Nava Atlas's Blog, page 45
February 15, 2021
The Scandalous, Sexually Explicit Writings of Aphra Behn
Aphra Behn (1640 – 1689), was far ahead of her time as the first Englishwoman to earn a living by the pen as a playwright, poet, and novelist. She was also considered scandalous not just for thriving in a profession generally closed to women, but for the sexually explicit nature of her writing. This aspect of her artistry is explored in this excerpt from Killing the Angel: Early British Transgressive Women Writers ©2021 by Francis Booth. Reprinted by permission:
In A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf espoused Aphra Behn’s cause as the great precursor of free women writers — though the first book in English was written by Julian of Norwich, the first autobiography was written by Margery Kempe, the first playwright and female poet since antiquity was Hrotsvitha and the first professional woman writer was probably Christine of Pizan.
“All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn which is, most scandalously but rather appropriately, in Westminster Abbey, for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds.”
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Learn more about Aphra Behn
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Woolf argued that it was not the fact that Behn succeeded artistically that was her transgression, but the fact that she succeeded commercially. Because of this, rather than helping the women writers who followed her, Behn may have made it worse for them precisely because of her public transgressiveness, not just as a writer but as a woman.
Aphra Behn . . . made, by working very hard, enough to live on. The importance of that fact outweighs anything that she actually wrote . . . for here begins the freedom of the mind, or rather the possibility that in the course of time the mind will be free to write what it likes. For now that Aphra Behn had done it, girls could go to their parents and say, You need not give me an allowance; I can make money by my pen. Of course the answer for many years to come was, Yes, by living the life of Aphra Behn! Death would be better!
The reason for the parents’ horror would have been Behn’s very public views on free sexual relations for both men and women. She was not only a friend of the poet John Dryden but of the notorious libertine John Wilmot, Lord Rochester; that friendship alone would have ruined her reputation.
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Killing the Angel on Amazon US*
Killing the Angel on Amazon UK*
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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.
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 dispense,
Offering her Virgin-Innocence
A Victim to Loves Sacred Flame ;
Whilst th’ or’e ravish’d Shepherd lies,
Unable to perform the Sacrifice.
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 could move,
Or calm that Rage that had debauch’d his Love.
Writing as Astrea
Subsequent generations were even more prudish than Behn’s and were generally unkind to Behn’s transgressiveness: Alexander Pope said of her, “The stage how loosely does Astrea tread, Who fairly puts all characters to bed!”
Behn wrote her scandalous, sex-filled plays under a pseudonym – Astrea – as did many of her contemporaries and successors (often beginning with A: Anne Finch called herself Ardelia and George Sand used the name Aurore); it would be a long time before transgressive women writers published under their own name. Some women published works with no name at all attached; as Virginia Woolf said, ‘I would venture to guess that Anonymous, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.’
Love Letters Between a Nobleman and his Sister (1684)
Behn’s novels were as sexually frank as her plays. In Love Letters Between a Nobleman and his Sister (1684) – a transgressive title in itself – first printed anonymously, innocent young Silvia has given herself to Philander (the clue is in his name, Silvia) and now regrets it. Her letter to him is highly erotic; Behn as Silvia is here transgressing the bounds of what an ‘innocent’ young girl is supposed to say. This is one of the first descriptions of a woman’s sexual desires to be published by a woman since Margery Kempe and far more explicit.
I own, for I may own it, now heaven and you are witness of my shame, I own with all this love, with all this passion, so vast, so true, and so unchangeable, that I have wishes, new, unwonted wishes, at every thought of thee I find a strange disorder in my blood, that pants and burns in every vein, and makes me blush, and sigh, and grow impatient . . .
What though I lay extended on my bed, undressed, unapprehensive of my fate, my bosom loose and easy of access, my garments ready, thin and wantonly put on, as if they would with little force submit to the fond straying hand: what then, Philander, must you take the advantage?
Must you be perjured because I was tempting? It is true, I let you in by stealth by night, whose silent darkness favoured your treachery; but oh, Philander, were not your vows as binding by a glimmering taper, as if the sun with all his awful light had been a looker on? I urged your vows as you pressed on, – but oh, I fear it was in such a way, so faintly and so feebly I upbraided you, as did but more advance your perjuries.
Your strength increas’d, but mine alas declin’d; ‘till I quite fainted in your arms, left you triumphant lord of all: no more my faint denials do persuade, no more my trembling hands resist your force, unregarded lay the treasure which you toil’d for, betrayed and yielded to the lovely conqueror– but oh tormenting, – when you saw the store, and found the prize no richer, with what contempt, (yes false, dear man) with what contempt you view’d the unvalu’d trophy: what, despised!
Having had his way with Silvia, Philander immediately treats her with contempt; Behn writes of this as if from personal experience. It is easy to see why her frankness would upset the parents of aspiring female authors.
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5 Early English Women Writers to Discover
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But Behn’s transgressiveness was not only in relation to sex: her late novel Oroonoko (1688) is critical of both colonialism and slavery and is sympathetic towards its eponymous, noble African hero. It is set in the recently founded Dutch colony of Surinam, whose economy depended totally on slavery and which Behn herself had visited; she became a staunch opponent of slavery herself. “I was myself an Eye-witness to a great Part of what you will find here set down; and what I could not be Witness of, I receiv’d from the Mouth of the chief Actor in this History, the Hero himself.”
Unusually for this time, the narrator is female, giving Behn an opportunity to set out her feelings and opinions in a way that women authors were not expected to. Behn believed herself to be a writer of the first rank and commercially at least she certainly was, but she constantly felt she had to justify herself as a woman writer.
