attempts to force himself on the maid Cloris. It’s implied that that two are in love, and that the encounter is not a random situation.

Cloris, however, is unwilling, and Lisander is unable to perform — experiencing “the Hell of Impotence.” She is able to escape, and yet, since the perspective is on the female sexual experience, we’re left to wonder which of the pair is the most disappointed.

“Behn wrote quite freely about sex: her poem The Disappointment is very explicit and concerns male impotence, a highly transgressive theme for a woman, then and now,” writes Francis Booth in Killing the Angel: Early British Transgressive Women Writers.

It was, to say the least, highly unusual to focus on female sexuality in literature of Behn’s time. She was reviled by many critics, though today her influence and courage are respected. In A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf wrote that all women owe a debt to Aphra Behn, who “earned them the right to speak their minds.”

 Analyses of “The Disappointment”

In a detailed analysis of “The Disappointment,” Nancy Snyder writes, “Cloris recognizes the period expectations of chastity and honor. She fights off Lisander’s advances despite the widely accepted practice of women’s submission. Behn presents the accepted gender classification of male dominance as Lisander takes what he wants from the unwilling Cloris.”

This excellent analysis by William Chen offers an annotated version of the poem, astutely concluding:

“There are a couple of ways to interpret The Disappointment, and their differences lie in how much one believes Cloris desires Lisander, which also answers the question of who exactly is disappointed here. On one end is a traditional interpretation; that the two are passionate lovers and Cloris’s objections are obligatory utterances said for the purpose of propriety, but Lisander’s impotence disappoints them both.

On the other is the interpretation that Cloris is completely objecting; her unfortunate and unavoidable physical arousal are interpreted by Lisander as consent (or some pleasure, which he interprets as consent), and Lysander’s failure to perform disappoints only him and is rather a relief to Cloris.”

. . . . . . . . . .

You may also enjoy:
The Scandalous, Sexually Explicit Writings of Aphra Behn
. . . . . . . . . .

 “The Disappointment” by Aphra Behn

1

One Day the Amarous Lisander,
By an impatient Passion sway’d,
Surpris’d fair Cloris, that lov’d Maid,
Who cou’d defend her self no longer ;
All things did with his Love conspire,
The gilded Planet of the Day,
In his gay Chariot, drawn by Fire,
Was now descending to the Sea,
And left no Light to guide the World,
But what from Cloris brighter Eyes was hurl’d.

2

In alone Thicket, made for Love,
Silent as yielding Maids Consent,
She with a charming Languishment
Permits his force, yet gently strove ?
Her Hands his Bosom softly meet,
But not to put him back design’d,
Rather to draw him on inclin’d,
Whilst he lay trembling at her feet;
Resistance ’tis to late to shew,
She wants the pow’r to say — Ah! what do you do?

3

Her bright Eyes sweat, and yet Severe,
Where Love and Shame confus’dly strive,
Fresh Vigor to Lisander give :
And whispring softly in his Ear,
She Cry’d — Cease — cease — your vain desire,
Or I’ll call out — What wou’d you do ?
My dearer Honour, ev’n to you,
I cannot — must not give — retire,
Or take that Life whose chiefest part
I gave you with the Conquest of my Heart.

4

But he as much unus’d to fear,
As he was capable of Love,
The blessed Minutes to improve,
Kisses her Lips, her Neck, her Hair !
Each touch her new Desires alarms !
His burning trembling Hand he prest
Upon her melting Snowy Breast,
While she lay panting in his Arms !
All her unguarded Beauties lie
The Spoils and Trophies of the Enemy.

5

And now, without Respect or Fear,
He seeks the Objects of his Vows ;
His Love no Modesty allows :
By swift degrees advancing where
His daring Hand that Alter seiz’d,
Where Gods of Love do Sacrifice ;
That awful Throne, that Paradise,
Where Rage is tam’d, and Anger pleas’d ;
That Living Fountain, from whose Trills
The melted Soul in liquid Drops distils.

6

Her balmy Lips encountring his,
Their Bodies as their Souls are joyn’d,
Where both in Transports were confin’d,
Extend themselves upon the Moss.
Cloris half dead and breathless lay,
Her Eyes appear’d like humid Light,
Such as divides the Day and Night;
Or falling Stars, whose Fires decay ;
And now no signs of Life she shows,
But what in short-breath-sighs returns and goes.

7

He saw how at her length she lay,
He saw her rising Bosom bare,
Her loose thin Robes, through which appear
A Shape design’d for Love and Play;
Abandon’d by her Pride and Shame,
She do’s her softest Sweets dispence,
Offring her Virgin-Innocence
A Victim to Loves Sacred Flame ;
Whilst th’ or’e ravish’d Shepherd lies,
Unable to perform the Sacrifice.

8

Ready to taste a Thousand Joys,
Thee too transported hapless Swain,
Found the vast Pleasure turn’d to Pain :
Pleasure, which too much Love destroys !
The willing Garments by he laid,
And Heav’n all open to his view ;
Mad to possess, himself he threw
On the defenceless lovely Maid.
But oh ! what envious Gods conspire
To snatch his Pow’r, yet leave him the Desire !

9

Natures support, without whose Aid
She can no humane Being give,
It self now wants the Art to live,
Faintness it slacken’d Nerves invade :
In vain th’ enraged Youth assaid
To call his fleeting Vigour back,
No Motion ’twill from Motion take,
Excess of Love his Love betray’d ;
In vain he Toils, in vain Commands,
Th’ Insensible fell weeping in his Hands.

10

In this so Am’rous cruel strife,
Where Love and Fate were too severe,
The poor Lisander in Despair,
Renounc’d his Reason with his Life.
Now all the Brisk and Active Fire
That should the Nobler Part inflame,
Unactive Frigid, Dull became,
And left no Spark for new Desire ;
Not all her Naked Charms cou’d move,
Or calm that Rage that had debauch’d his Love.