‘Tis not fit for the Ladys
In the preface to The Lucky Chance, quoted above, Behn wrote:
… They charge it with the old never failing Scandal—That ‘tis not fit for the Ladys: As if (if it were as they falsly give it out) the Ladys were oblig’d to hear Indecencys only from their Pens and Plays and some of them have ventur’d to treat ‘em as Coursely as ‘twas possible, without the least Reproach from them; and in some of their most Celebrated Plays have entertained ‘em with things, that if I should here strip from their Wit and Occasion that conducts ‘em in and makes them proper, their fair Cheeks would perhaps wear a natural Colour at the reading them: yet are never taken Notice of, because a Man writ them, and they may hear that from them they blush at from a Woman – But I make a Challenge to . . . any unprejudic’d Person that knows not the Author, to read any of my Comedys and compare ‘em with others of this Age, and if they find one Word that can offend the chastest Ear, I will submit to all their peevish Cavills; but Right or Wrong they must be Criminal because a Woman’s.
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 information about Aphra Behn
Aphra Behn and the Beginnings of a Female Narrative Voice Poetry Foundation Behn on Writers Inspire Reader discussion on Goodreads. . . . . . . . .
*These are Amazon Affiliate links. If a product is purchased by linking through, Literary Ladies Guide receives a modest commission, which helps maintain our site and helps it to continue growing!
The post The Scandalous, Sexually Explicit Writings of Aphra Behn appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.
February 14, 2021
Tomorrow Will Be Better by Betty Smith (1948)
Betty Smith’s first novel, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1943), was a tough act to follow. And while her subsequent novels were all solid efforts, they didn’t achieve the phenomenal success of her debut. Tomorrow Will Be Better (1948), Smith’s second novel, is still very much worth discovering.
The families depicted in Tomorrow Will Be Better — the Shannons and the Malones — might be fictional neighbors of the Nolan family of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Set in the tenements of Brooklyn in the 1920s, it’s a quintessentially American tale of pursuing dreams in the face of obstacles — not the least of which is poverty.
Margy Shannon, a young woman filled with hope, is central to the narrative. In search of happiness and a better life, she faces disappointment with fortitude and dignity. As the review that follows noted, “Miss Smith has written a quiet, warm book about people she obviously knows and loves well.”
In a tribute to this novel in Vol. 1 Brooklyn (“Playing Checkers in Brooklyn: Hope and Resilience in Betty Smith’s Wartime Fiction”), Marcie McCauley comments:
“With HarperCollins’ November 2020 reprint of Betty Smith’s second novel, Tomorrow Will Be Better (1948), readers are reminded how infrequently working-class readers have seen their lives represented in fiction. More than seven decades after the launch of Betty Smith’s writing career, her focus on low-wage and no-wage families in fiction still stands out.
Even more remarkable, contemporary journalism echoes some of the story elements of Betty Smith’s historical novels. Many aspects of financial hardship in the 20th century are consistent with financial hardship in the 21st century.”
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Betty Smith
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In late 2020, HarperPerennial Modern Classics reissued Tomorrow Will Be Better for a new generation of readers. From the publisher:
From Betty Smith, author of the beloved classic A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, comes a poignant story of love, marriage, poverty, and hope set in 1920s Brooklyn.
Tomorrow Will Be Better tells the story of Margy Shannon, a shy but joyfully optimistic young woman just out of school who lives with her parents and witnesses how a lifetime of hard work, poverty, and pain has worn them down.
Her mother’s resentment toward being a housewife and her father’s inability to express his emotions result in a tense home life where Margy has no voice. Unable to speak up against her overbearing mother, Margy takes refuge in her dreams of a better life.
Her goals are simple—to find a husband, have children, and live in a nice home—one where her children will never know the terror of want or the need to hide from quarreling parents. When she meets Frankie Malone, she thinks her dreams might be fulfilled, but a devastating loss rattles her to her core and challenges her life-long optimism.
As she struggles to come to terms with the unexpected path her life has taken, Margy must decide whether to accept things as they are or move firmly in the direction of what she truly wants.
Rich with the flavor of its Brooklyn background, and filled with the joys and heartbreak of family life, Tomorrow Will Be Better is told with a simplicity, tenderness, and warmhearted humor that only Betty Smith could write.
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You might also like: A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
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From the original review in The Times of San Mateo, CA, August 1948: A Tree Grows in Brooklyn has produced a shoot in Betty Smith’s second novel, Tomorrow Will Be Better. In fact, the Shannons and the Malones might be neighbors of those who peopled her first book.
It is a simple, authentic story of people’s stubborn pursuit of their dreams, their refusal to recognize a stern reality as anything but temporary. She writes with meticulous care and sympathetic skill of people faced with poverty a step above grinding, and clinging to hope a cut above pretensions.
Seeking love and plenty
Gentle, shy Margy Shannon wanted happiness — a husband, children, and a home which would know good humor, peace, love, and plenty. It is a story of Margy’s search for happiness, half understanding it had slipped away from her, but never giving up hope of it.
The Shannon home was dominated by nagging, frustrated Flo, bitter, irascible, and yet with a pent-up core of real love for her daughter. Her husband, Henny, feeling his own inadequacy, fought back a little. But Margy, loving and somewhat understanding her parents, thought only of escaping.
Facing the disappointments of marriage
So she married he first boy who “dated” her, Frankie Malone. Frankie came from the same poverty and the same way of life. It wasn’t the kind of marriage that Margy dreamed about — but she never lost hope that it would be, one day. Miss Smith has written a quiet, warm book about people she obviously knows and loves well.
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Tomorrow Will Be Better on Amazon*
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More about Tomorrow Will Be Better
Reader discussion on Goodreads Review on Kirkus Reviews Playing Checkers in Brooklyn: Hope and Resilience in Betty Smith’s Wartime Fiction Betty Smith’s “Tomorrow Will Be Better” Is Indeed a Rediscovered Classic. . . . . . . . . .
*This is an Amazon Affiliate link. If a product is purchased by linking through, Literary Ladies Guide receives a modest commission, which helps maintain our site and helps it to continue growing!
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February 12, 2021
Elinor Wylie
Elinor Wylie (September 7, 1885 – December 16, 1928) was a popular American poet and novelist in the 1920s and 1930s. She was a celebrated author in her lifetime, with a cult following in her pinnacle years. She was well known for her passionate writing, fueled by ethereal descriptors, historical references, and feminist undertones.
During her short span of eight years as a writer, Elinor published four volumes of poetry and four novels, all garnering praise.
She was also widely known for her tumultuous personal life, which often made its way into her writings. Many of her works offered insight into the difficulties of marriage and the impossible expectations that come with womanhood.
A privileged upbringingBorn Elinor Hoyt in Somerville, New Jersey to Henry Martyn Hoyt, Jr and Anne Morton McMichael. Elinor was raised in a distinguished family. Her grandfather, Henry Hoyt, was the governor of Pennsylvania. Her aunt, Helen Hoyt, was also a poet.
By the time Elinor turned twelve, her family had moved to Washington, D.C., where her father became Solicitor General of the United States. She and her family often rubbed shoulders with D.C.’s political elite.
Elinor was educated in multiple private schools, but didn’t pursue a higher education. Raised in a privileged background, she was expected to be a debutante.
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Marriages and scandalsAt age twenty, Elinor married Philip Simmons Hichborn. Though the marriage was unstable, they had a son together. Elinor alluded to Hichborn being volatile and abusive.
Elinor’s mother didn’t believe in divorce, and meddled in her marital decisions. Because of this, Elinor stayed in the marriage for longer than she had wished.
In the midst of her troubled marriage, Elinor found herself being stalked by Harvard Law graduate and prominent attorney Horace Wylie. He stalked her for years, though he was a married man with three children and seventeen years her senior.
In a shocking turn of events, Elinor left her husband and son, and eloped with Wylie. The incident became a widely-known scandal that was covered in the press. After being socially exiled by friends and family, the couple moved to England and changed their last name. Elinor’s ex-husband ended up committing suicide in 1916.
This wasn’t the end of Elinor’s tumultuous private life — she later left Wylie for her literary confidante, William Rose Benét. And after living with Benét for some years, they separated. Elinor ended up falling for her close friend’s husband, Henry de Clifford Woodhouse.
A brief but prolific writing career
Elinor first began to write seriously and considered publishing during her time in England. She published her first poems anonymously in 1912 in Incidental Numbers, a compilation of poems she had been working on for ten years.
After World War I broke out, Elinor returned to the U.S. with Horace Wylie, settling back in Washington, D.C. There, she frequented literary circles, befriending writers John Peale Bishop, Sinclair Lewis, and her future husband, William Rose Benét. Her literary friends encouraged her to publish.
She submitted poems to Poetry magazine, which published four of her pieces. One of the poems published was “Velvet Shoes,” her most widely anthologized piece.
After this taste of literary success, Elinor moved to New York City and continued making inroads into the literary scene. She published Nets to Catch the Wind in 1921, a collection that contains some of her best poems, including “Velvet Shoes,” “Wild Peaches,” and “Winter Sleep.”
Following Nets to Catch the Wind, she published another successful collection titled Black Armour (1923). It garnered glowing reviews, including one in the New York Times stating, “There is not a misplaced word or cadence in it. There is not an extra syllable.”
Angels and Earthly Creatures, which also received positive reviews, was published in 1925. This collection included nineteen sonnets dedicated to Henry de Clifford Woodhouse, her friend’s husband.
Elinor Wylie published four novels in addition to her poetic work: Jennifer Lorn (1923), The Venetian Glass Nephew (1925), and The Orphan Angel (1926), all of which had rave reviews. Jennifer Lorn’s publication even prompted a torchlight parade in Manhattan to celebrate its release. In all, she published some ten collections of poetry.
Elinor also worked as the poetry editor of Vanity Fair magazine from 1923 to 1925, and edited for The Literary Guild and The New Republic in her later years.
Elinor had suffered from dangerously high blood pressure for much of her life. In the winter of 1928, Elinor died of a stroke. At age forty-three, her untimely death came at the height of her career.
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Taking a deep dive into Elinor Wylie’s workElinor often used her own complicated private life to fuel her works. In many ways, she was a master of subtlety.
Her poems were often rebellious in nature, using her continually failing marriages as a framework for her dissatisfaction with femininity and the expectations that come with it. In that same vein of rebellion, she often expressed her distaste for the wealthy environment in which she was raised.
She expressed these things quietly, through vivid and romantic descriptions. A perfect example of this can be seen in her popular poem “Wild Peaches”:
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 …
Within this dense, romantic poem, Elinor delves into her internal battle with her upbringing. She cloaks these insurgent perspectives by utilizing rich, pastoral details that are oftentimes seen in more traditional works. In this way, Elinor Wylie was a part of a vanguard of women poets, creating a path for feminist literature.