11

Cloris returning from the Trance
Which Love and soft Desire had bred,
Her tim’rous Hand she gently laid,
Or guided by Design or Chance,
Upon that Fabulous Priapus,
That Potent God (as Poets feign.)
But never did young Shepherdess
(Gath’ring of Fern upon the Plain)
More nimbly draw her Fingers back,
Finding beneath the Verdant Leaves a Snake.

12

Then Cloris her fair Hand withdrew,
Finding that God of her Desires
Disarm’d of all his pow’rful Fires,
And cold as Flow’rs bath’d in the Morning-dew.
Who can the Nymphs Confusion guess ?
The Blood forsook the kinder place,
And strew’d with Blushes all her Face,
Which both Disdain and Shame express ;
And from Lisanders Arms she fled,
Leaving him fainting on the gloomy Bed.

13

Like Lightning through the Grove she hies,
Or Daphne from the Delphick God ;
No Print upon the Grassie Road
She leaves, t’ instruct pursuing Eyes.
The Wind that wanton’d in her Hair,
And with her ruffled Garments plaid,
Discover’d in the flying Maid
All that the Gods e’re made of Fair.
So Venus, when her Love was Slain,
With fear and haste flew o’re the fatal Plain.

14

The Nymphs resentments, none but I
Can well imagin, and Condole ;
But none can guess Lisander‘s Soul,
But those who sway’d his Destiny :
His silent Griefs, swell up to Storms,
And not one God, his Fury spares,
He Curst his Birth, his Fate, his Stars,
But more the Shepherdesses Charms ;
Whose soft bewitching influence,
Had Damn’d him to the Hell of Impotence.

 

The post “The Disappointment” by Aphra Behn (1680) appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.

“The Disappoinment” by Aphra Behn (1680)

“The Disappointment” by Aphra Behn, a poem first published in 1680, is arguably among the best known and enduring of her works. Considered scandalous in her lifetime, Behn (1640 – 1689), a playwright, poet, and novelist, is recognized as the first British woman to earn a living by her writing. 

In this lengthy poem, the shepherd Lisander attempts to force himself on the maid Cloris. It’s implied that that two are in love, and that the encounter is not a random situation. Cloris, however, is unwilling, and Lisander is unable to perform — experiencing “the Hell of Impotence.” She is able to escape, and yet, since the perspective is on the female sexual experience, we’re left to wonder which of the pair is the most disappointed.

“Behn wrote quite freely about sex: her poem The Disappointment is very explicit and concerns male impotence, a highly transgressive theme for a woman, then and now,” writes Francis Booth in Killing the Angel: Early British Transgressive Women Writers.

It was, to say the least, highly unusual to focus on female sexuality in literature of Behn’s time. She was reviled by many critics, though today her influence and courage are respected. In A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf wrote that all women owe a debt to Aphra Behn, who “earned them the right to speak their minds.”

 Analyses of “The Disappointment”

In a detailed analysis of “The Disappointment,” Nancy Snyder writes, “Cloris recognizes the period expectations of chastity and honor. She fights off Lisander’s advances despite the widely accepted practice of women’s submission. Behn presents the accepted gender classification of male dominance as Lisander takes what he wants from the unwilling Cloris.”

This excellent analysis by William Chen offers an annotated version of the poem, astutely concluding:

“There are a couple of ways to interpret The Disappointment, and their differences lie in how much one believes Cloris desires Lisander, which also answers the question of who exactly is disappointed here. On one end is a traditional interpretation; that the two are passionate lovers and Cloris’s objections are obligatory utterances said for the purpose of propriety, but Lisander’s impotence disappoints them both.

On the other is the interpretation that Cloris is completely objecting; her unfortunate and unavoidable physical arousal are interpreted by Lisander as consent (or some pleasure, which he interprets as consent), and Lysander’s failure to perform disappoints only him and is rather a relief to Cloris.”

. . . . . . . . . .

You may also enjoy:
The Scandalous, Sexually Explicit Writings of Aphra Behn
. . . . . . . . . .

 “The Disappointment” by Aphra Behn

1

One Day the Amarous Lisander,
By an impatient Passion sway’d,
Surpris’d fair Cloris, that lov’d Maid,
Who cou’d defend her self no longer ;
All things did with his Love conspire,
The gilded Planet of the Day,
In his gay Chariot, drawn by Fire,
Was now descending to the Sea,
And left no Light to guide the World,
But what from Cloris brighter Eyes was hurl’d.

2

In alone Thicket, made for Love,
Silent as yielding Maids Consent,
She with a charming Languishment
Permits his force, yet gently strove ?
Her Hands his Bosom softly meet,
But not to put him back design’d,
Rather to draw him on inclin’d,
Whilst he lay trembling at her feet;
Resistance ’tis to late to shew,
She wants the pow’r to say — Ah! what do you do?

3

Her bright Eyes sweat, and yet Severe,
Where Love and Shame confus’dly strive,
Fresh Vigor to Lisander give :
And whispring softly in his Ear,
She Cry’d — Cease — cease — your vain desire,
Or I’ll call out — What wou’d you do ?
My dearer Honour, ev’n to you,
I cannot — must not give — retire,
Or take that Life whose chiefest part
I gave you with the Conquest of my Heart.

4

But he as much unus’d to fear,
As he was capable of Love,
The blessed Minutes to improve,
Kisses her Lips, her Neck, her Hair !
Each touch her new Desires alarms !
His burning trembling Hand he prest
Upon her melting Snowy Breast,
While she lay panting in his Arms !
All her unguarded Beauties lie
The Spoils and Trophies of the Enemy.