Elinor Wylie’s legacy
Elinor Wylie appealed to general audiences as well as literary critics. Her ability to create writing that was universally enjoyable made her famous.
Today, Elinor is praised by feminist theorists and literary critics. During her lifetime, her marital scandals were notorious and looked down upon. Many of her pieces offer clear insight into the deceptive trap of marriage and the impossible expectations that come with womanhood.
American poet Louis Untermeyer once described Elinor’s writing as “a passion frozen at its source.” Elinor’s literary force transcends the marital scandals that once marked her reputation. She was as subtle as she was bold. Her ability to blend more modern themes within a traditionalist writing style contributed to the developing aesthetic of modernism.
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Elinor Wylie page on Amazon*
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Contributed by Jess Mendes, a 2021 graduate of SUNY-New Paltz with a major in Digital Media Management, and a minor in Creative Writing.
More About Elinor WylieMajor Works
Poetry
Incidental Numbers (1912) Nets to Catch the Wind (1921)Black Armour. New York: Doran, (1923).Trivial Breath. New York, London: Knopf, (1928.Angels and Earthly Creatures: A Sequence of Sonnets (1928)Birthday Sonnet. New York: Random House, 1929.Collected Poems of Elinor Wylie. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, (1932)Selected Works of Elinor Wylie (Evelyn Helmick Hively, ed. 2005)Fiction
Jennifer Lorn: A Sedate Extravaganza (1923)The Venetian Glass Nephew (1925)The Orphan Angel (1926)Mr. Hodge & Mr. Hazard (1928)Collected Prose of Elinor Wylie (1933)Biography
A Private Madness: The Genius of Elinor Wylie by Evelyn Hively (2003)More information and sources
Wikipedia The Poetry Foundation Elinor Wylie: A Sordid Life – Owlcation Britannica Listen to Elinor Wylie’s poetry on Librivox. . . . . . . . .
*This is an Amazon Affiliate link. If a product is purchased by linking through, Literary Ladies Guide receives a modest commission, which helps maintain our site and helps it to continue growing!
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February 10, 2021
Advice to Young Ladies on Reading Novels — From Early Female Authors
Is it possible that early female authors actually warned their target audience —female readers —against the practice of reading novels? It’s not only possible, but seemed to be a fairly common occurrence.
When Madame Bovary first commits adultery, Flaubert tells us that it was her early reading of novels that was to blame: “she recalled the heroines of the books that she had read, and the lyric legion of these adulterous women began to sing in her memory with the voice of sisters that charmed her.”
In his A Plan for the Conduct of Female Education of 1797, Erasmus Darwin warns that ‘many objectionable passages’ are to be found in novels and Rousseau said ‘no chaste girls ever read a novel.’ But even groundbreaking literary ladies who wrote novels themselves were in two minds about letting their daughters, granddaughters and nieces read them. Here’s a sampling:
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Perhaps, were it possible to effect the total extirpation of novels, our young ladies in general, and boarding-school damsels in particular, might profit from their annihilation; but since the distemper they have spread seems incurable, since their contagion bids defiance to the medicine of advice or reprehension, and since they are found to baffle all the mental art of physic, save what is prescribed by the slow regimen of Time, and bitter diet of Experience; surely all attempts to contribute to the number of those which may be read, if not with advantage, at least without injury, ought rather to be encouraged than condemned.
— Fanny Burney (1752 – 1840), from the preface to Evelina (1778)
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I can’t forbear saying something in relation to my granddaughters, who are very near my heart. If any of them are fond of reading, I would not advise you to hinder them (chiefly because it is impossible) seeing poetry, plays, or romances; but accustom them to talk over what they read, and point out to them, as you are very capable of doing, the absurdity often concealed under fine expressions, where the sound is apt to engage the admiration of young people.
I was so much charmed, at fourteen, with the dialogue of Henry and Emma, I can say it by heart to this day, without reflecting on the monstrous folly of the story in plain prose, where a young heiress to a fond father is represented falling in love with a fellow she had only seen as a huntsman, a falconer, and a beggar, and who confesses, without any circumstances of excuse, that he is obliged to run his country, having newly committed a murder.
She ought reasonably to have supposed him, at best, a highwayman; yet the virtuous virgin resolves to run away with him, to live among the banditti, and wait upon his trollop, if she had no other way of enjoying his company. This senseless tale is, however, so well varnished with melody of words and pomp of sentiments, I am convinced it has hurt more girls than ever were injured by the lewdest poems extant.
— Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, (1689 – 1752) from a letter to her daughter
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With respect to sentimental stories, and books of mere entertainment, we must remark, that they should be sparingly used, especially in the education of girls. This species of reading, cultivates what is called the heart prematurely; lowers the tone of the mind, and induces indifference for those common pleasures and occupations which, however trivial in themselves, constitute by far the greatest portion of our daily happiness.
Stories are the novels of childhood. We know, from common experience, the effects which are produced upon the female mind by immoderate novel reading. To those who acquire this taste, every object becomes disgusting which is not in an attitude for poetic painting; a species of moral picturesque is sought for in every scene of life, and this is not always compatible with sound sense, or with simple reality.
— Maria Edgeworth (1767 – 1849), Practical Education, 1798
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I would by no means exclude the kind of reading, which young people are naturally most fond of; though I think the greatest care should be taken in the choice of those fictitious stories, that so enchant the mind – most of which tend to inflame the passions of youth, whilst the chief purpose of education should be to moderate and restrain them.