5

And now, without Respect or Fear,
He seeks the Objects of his Vows ;
His Love no Modesty allows :
By swift degrees advancing where
His daring Hand that Alter seiz’d,
Where Gods of Love do Sacrifice ;
That awful Throne, that Paradise,
Where Rage is tam’d, and Anger pleas’d ;
That Living Fountain, from whose Trills
The melted Soul in liquid Drops distils.

6

Her balmy Lips encountring his,
Their Bodies as their Souls are joyn’d,
Where both in Transports were confin’d,
Extend themselves upon the Moss.
Cloris half dead and breathless lay,
Her Eyes appear’d like humid Light,
Such as divides the Day and Night;
Or falling Stars, whose Fires decay ;
And now no signs of Life she shows,
But what in short-breath-sighs returns and goes.

7

He saw how at her length she lay,
He saw her rising Bosom bare,
Her loose thin Robes, through which appear
A Shape design’d for Love and Play;
Abandon’d by her Pride and Shame,
She do’s her softest Sweets dispence,
Offring her Virgin-Innocence
A Victim to Loves Sacred Flame ;
Whilst th’ or’e ravish’d Shepherd lies,
Unable to perform the Sacrifice.

8

Ready to taste a Thousand Joys,
Thee too transported hapless Swain,
Found the vast Pleasure turn’d to Pain :
Pleasure, which too much Love destroys !
The willing Garments by he laid,
And Heav’n all open to his view ;
Mad to possess, himself he threw
On the defenceless lovely Maid.
But oh ! what envious Gods conspire
To snatch his Pow’r, yet leave him the Desire !

9

Natures support, without whose Aid
She can no humane Being give,
It self now wants the Art to live,
Faintness it slacken’d Nerves invade :
In vain th’ enraged Youth assaid
To call his fleeting Vigour back,
No Motion ’twill from Motion take,
Excess of Love his Love betray’d ;
In vain he Toils, in vain Commands,
Th’ Insensible fell weeping in his Hands.

10

In this so Am’rous cruel strife,
Where Love and Fate were too severe,
The poor Lisander in Despair,
Renounc’d his Reason with his Life.
Now all the Brisk and Active Fire
That should the Nobler Part inflame,
Unactive Frigid, Dull became,
And left no Spark for new Desire ;
Not all her Naked Charms cou’d move,
Or calm that Rage that had debauch’d his Love.

11

Cloris returning from the Trance
Which Love and soft Desire had bred,
Her tim’rous Hand she gently laid,
Or guided by Design or Chance,
Upon that Fabulous Priapus,
That Potent God (as Poets feign.)
But never did young Shepherdess
(Gath’ring of Fern upon the Plain)
More nimbly draw her Fingers back,
Finding beneath the Verdant Leaves a Snake.

12

Then Cloris her fair Hand withdrew,
Finding that God of her Desires
Disarm’d of all his pow’rful Fires,
And cold as Flow’rs bath’d in the Morning-dew.
Who can the Nymphs Confusion guess ?
The Blood forsook the kinder place,
And strew’d with Blushes all her Face,
Which both Disdain and Shame express ;
And from Lisanders Arms she fled,
Leaving him fainting on the gloomy Bed.

13

Like Lightning through the Grove she hies,
Or Daphne from the Delphick God ;
No Print upon the Grassie Road
She leaves, t’ instruct pursuing Eyes.
The Wind that wanton’d in her Hair,
And with her ruffled Garments plaid,
Discover’d in the flying Maid
All that the Gods e’re made of Fair.
So Venus, when her Love was Slain,
With fear and haste flew o’re the fatal Plain.

14

The Nymphs resentments, none but I
Can well imagin, and Condole ;
But none can guess Lisander‘s Soul,
But those who sway’d his Destiny :
His silent Griefs, swell up to Storms,
And not one God, his Fury spares,
He Curst his Birth, his Fate, his Stars,
But more the Shepherdesses Charms ;
Whose soft bewitching influence,
Had Damn’d him to the Hell of Impotence.

 

The post “The Disappoinment” by Aphra Behn (1680) appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.

Susanna Centlivre, English Poet and Playwright

This introduction to Susanna Centlivre (1669 – 1723), the English poet, playwright, and actress, is excerpted from Killing the Angel: Early British Transgressive Women Writers ©2021 by Francis Booth. Reprinted by permission:

Very much as Virginia Woolf wrote about Aphra Behn, the anonymous author of the introduction to Susanna Centlivre’s collected works wished that Centlivre had been buried as a national treasure in Westminster Abbey.

To entertain this bustling busy Age,
Our Author now brings Business on the Stage;
She plots, contrives, embroils, foments Confusion,
And yet to Politicks makes not the least Allusion.

— Susanna Centlivre, Prologue to The Perplex’d Lovers

 

A prolific & successful female playwright

Aphra Behn’s reputation was, as Woolf said, a major bar to later women making a living as a playwright but not a complete one: the poet, actor and prolific playwright Susanna Centlivre, née Freeman and known professionally as Susanna Carroll, was said to be financially the most successful female playwright of the eighteenth century, even more than Behn herself.

Be it known that the Person with Pen in Hand is no other than a Woman, not a little piqued to find that neither the Nobility nor Commonalty of the Year 1722, had Spirit enough to erect in Westminster Abbey, a monument justly due to the Manes of the never to be forgotten Mrs Centlivre.

Between 1700 and 1723 she wrote nineteen plays, some of which had long and successful stage careers. In the preface to her most successful play The Busie Body, 1709, Centlivre respectfully addresses the Lord President of the Privy council, as was customary and she does it with the customary combination of self-deprecation and grovelling.

May it please Your Lordship,

As it’s an Established Custom in these latter Ages, for all Writers, particularly the Poetical, to shelter their Productions under the Protection of the most Distinguished, whose Approbation produces a kind of Inspiration, much superior to that which the Heathenish Poets pretended to derive from their Fictitious Apollo: So it was my Ambition to Address one of my weak Performances to Your Lordship, who, by Universal Consent, are justly allowed to be the best Judge of all kinds of Writing.

. . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . .

However, towards the end of all this obsequiousness Centlivre suddenly switches tack, pleading feminine inadequacies, implying that all the foregoing had perhaps been intended ironically and that she is here slyly transgressing the norms of these fawning dedications to pompous men.

And here, my Lord, the Occasion seems fair for me to engage in a Panegyric upon those Natural and Acquired Abilities, which so brightly Adorn your Person: But I shall resist that Temptation, being conscious of the Inequality of a Female Pen to so Masculine an Attempt; and having no other Ambition, than to Subscribe myself, My Lord,

Your Lordship’s Most Humble and
Most Obedient Servant,
Susanna Centlivre.

. . . . . . . . . . .

Killing the Angel on Amazon US*
Killing the Angel on Amazon UK*
. . . . . . . . . . .

Husbands in life and onstage

Not much is known about Centlivre’s early life but it is likely that her father died early, her mother remarried, then also died, after which stepfather died too. She probably then left home to join a company of strolling actors at around the age of fifteen, playing breeches roles – the male parts – and marrying another actor at the age of sixteen. He died less than a year later, she married again, an army officer named Carroll, but he died in a duel year after that.

Then, while performing at Windsor Castle, she met Joseph Centlivre and married him, though he was only a cook in the Castle kitchen. This one seems to have lived rather longer than the previous two, but presumably Susanna needed the money from her writing to sustain them.

In the play The Perjur’d Husband, 1700, Centlivre playfully subverts with the conventions of male characters complaining about women; her characters say the same things about the joy of being free from women as those in male-authored plays but they can be read as ironic because they were written by a woman.

Oh! happy he
Who lives secure and free from Love’s Alarms.
But happier far, who, Master of himself,
Ranges abroad without that Clog, a Wife.
Oh! rigorous Laws imposed on Free-born Man!
On Man, by bounteous Nature first designed
The Sovereign Lord of all the Universe!
Why must his generous Passion thus be starved,
And be confined to one alone?
The Woman, whom Heaven sent as a Relief,
To ease the Burden of a tedious Life,
And be enjoyed when summoned by Desire,
Is now become the Tyrant of our Fates.

. . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . .

Plays continued to be performed beyond her lifetime

Centlivre’s plays continued to be popular and were performed regularly until well after her death; in 1762 her collected works were published in three volumes. However, in the introduction (written by an anonymous woman) it is made clear that audiences initially stayed away from her plays, knowing they were by a woman; only when word of mouth spread did the audiences increase.

Her play of the Busy Body, when known to be the Work of a Woman, scarce defrayed the expenses of the First Night. The thin Audience were pleased, and caused a full House the Second; the Third was crowded and so on to the Thirteenth, then it stopped, on account of the advanced season; but the following Winter successively, was acted by rival Players, both at Drury Lane, and at the Hay-Market Houses. See here the Effect of Prejudice, a Woman who did Honour to the Nation, suffered because she was a Woman. Are these things fit and becoming a free born People, who call themselves polite and civilised!

The author of the introduction is at pains to make sure that we understand the problems facing a woman writer at that time.

Some Authors have had a Shandeian Knack of ushering in their own Praises, sounding their own Trumpet, calling Absurdity Wit, and boasting when they ought to blush; but our Poetess had Modesty, the general Attendant of Merit. She was even ashamed to proclaim her own great Genius, probably because the Custom of the Times discountenanced poetical Excellence in a Female. The Gentlemen of the Quill published it not, perhaps envying her superior Talents; and her Bookseller, complying with national Prejudices, put a fictitious name to her Love’s Contrivance, through fear that the work should be condemned, if known to be Feminine.

. . . . . . . . . . .

You may also enjoy:
5 Early English Women Writers to Discover
. . . . . . . . . . .

Finding her own voice

Centlivre did blow her own trumpet on occasion though, and certainly knew the mechanics of playwriting; she refers to Aristotle’s three dramatic unities: time, space and action. Another early English author, Elizabeth Montagu, in her praise of Shakespeare, condemned French authors for sticking too closely to them.

Centlivre understands these things but also understands that audiences simply want entertainment, to suspend disbelief for an evening. In her Preface to Loves Contrivance, 1703, Centlivre makes it clear that she knows the classics but does not seek to emulate them.

Writing is a kind of Lottery in this fickle Age, and Dependence on the Stage as precarious as the Cast of a Die; the Chance may turn up, and a Man may write to please the Town, but ’tis uncertain, since we see our best Authors sometimes fail. The Critics cavil most about Decorums, and cry up Aristotle’s Rules as the most essential part of the Play. I own they are in the right of it; yet I dare venture a Wager they’ll never persuade the Town to be of their Opinion, which relishes nothing so well as Humour lightly tossed up with Wit, and dressed with Modesty and Air. . . This I dare engage, that the Town will ne’er be entertained with Plays according to the Method of the Ancients, till they exclude this Innovation of Wit and Humour, which yet I see no likelihood of doing.

. . . . . . . . . . .

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.

. . . . . . . . . . .

More about Susanna Centlivre

Wikipedia List of works Reader discussion on Goodreads Encyclopedia.com

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Regiment of Women by Clemence Dane (1917)

This introduction to Regiment of Women (1917), a proto-lesbian novel by the pseudonymous Clemence Dane, is is excerpted from Girls in Bloom: Coming of Age in mid-20th Century Women’s Fiction by Francis Booth, reprinted with permission:

The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall (1928 ), 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.

Clemence Dane’s 1921 play, A Bill of Divorcement, was made into a film three times and Dane went on to write screenplays herself, including Anna Karenina, starring Greta Garbo.