Add to this, that both the writing and sentiments of most novels and romances are such as are only proper to vitiate your style, and to mislead your heart and understanding. The expectation of extraordinary adventures – which seldom ever happen to the sober and prudent part of mankind – and the admiration of extravagant passions and absurd conduct, some of the usual fruits of this kind of reading; which, when a young woman makes it her chief amusement, generally renders her ridiculous in conversation, and miserably wrongheaded in her pursuits and behavior.
— Hester Chapone (1727 – 1801), Letters on the Improvement of the Mind, Addressed to a Young Lady, 1773
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When she was seven years of age, he chose her such books to read in as might make her wise, not amorous, for he never suffered her to read in romances, nor such light books; but moral philosophy was the first of her studies, to lay a ground and foundation of virtue, and to teach her to moderate her passions, and to rule her affections.
The next, her study was in history, to learn her experience by the second hand, reading the good fortunes and misfortunes of former times, the errors that were committed, the advantages that were lost, the humour and dispositions of men, the laws and customs of nations, their rise, and their fallings, of their wars and agreements, and the like. The next study was in the best of poets, to delight in their fancies, and to recreate in their wit; and this she did not only read, but repeat what she had read every evening before she went to bed.
— Margaret Cavendish, (1623 – 1673) The Contract, 1756
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She soon became a perfect Mistress of the French and Italian Languages, under the Care of her Father; and it is not to be doubted, but she would have made a great Proficiency in all useful Knowledge, had not her whole Time been taken up by another Study. From her earliest Youth she had discovered a Fondness for Reading, which extremely delighted the Marquis; he permitted her therefore the Use of his Library, in which, unfortunately for her, were great Store of Romances, and, what was still more unfortunate, not in the original French, but very bad Translations.
Charlotte Lennox (1730 – 1804), The Female Quixote, 1752
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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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*This is an Amazon Affiliate link. If a product is purchased by linking through, Literary Ladies Guide receives a modest commission, which helps maintain our site and helps it to continue growing!
The post Advice to Young Ladies on Reading Novels — From Early Female Authors appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.
February 9, 2021
Giannina Braschi in the World of Contemporary Latinx Literature
This introduction to Latinx literary figure Giannina Braschi is excerpted from Poets, Philosophers, Lovers: On the Writings of Giannina Braschi, edited by by Frederick Luis Aldama and Tess O’Dwyer. © 2020 University of Pittsburgh Press. All rights reserved, reprinted by permission.
Scholar, playwright, spoken-word performer, award-winning poet, and avant-garde fiction author, since the 1980s Giannina Braschi has been creating up a storm in and around a panoply of Latinx hemispheric spaces.
Her creative corpus reaches across different genres, regions, and historical epochs. Her critical works cover a wide range of subjects and authors, including Miguel de Cervantes, Garcilaso de la Vega, Juan Ramón Jiménez, Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer, Antonio Machado, César Vallejo, and García Lorca.
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Giannina Braschi
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Braschi’s dramatic poetry titles in Spanish include Asalto al tiempo (1981) and La comedia profana (1985). Her radically experimental genre-bending titles include El imperio de los sueños (1988), the bilingual Yo-Yo Boing! (1998), and the English-penned United States of Banana (2011). With national and international awards and works appearing in Swedish, Slovenian, Russian, and Italian, she is recognized as one of today’s foremost experimental Latinx authors.
Her vibrant bilingually shaped creative expressions and innovation spring from her Latinidad, her Puerto Rican-ness that weaves in and through a planetary aesthetic sensibility. We discover as much in her work about US/Puerto Rico sociopolitical histories as we encounter the metaphysical and existential explorations of a Cervantes, Rabelais, Diderot, Artaud, Joyce, Beckett, Stein, Borges, Cortázar, and Rosario Castellanos, for instance.
With every flourish of her pen Braschi reminds us that in the distillation and reconstruction of the building blocks of the universe there are no limits to what fiction can do. And, here too, the black scratches that form words and carefully composed blank spaces shape an absent world; her strict selection out of words and syntax is as important as the precise insertion of words and syntax to put us into the shoes of the “complicit reader” (Julio Cortázar’s term) to most productively interface, invest, and fill in the gaps of her storyworlds.
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Poets Philosophers Lovers on Bookshop.org*
Poets Philosophers Lovers on Amazon*
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Braschi reminds us of the power of lexis—asking us to deep-dive into the metaphorical, subtextual, and allegorical layers of meaning. No subject remains untouched in her fiction making. She draws from Latinx realities as well as metaphysics— even historical archive, sociopolitical, and judicial discourses. Indeed, Braschi invents new forms to express polyvalent Latinx sensibilities that shape-shift across time, place, and identity categories.
In many ways, as a contemporary Latinx author Braschi stands apart. Her radically experimental works continue to grow a genealogy of Latinx letters, but they do so from the avant-garde margins. Taken as a whole her work extends and complicates a trajectory of Latinx experimental fiction that has not received the same critical attention as, perhaps, the work of a more straightforward realist writer such as an Esmeralda Santiago or a Piri Thomas.
Sidestepping the easily consumable, Braschi’s creative work puts pressure on and radically bends a Latinx literary canon, and with this she calls attention to the self-within-the-collective of nation and diasporic community. She converses with Isabel Rios (Victuum, 1976), Cecile Pineda (Face, 1985), Guillermo Gomez-Peña (Codex Espangliensis, 1998), Alejandro Morales (Waiting to Happen, 2001), Salvador Plascencia (The People of Paper, 2005), or Sesshu Foster (Atomik Aztex, 2005).