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Winifred Ashton (AKA Clemence Dane)
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A leading feminist

As she was thirty years old in 1918, Ashton was one of the first women to be allowed to vote under the new Representation of the People Act – it was not until ten years later that women aged twenty-one and over were allowed to vote. Ashton joined the Six Point Group, founded in 1921 to press for equality for women in six areas: political, occupational, moral, social, economic, and legal. In 1927, writing as Clemence Dane, she published The Women’s Side.

When conditions are evil it is not your duty to submit . . . when conditions are evil, your duty, in spite of protests, in spite of sentiment, your duty, though you trample on the bodies of your nearest and dearest to do it, though you bleed your own heart while your duty is to see that those conditions are changed.

If your laws forbid you, you must change your laws. If your church forbids you, you must change your church. And if your God forbids you, you must change your God.

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Girls in Bloom by Francis Booth on Amazon US*
Girls in Bloom on Amazon UK*
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Interpreting and misinterpreting the title

The word ‘Regiment’ in the title Regiment of Women means ‘rule by,’ and is a reference to John Knox’s pamphlet The First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women, 1558, published at the time of Queen Elizabeth I; Knox argued that rule by women was against the teachings of the Bible.

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.

 

Clare, Alwynne, and Louise

The two ostensible main characters of the novel are teachers at a private girls’ boarding school: Clare Hartill, in her thirties, deputy headmistress but in practice the person who runs the school, and nineteen-year-old Alwynne Durand. The two women are very close and go abroad together in the summer holidays, implying though never explicitly stating a lesbian relationship.

However, for our purposes, the most interesting character is their fourteen-year-old pupil Louise Denny, who adores Clare more even than the average boarding school girl loves a teacher, though both teachers dote on her in return. There is no explicit suggestion that their interest in Louise is sexual, though the symbolism of calyx and blossom is certainly suggestive.

Clare could be exquisitely tender, could keep all-patient vigil over an unfolding mind, provided that the calyx concealed a rare enough blossom. Louise was encouraged, her shyness swept aside, her ideas developed, her knowledge tested; she was fed, too, cautiously, on richer and richer food – stray evening lectures, picture galleries with Alwynne, headiest of cicerones; the freedom of the library and long talks with Clare.

At home, Louise had no elder sister and unsympathetic parents. When she was sent to boarding school at the age of twelve, ‘She was unaccustomed to companions of her own age and sex and, quite simply, did not know how to make friends.’ Clare’s effect on Louise is shattering; she becomes something between a goddess, a mother, and a sister.

With Clare’s intervention, the world was changed for Louise; she had her first taste of active pleasure. It is difficult to realize what an effect a woman of Clare’s temperament must have had on the impressionable child. In her knowledge, her enthusiasms, her delicate intuition, and her keen intellectual sympathy, she must have seemed the embodiment of all dreams, the fulfillment of every longing, the ideal made flesh.

A wanderer in an alien land, homesick, hungry, for whom, after weary days, a queen descends from her throne, speaking his language, supplying his unvoiced wants, might feel something of the adoring gratitude that possessed Louise. She rejoiced in Clare as a vault-bred flower in sunlight.

Both Clare and Alwynne are blissfully unaware of the impact they are having on the literally-cloistered, naive fourteen-year-old girl, though they should of course know better. Even Louise’s school friend Cynthia can see the disaster coming. Cynthia also admires Clare but not in the way that Louise does. ‘I don’t worship her like you do,’ says Cynthia.

    ‘I don’t!  – I just love her.’ Louise glowed.
      Cynthia laughed jollily. ‘Oh, well! You’ll get over that. Wait till you get a best boy.’
    ‘If you think I’d look at any silly man, after knowing her –’
     ‘My dear girl! Has it never occurred to you that you’ll marry some day?’
      Louise shook her head. ‘I’ve thought it all out. I never could love anybody as much as I do Miss Hartill. I know I couldn’t.’
    ‘But it’s not the same! Falling in love with a man –’
    ‘Love’s love,’ said Louise with finality. ‘Where’s the difference?’

Cynthia knows the difference between men and women, or at least claims to. She attempts to tell Louise. ‘Shall I tell you? Would you like to know? You ought to – you’re fourteen – it’s absurd – not knowing about things – shall I tell you?’ But Louise is not interested, she is not yet ready to come of age. ‘I don’t think I want to know anything. It’s awfully sweet of you.’

And Louise, eating chocolates, was not long in forgetting the conversation and all the curious discomfort it had aroused. If a leaf had fallen on the white garment of her innocence – a leaf from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil – she had brushed it aside, all unconscious, before it could leave a stain.

 

No happy endings allowed

This idyll cannot last, and it doesn’t. One evening Clare has invited Louise to a very grown-up function; Louise believes she has behaved appropriately but Clare is annoyed with her. She begs Clare not to be cross.

‘I can’t bear it. It’s killing me. Couldn’t you stop being angry?’
      Clare, ignoring her, wrenched open the door. Louise, flung sideways, slipped on the polished floor. She crouched where she fell, and caught at Clare’s skirts. She was completely demoralised.
     ‘Miss Hartill! Oh, please – please – if you would only understand. You hurt me so. You hurt me so.’
      Clare stood looking down at her. ‘Once and for all, Louise, I dislike scenes. Let me go, please.’

This rejection literally tips the fragile Louise over the edge. She goes up to the top of the big old house and leans out of the window, contemplating what it would be like to fall to the ground. ‘She imagined the sensation of the impact, and shuddered. But at least they would kill one outright….’ Louise hesitates, pulls back, but then she hears a knocking at the door.

     They would break open the door … They would find her … They would stop her … Coward that she was – fool and coward … One instant’s courage – one little movement!
     She stiffened herself anew. Poised on the extreme edge of the outer sill, she pushed her two hands through the belt of her dress, lest they should save her in her own despite. She stood an instant, her eyes closed.
     Then she sprang …

Poor Louise never lives to come of age. There were no happy endings allowed in lesbian novels for a long time after Regiment of Women.

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More by Francis Booth on this site
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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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More about Regiment of Women by Clemence Dane Review in Stuck in a Book Reader discussion on Goodreads Read Regiment of Women (full text)

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

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Francie Nolan: Coming of Age in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

The coming of age of a strong  female protagonist was a surprisingly common theme in mid-20-century literature by women authors. At a time when women’s progress suffered setbacks, perhaps the pages of books were an  outlet for repressed ambitions and desires. Francie Nolan, the gentle, relatable heroine of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith is considered in this excerpt from Girls in Bloom: Coming of Age in mid-20th Century Women’s Fiction by Francis Booth. Reprinted with permission:

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1943), the first published novel by Betty Smith (1896-1971) is a wonderful example of the female bildungsroman, following the central character Francie Nolan in an epic sweep from age eleven to seventeen. Beginning in summer 1912, the story centers around Francie and her Irish immigrant family, living in a Brooklyn slum where the children pick rags to make a few cents.

 

Learning about the world through books

Like Cassandra Mortmain of I Capture the Castle and like some other girls in this genre – Natalie Waite in Shirley Jackson’s Hangsaman is another example – Francie is perhaps unreasonably literate, even more so given her poor background. She loves the local public library.

Francie thought that all the books in the world were in that library and she had a plan about reading all the books in the world. She was reading a book a day in alphabetical order and not skipping the dry ones. She remembered that the first author had been Abbott. She had been reading a book a day for a long time now and she was still in the B’s.

Already she had read about bees and buffaloes, Bermuda vacations and Byzantine architecture. For all of her enthusiasm, she had to admit that some of the B’s had been hard going. But Francie was a reader. She read everything she could find: trash, classics, timetables and the grocer’s price list. Some of the reading had been wonderful; the Louisa May Alcott books, for example. She planned to read all the books over again when she had finished with the Z’s.

We are not told what Francie thought of Jane Austen or whether she has yet reached the Brontës. Francie lives out the metaphor of the tree growing in Brooklyn of the title, which grows outside her window. “An eleven-year-old girl sitting on this fire escape could imagine that she was living in a tree. That’s what Francie imagined every Saturday afternoon in summer.”

Her mother, who is herself only twenty-nine at the start of the story, says: “Look at that tree growing up there out of that grating. It gets no sun, and water only when it rains. It’s growing out of sour earth. And it’s strong because its hard struggle to live is making it strong. My children will be strong that way.”

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Girls in Bloom by Francis Booth on Amazon*
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Thriving through reading

And Francie is strong that way. She thrives at school, and particularly loves her school supplies: “a notebook and tablet and a pencil box with a sliding top filled with new pencils, an eraser, a little tin pencil sharpener made in the shape of a cannon, a pen wiper, and a six-inch, softwood, yellow ruler.”

In a long flashback to when Francie is younger and just starting school, the magic of the discovery of reading and the worlds to which it gives even the poorest girl access, is beautifully captured.

Oh, magic hour when a child first knows it can read printed words!

For quite a while, Francie had been spelling out letters, sounding them and then putting the sounds together to mean a word. But one day, she looked at a page and the word ‘mouse’ had instantaneous meaning. She looked at the word and the picture of a grey mouse scampered through her mind… She read a few pages rapidly and almost became ill with excitement. She wanted to shout it out. She could read! She could read!

From that time on, the world was hers for the reading. She would never be lonely again, never miss the lack of intimate friends. Books became her friends and there was one for every mood. There was poetry for quiet companionship. There was adventure when she tired of quiet hours. There would be love stories when she came into adolescence and when she wanted to feel a closeness to someone she could read a biography. On that day when she first knew she could read, she made a vow to read one book a day as long as she lived.

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A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith
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Writing, writing, and more writing

Francie keeps a diary, like many girls in this genre. One day, when she is thirteen she writes: “Today, I am a woman.” It’s not clear whether this is because her periods have started. “She looked down on her long thin and as yet formless legs. She crossed out the sentence and started over. ‘Soon, I shall become a woman.’ She looked down on her chest which was as flat as a wash board and ripped the page out of the book. She started fresh on a new page.”

That same Saturday she sees her name in print for the first time, a story of hers having been printed in the school magazine as the best story in her composition class. But her composition teacher looks down on her family and her way of life and consequently looks down on the stories that Francie writes about them.

“I honestly believe that you have promise. Now that we’ve talked things out, I’m sure you will stop writing those sordid little stories.” Francie is appalled to be called sordid: she loves her mother and father, who do their best for her and her brother. She uncharacteristically lashes out at her teacher. “Don’t you ever dare use that word about us!”

Francie has plans to publish the book when it is finished and has even worked out in her mind a fantasy of the dialogue she will have with her delighted teacher when she sees it. “It was such a rosy dream that Francie started the next chapter in a fever of excitement. She’d write and write and get it done quickly so the dream could come true.”

But there is no food in the apartment, just some stale bread and she can hardly write for hunger. Reading what she has written, she realizes that she has been simply inverting her own poverty: she is writing about a heroine spoilt by a surfeit of rich food because her own hunger has made her obsessed.

Furious with the novel, she ripped the copy-book apart and stuffed it into the stove. When the flames began licking on it, her fury increased and she ran and got her box of manuscripts from under her bed … She was burning all her pretty “A” compositions.’

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How Betty Smith Came to Write A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
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Entering the working world young

After her father dies, Francie’s mother cannot afford for both her and her brother to go to school and favors the boy. Francie starts working in a factory at the age of fourteen, lying about her age to make herself older so that she can get a job. Soon, though, she improves her situation enormously, working as a reader in a newspaper office and earning what by her family’s standards is an enormous amount of money while reading for a living.