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And today we see Braschi joined by a growing number of Latinx canon-benders such as Carmen María Machado, Elizabeth Acevedo, Monica de la Torre, and Naomi Ayala. More globally, Braschi’s works extend and complicate a genealogy of avant-garde women of color authors such as Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Claudia Rankine, and Audre Lorde, and she joins with other planetary cutting-edge contemporaries such as Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi, Pamela Lu, Zinzi Clemmons, and Sumana Roy.
Although standing apart, Braschi as creator clearly doesn’t exist ex nihilo. Indeed, we see her build on and redeploy the work of feminist and queer fore-figures, including Cristina Peri Rossi, Alejandra Pizarnik, Clarice Lispector, Luce Irigaray, Helene Cixous, Marguerite Duras, and Gertrude Stein. She does so less from an identity perspective and more from a theoretical practice perspective.
We see a similar dynamic with her Puerto Rican family friends and mentors playwright René Marqués and public intellectual Nilita Vientós-Gastón, and with her fiction-writing friends on the island, Rosario Ferré, Manuel Ramos Otero, Luis Rafael Sánchez, and Ana Lydia Vega.
I think also of her Nuyorican poet friends who are cofounders of the Nuyorican Poets Café, Pedro Pietri and Miguel Algarín, and their precursor Julia de Burgos. From Pizarnik and Duras to Marqués and Pietri, these voices, each with their own aesthetic (some more experimentational than others) and each with their uniquely expressed antiestablishment worldviews, are forerunners to Braschi.
Braschi smuggles into a US imagination a sensibility created in and across a hemispheric Américan history, aesthetic, and culture. And she does so to create hard-hitting, no-holds-barred, mind-expanding storyworlds. She wakes us to the world in and across languages, ontologies, metafictional epistemologies.
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February 5, 2021
Preserving Nature: Emily Dickinson’s Herbarium
Emily Dickinson’s herbarium serves as a time capsule into the poet’s mysterious life. It reflects her poetic connection to nature, and her sensitivity to life and mortality, echoing the enigmatic nature of the poet herself.
Emily lived a quiet life in her hometown of Amherst, Massachusetts, where she was born in 1830. She was a gardener before she was a poet, having studied botany beginning at the age of nine. She also enjoyed working alongside her mother in the garden.
Collecting and pressing flowers was a common hobby for young girls of her time. Emily began her assemblage of flowers while attending Amherst Academy in 1844, and took her passion to new levels, often including pressed flowers in letters she sent.
Pages from Emily Dickinson’s herbarium courtesy of
Houghton Library, Harvard University
She was a serious student of science, particularly botany, during her only year at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary. At a time when the sciences were male-dominated, Emily pushed herself to gain as much knowledge as possible.
At age fourteen, Emily began a collection of over four hundred specimens of dried flowers. Neatly pressed onto sixty-six pages in a leather-bound album, she meticulously and delicately arranged and positioned them, almost as if to appear that they were still alive.
Emily had a habit of juxtaposing botanical samples that wouldn’t often appear together in nature. For example, on the first page of the album, she combined jasmine and pivot, arranging them in the center of the page in such a way that made them look like one plant.
Whether this odd combination was merely for aesthetic purposes or some other intent is beyond our knowledge. Leslie A. Morris, curator of modern books and manuscripts at Harvard University’s Houghton Library, speculates that these arrangements may have been poetic.
“I think you could read a lot into the herbarium if you wanted to. Jasmine has as one of its nicknames ‘poet’s jessamine’; it can also mean ‘passion’ in the language of flowers. Did she choose that specimen because it represented poetry to her? You have jasmine for poetry and passion, and privet for privacy – and Dickinson became a recluse later in life.”
We can never truly know Emily’s intentions, or if they existed at all. However, that doesn’t mean the herbarium isn’t significant.
Emily had a penchant for weaving botanical elements into her writings, informing her passion for poetry with her passion for nature. Poems such as Fame is a Bee , With a Flower, and Nobody Knows this Little Rose include elements of her affinity with the natural world.
Emily Dickinson’s herbarium is extensive, detailed, and sensitively organized. The original Herbarium now lives at Harvard’s Houghton Rare Book Library. It’s so delicate that touching it is prohibited. However, the library has made high-quality online scans of the book that are free to access.
In addition, Harvard University Press published a complete facsimile of the Herbarium in 2006:
“Dickinson devotees can finally examine what lies inside with a full-size, full-color reproduction of the album published as “Emily Dickinson’s Herbarium: A Facsimile Edition” (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press).
To learn more about Emily Dickinson’s herbarium, here are further resources:
Emily Dickinson’s Herbarium A Teenage Emily Dickinson’s Careful Collection of Dried Flowers Emily Dickinson’s Gardening Life by Marta McDowell The Art of the Plant – Emily Dickinson
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February 4, 2021
Frankie Addams: Coming of Age in Carson McCullers’ The Member of the Wedding
Like Mick Kelly of The Heart is a Lonely Hunter and her author, Carson McCullers, Frankie Addams is a tall, gangling tomboy. This in-depth look at the complicated young heroine of The Member of the Wedding (the 1946 novel) is excerpted from Girls in Bloom by Francis Booth.
“ … She was almost a big freak, and her shoulders were narrow, the legs too long … Her hair had been cut like a boy’s, but it had not been cut for a long time and was now not even parted.” At the age of ‘twelve and five-sixths’ Frankie is five feet five and three-quarter inches tall and wears size seven shoes.
“In the past year she had grown four inches, or at least that was what she judged. Already the hateful little summer children hollered to her: ‘Is it cold up there?’ Frankie calculates that ‘unless she could somehow stop herself, she would grow to be over nine feet tall.”
Unlike Mick, however, Frankie doesn’t feel part of any community or family. She has no mother – again, there is an absence of a mother figure – a distant father who is always at work and a much older brother who is away in the army (the highly successful play that McCullers made from the novel specifies the setting as August 1945, at the end of the Second World War).
“It happened that green and crazy summer when Frankie was twelve years old. This was the summer when for a long time she had not been a member. She belonged to no club and was a member of nothing in the world. Frankie had become an unjoined person who hung around in doorways, and she was afraid.”
Frankie is not a member of the club of thirteen and fourteen-year-old girls at school who have “parties with boys on Saturday night. Frankie knew all of the club members, and until this summer she had been like a younger member of the crowd, but now they had this club and she was not a member. They said she was too young and mean.”
The sympathetic BereniceThe only people with whom Frankie has close contact are Berenice Sadie Brown, who has been ‘the cook since Frankie could remember,’ and Frankie’s six-year-old cousin John Henry; much of the novel and the play, which both take place in a very short timescale, are spent with the three of them around the kitchen table.
Like Portia in The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Berenice is a very sympathetically-drawn Black female character from a time when white authors largely avoid African-Americans; she was played to great acclaim in the first production of the stage version of The Member of the Wedding, which opened on December 22, 1949 in Philadelphia, by local actress and jazz/blues singer Ethel Waters, who ten years earlier had been the first African-American to star in her own television show.
Frankie was played by a very young-looking, twenty-three-year-old Julie Harris, whose hair was cropped to make her look younger and more tomboyish; the day before the opening night the director asked to cut it even shorter and to do it herself, as Frankie had done. Harris went on to be nominated for an Academy Award for playing the same role in the 1952 film of the play, in which Ethel Waters also starred.
McCullers was concerned about racial balance in her work, and Berenice Sadie Brown may be based partly on the maid, Lucille, her family had when she was young. In her autobiography, McCullers tells the story of how Lucille, when ‘she was only fourteen and a marvelous cook, had called a cab to go home.’
When the taxi driver arrived, he shouted, ‘I’m not driving no damn …’ [the rest can be imagined] “People, kind, sweet people who had nursed us so tenderly, humiliated because of their color… We were exposed so much to the sight of humiliation and brutality, not physical brutality, but the brutal humiliation of human dignity which is even worse. Lucille comes back to me over and over; gay, charming Lucille.”
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Girls in Bloom by Francis Booth on Amazon*
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The wedding of which Frankie wants to be a member is happening in a few days in Winter Hill and Frankie cannot wait to go – unlike Mick, who is firmly anchored in her community, Frankie cannot wait to go anywhere away from where she is.
“I wish tomorrow was Sunday instead of Friday. I wish I had already left town.”
“Sunday will come,’ said Berenice.
“I doubt it,’ said Frankie. ‘I’ve been ready to leave this town so long. I wish I didn’t have to come back here after the wedding. I wish I was going somewhere for good. I wish I had hundred dollars and could just light out and never see this town again.”
“It seems to me you wish for a lot of things,” said Berenice.
“I wish I was somebody else except me.”
This was the summer that “Frankie was sick and tired of being Frankie. She hated herself, and had become a loafer and a big no-good who hung around the summer kitchen: dirty and greedy and mean and sad.”
Frankie has become aware of the outside world, not like “a round school globe,” but as ‘huge and cracked and loose and turning a thousand miles an hour.’ She is aware of the war, of Patton “chasing the Germans across France,” though it is “happening so fast that sometimes she did not understand.”
Frankie wants to join something, anything — but she cannot join the war. She wants to donate blood to the Red Cross so that the army doctors would say that “the blood of Frankie Addams was the reddest and strongest blood that they had ever known,” but the Red Cross say she is too young. Frankie feels “left out of everything … She was afraid because in the war they would not include her, and because the world seemed somehow separate from herself.”
All these things made her “suddenly wonder who she was, and what she was going to be in the world;” who is this “great big long-legged twelve-year-old blunderbuss who still wants to sleep with her old Papa.” But she is now too old to sleep with her father and sleeps alone in her room, a member of nothing. Her best friend has moved away to Florida and “Frankie did not play with anybody any more.”
Going astray
It was also this summer that Frankie had become a criminal, at least in her own mind. She had taken her father’s gun from the drawer and gone out shooting with it on a vacant lot. She had also stolen a knife from the Sears and Roebuck store, but one sin had been worse than any of them.
One Saturday afternoon in May she committed a secret and unknown sin. In the MacKeans’ garage, with Barney MacKean, they committed a queer sin, and how bad it was she did not know. The sin made a shriveling sickness in her stomach, and she dreaded the eyes of everyone. She hated Barney and wanted to kill him. Sometimes alone in the bed at night she planned to shoot him with the pistol or throw a knife between his eyes.
Like Mick Kelly, after she has committed what we assume is the same sin, Frankie is afraid that people will see the difference in her, afraid of “the eyes of everyone.” After a while though this unspecified sin “became far from her and was remembered only in her dreams.”
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The Member of the Wedding was adapted to film in 1952 and 1997
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The imminent wedding makes Frankie even more aware of her separateness. Her brother and his bride are hundred miles away: “They were them and in Winter Hill, together, while she was her and in the same old town all by herself.”