Even after she loses this job, she falls on her feet and gets a job working a teletype. “She thought it a wonderful miracle that she could sit at that machine and type and have the words come out hundreds of miles away.’” She works the night shift which takes care of her “lonely evenings,” and allows her to sit outside in the sun during the day. Francie is still only fifteen. Her mother suggests that she could go to college while working the night shift.

But what in the world could I learn in high school now? Oh, I’m not conceited or anything, but after all, I read eight hours a day for almost a year and I learned things. I got my own ideas about history and government and geography and writing and poetry. I read too much about people – what they do and how they live. I’ve read about crimes and about heroic things.

Mama, I’ve read about everything. I couldn’t sit still now in a classroom with a bunch of baby kids and listen to an old maid teacher drool away about this and that. I’d be jumping up and correcting her all the time. Or else, I’d be good and swallow it all down and then I’d hate myself for . . . well, . . . eating mush instead of bread. So I will not go to high school. But I will go to college some day.

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More by Francis Booth on this site
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A lost chance at love

When Francie is sixteen, she meets Lee, a soldier who is about to go off to the war – this is 1917. He admits she means nothing to him but tries to persuade Francie to spend the night with him. She resists but promises to write to him every day while he is away and marry him when he comes back. And if he doesn’t come back she promises never to marry, or even kiss anyone else.

“And he asked for her whole life as simply as he’d ask for a date. And she promised away her whole life as simply as she’d offer a hand in greeting or farewell.”

Soon afterward, Francie gets a letter from Lee’s mother thanking her for being a good friend to him while he was in New York and telling her that Lee has got married. “I read the letter you sent Lee. It was mean of him to pretend to be in love with you and I told him so. He said to tell you he’s dreadfully sorry.” Francie confides in her mother, Katie.

   “Mother, he asked me to be with him for the night. Should I have gone?”
     Katie’s mind darted around looking for works.
   “Don’t make up a lie, Mother. Tell me the truth.”
     Katie couldn’t find the right words.
   “I promise you that I’ll never go with a man without being married first – if I ever marry. And if I feel that I must – without being married, I’ll tell you first. That’s a solemn promise. So you can tell me the truth without worrying that I’ll go wrong if I know it.”
    “There are two truths,” said Katie finally.
    “As a mother, I say it would have been a terrible thing for a girl to sleep with the stranger – a man she had known less than forty-eight hours. Horrible things might have happened to you. Your whole life might have been ruined. As a mother, I tell you the truth.
    “But as a mother …” she hesitated. “I will tell you the truth as a woman. It would have been a very beautiful thing. Because there is only once that you love that way.”
     Francie thought, “I should have gone with him then. I’ll never love anyone as much again. I wanted to go and I didn’t go and now I don’t want him that way anymore because she owns him now. But I wanted to and I didn’t and now it’s too late.”
    She put her head down on the table and wept.

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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 Francie Nolan: Coming of Age in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.

Merci, Colette: How the Legendary French Author Continues to Inspire

This heartwarming essay by Tyler Scott is an homage to Colette (1873 – 1954), the bold and fearless French author, and discusses how she continues to inspire writers at any stage of practice:

In the fraught year of 2020, I had been too addled and worried to write very much. After a career as a freelancer, I started to wonder if things had ground to a halt. Was this the end of the line for me? After all that work? All that research? All those accolades? As Claudia Emerson, the late Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and onetime classmate told me, “Sometimes it’s just easier to quit.”

So, what opened my eyes, jolted my imagination, made me grab a pen and pick up my dusty journal? Colette. Thanks to a famous French author, I am writing again for the first time in months.

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Learn more about Colette
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Slow down and study life

How would a belletrist most people in the United States have never heard of help me heal? Because her prose is voluptuous, wistful, and sometimes saucy and when I read her, she reminds me to slow down, study, and take more pains with my writing. To paint with words layer by layer.

I may look out my dining room window and see a bed of green moss yet with her ghostly hand guiding me, I realize the moss is greyish, forlorn, and striped with sunlight. And look! The mayor next door is heading to work at the newspaper (I live in a small town where people wear several hats). And why is Mr. So-and-So walking his retriever so quickly this morning? Is it really that cold?

A writer like Colette encourages you to take the extra step and look for the art in the scenery as well as the people. Find the beauty in the simple and the simple in the beauty. Our world is a prism of detail.

 

 

Discovering Colette in Paris

Like many Southern girls way back when (I am a woman of a certain age), my parents sent me on Junior Year Abroad in 1977 to learn a language, broaden my horizons, and learn some Old-World etiquette. I chose Paris.

In my French program, I had a chic teacher named Pascal who one day assigned a passage from Colette as well as a pastiche. I had never heard of either and can’t remember what we read, but whatever it was, the floodgates opened. Colette has influenced me ever since. Her prose = poetry.

“Always up at dawn and sometimes before day, my mother attached particular importance to the cardinal points of the compass, as much for the good as for the harm they might bring. It is because of her and my deep-rooted love for her that first thing every morning, and while I am still snug in bed, I always ask: ‘Where is the wind coming from?’ only to be told in reply: ‘It’s a lovely day,’ or ‘The Palais-Royal’s full of sparrows,’ or ‘The weather’s vile’ or ‘seasonable.’ So nowadays I must rely on myself for the answer, by watching which way a cloud is moving, listening for ocean rumblings in the chimney.” (From Sido, Colette’s tribute to her mother)

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Secrets of the Flesh, a Life of Colette
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Becoming Colette

Sidonie Gabrielle Colette was born in 1873 in Saint-Sauveur-en-Puisaye in Burgundy. Daughter of a retired soldier and politician and a strong-willed mother, she was a typical mischievous girl turned loose with her friends and family in the countryside, all of which would play major roles in her writing.

Her style was distinct, discreet: remember: she was a product of La Belle Epoque. I recommend Judith Thurman’s biography, Secrets of the Flesh, a Life of Colette, for an excellent overview of this remarkable woman’s life. 

Colette was prolific – she created about 80 works, including books, reportage, plays, short stories, essays, movie scripts, criticism, a libretto for Ravel – a veritable library. A feminist who often wrote autobiographically, Colette did not shy away from sexual themes, to borrow from Tolstoy, she wrote about “man’s most tormenting tragedy – the tragedy of the bedroom” – all with Mother Nature as a backdrop.

At twenty, she was swept off her feet by an older boulevardier from Paris, Henri Gauthier-Villars, Willy, who was also a publisher, editor and managed a stable of ghostwriters writing potboilers. During their early years together, Willy figured that Colette had entertaining schoolgirl tales, so he had her write them down, being sure to add some spice.

 

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How Colette Came to Write the Claudine Stories
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Thus, was born the Claudine series: Claudine at School; Claudine in Paris; Claudine Married; and Claudine and Annie, all bestsellers. The bad news was these books were published under Willy’s name, not to mention he also locked Colette in her room so she would toil away – after all he was making money off her talent and his editing. (“And that is how I became a writer,” she once recalled.) In 1904 she published Dialogue des Bêtes under her husband’s pen name Colette Willy.

Two years later, miserable, fed up with his philandering, she finally divorced Willy and struck out on her own, publishing La Retraite Sentimentale under her surname. The following years gave her plenty of material: a career in musical theater; affairs with both sexes; another marriage to the editor in chief of the newspaper Le Matin; an affair with her stepson (!); two world wars; motherhood late in life; opening two beauty shops; receiving the Legion of Honor and Prix de Goncourt; and enduring the Nazis in Occupied Paris with her Jewish third husband who was interred for a period.

Colette wrote her novel, Gigi, in 1944 and later chose an unknown actress named Audrey Hepburn to star in the Broadway adaption in 1951.

The Vagabond, Cheri, The Last of Cheri, The Tender Shoot and Other Stories are some of my favorite tomes as well as editor and translator Robert Phelps’s Earthly Paradise, where he pieced together parts of her prose to tell her autobiography. This was the first book I bought of Colette’s and my copy is so well-worn that the dust jacket is in four pieces and I use them as bookmarks. I don’t think there is such thing as a bad book by Colette. She was masterful and if the truth be known, her writing is so smooth and heady she is one of the few writers I can read before I go to sleep. The style is a true lull of words, a song.

 

 Colette gives writers a sense of hope

“To write, to be able to write, what does that mean? It means spending long hours dreaming before a white page, scribbling unconsciously, letting your pen play round a blot of ink and nibble at a half-formed word, scratching it, making it bristle with darts and adorning it with antennae and paws until it loses all resemblance to a legible word and turns into a fantastic insect or a fluttering creature, half butterfly, half fairy.” (From The Vagabond, a story of a young woman who is torn between love, independence, and art)

A writer like Colette gives us a sense of hope and pride and after such a tough and sad year as 2020 was, I think all of us need rejuvenation. Moreover, I understand why, long ago, my teacher assigned the reading and pastiche; Colette’s style is descriptive and easy to imitate and I think writing bad Colette is better than not writing at all.

Nowadays, I read her in English and the translations are excellent. Given she was penning a century ago, she had a rich vocabulary, so I usually keep a list of words I don’t know. Words like superannuated, Ortolan, and melopoeia are building blocks and I’ve always had the rule that each time I write an article, I must use a new word.

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Colette’s advice to writers

How does else does Colette influence me? She wrote until her last days, even though she was bedridden and crippled with arthritis and she never let poverty, heartbreak, war, an abusive husband, celebrity, motherhood, or bad health get in the way of her trade. This reminds me not to turn into a wannabe who talks about writing more than she writes.

She had many key words of advice:

“Writing only leads to more writing.”“Look long and hard at the things that please you, even longer and harder at what causes you pain.”“Sit down and put down everything that comes into your head and then you’re a writer. But an author is one who can judge one’s own stuff’s worth, without pity, and destroy most of it.”“Nobody asked you to be happy. Work. Do you hear me complaining?”

And my favorite:

“Hope costs nothing.”

Next time you hit a wall in your writing, choose a book from one of your favorite authors. Peruse, take notes, read and revel: remember these writers suffered most of the same challenges you and I have. Dry spells, penury, distractions, too many responsibilities, family and friends who rolled their eyes and patted us on our shoulders, enough rejection to paper a bedroom wall. Turning to a favorite wordsmith for guidance is a lot cheaper than therapy.

 The death of a legend, and a legacy

On August 3, 1954, Colette, after a sip of champagne, died at her apartment in Palais Royale. She was, as ever, surrounded by her beloved cats. The onetime schoolgirl from Burgundy had become a beloved national treasure with the same stature as Proust and considered a female Montaigne.

Because of her two divorces, the Catholic Church denied her a Christian burial, but France had other ideas. She was given a state funeral with full honors, the first for a woman, and buried with much pomp and respect. A kind soul mounted this plaque on a wall in her garden: Ici vecut, ici mourut Colette, dont l’oeuvre est est une fenetre grande ouverte sur la vie. (Here lived, here died Colette, whose work is a window wide-open on life.)

Many years ago, my husband and I owned a sailboat, a 29-foot sloop, sails trimmed in navy blue, teak interior, dingy dragging along behind. When I close my eyes, I see the boat cutting through the choppy waves of the Chesapeake Bay and I hear the sounds of happiness from family and friends, all under a beamy sun and watchful seagulls. We were surrounded by nature and joy, memories we all hold so dear now. 

The name of the sailboat was Colette.

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

Sources

Introduction, My Mother’s House & Sido, The Modern Library, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, Inc., New York, 1995.Earthly Paradise, An Autobiography, compiled by Robert Phelps, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, Inc., New York, 1966.Introduction, Short Novels of Colette, The Dial Press, New York, 1951.

Books by Colette on Bookshop.org*
Colette page on Amazon*

 

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