This is when Frankie has the revelation: she can be a member of something, a member of the wedding. McCullers comes up with one of the greatest sentences in coming-of-age literature:
“They are the we of me. Yesterday, and all the twelve years of her life, she had only been Frankie. She was an I person who had to walk around and do things by herself. All the other people had a we to claim, all other except her. When Berenice said we, she meant Honey and Big Mama, her lodge, or her church. The we of her father was the store. All members of clubs have a we to be-long to and talk about.
The soldiers in the army can say we, and even the criminals on chain-gangs. But the old Frankie had no we to claim, unless it could be the terrible summer we of her and John Henry and Berenice – and that was the last we in the world she wanted. Now all this was suddenly over with and changed. There was her brother and the bride, and it was as though when first she saw them something she had known inside of her: They are the we of me.”
For a moment Frankie believes she has come of age: “It was just at that moment that Frankie understood. She knew who she was and how she was going into the world.” But of course Frankie does not understand. She cannot be a member of the wedding, she cannot be the third person in a couple.
“I’m going off with the two of them to whatever place that they will ever go. I’m going with them … It’s like I’ve known it all my life, that I belong to be with them. I love the two of them so much.” Noting that her brother’s name is Jarvis and his fiancée is Janice she has already decided to change her name to F. Jasmine Addams.
“Jarvis and Janice and Jasmine. See?” she says to Berenice, but Berenice does not understand. Berenice asks what she will do if the couple don’t accept her. “If they don’t, I will kill myself,” she says, with “the pistol that Papa keeps under his handkerchief along with Mother’s picture.”
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Literary Tomboys in Coming of Age Novels
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F. Jasmine does not even discuss any of this with her brother, whom she has not seen for two years – we never see him at all: neither he nor his fiancée appear first-hand in the novel. But still she walks around the town “as a sudden member … entitled as a Queen … It was the day when, from the beginning, the world seemed no longer separate from herself and when all at once she felt included.”
Frankie is now so bold that she goes to a hotel room with a soldier – McCullers does not make explicit the fact that her brother is also a soldier and perhaps her desire to be a “member” of her brother and his new wife extends, if only subliminally, to the physical. Frankie has never met the soldier before and does not even find out his name. He seems not to realize how young she is and assumes she is a prostitute. Having got herself into a difficult situation, she does not know how to get out of it.
F. Jasmine did not want to go upstairs, but she did not know how to refuse. It was like going into a fair booth, or fair ride, that once having entered you cannot leave until the exhibition or the ride is finished. Now it was the same with the soldier, this date. She could not leave until it ended. The soldier was waiting at the foot of the stairs and, unable to refuse, she followed after him.
Once upstairs, neither of them seems at first to know what to do next.
“Already F. Jasmine had started for the door, for she could no longer stand the silence. But as she passed the soldier, grasped her skirt and limpened by fright, she was pulled down beside him on the bed. The next minute happened, but it was too crazy to be realized. She felt his arms around her and smelled his sweaty shirt. He was not rough, but it was crazier than if he had been rough – and in a second she was paralyzed by horror.
She could not push away, but she bit down with all her might upon what must have been the crazy soldier’s tongue – so that he screamed out and she was free. Then he was coming towards her with an amazed pained face, and her hand reached the glass pitcher and brought it down upon his head … He lay there still, with the amazed expression on his freckled face that was now pale, and a froth of blood showed on his mouth. But his head was not broken, or even cracked, and whether he was dead or not she did not know.”
Fortunately for F. Jasmine the soldier is not dead. She goes to the wedding as she had planned but nothing else goes according to plan. She cannot explain to them about the we of me and can only say: “Take me! And they pleaded and begged with her, but she was al-ready in the car. At the last she clung to the steering wheel until her father and somebody else had hauled and dragged her from the car.” The wedding party drives off without her and she is left “in the dust of the empty road,” still calling out: “Take me! Take me!”
In the third part of the narration she is now called Frances; she had started as the tomboy Frankie, then briefly became the delusional F. Jasmine, but Frances seems to be her coming of age name, her woman’s name. Berenice talks to her kindly.
Frances could not stand the kind tone. “I never meant to go with them!” she said. “It was all just a joke. They said they were going to invite me to visit when they get settled, but I wouldn’t go. Not for a million dollars.”
The sense of separateness continues
But though her delusion has been shattered and she has come of age, Frances still returns the next day to the feeling of separateness. “There had been a time, only yesterday, when she felt that every person she saw was somehow connected with herself,” but now she sees the world again as something separate from her.
Having left her father a note saying she is leaving, Frances ends up back in the sleazy hotel where she had been with the soldier, but now a policeman is there; it turns out that her father has asked the police to try to find her. The Law, as she thinks of him, asks her what he is doing there.
“What am I doing in here?” she repeated. For all at once she had forgotten, and she told the truth when she said finally, “I don’t know.”
The voice of the Law seemed to come from a distance like a question asked through a long corridor. “Where were you heading for?”
The world was now so far away that Frances could no longer think of it. She did not see the earth as in the old days, cracked and loose and turning a thousand miles an hour; the earth was enormous and still and flat. Between herself and all the places there was a space like an enormous canyon she could not hope to bridge or cross.
The novel ends quite suddenly with a flash forward: we are told that she has met a new friend, Mary Littlejohn, and that John Henry has died of meningitis. “She remembered John Henry more as he used to be, and it was seldom now that she felt his presence – solemn, suffering, and ghost-grey.”At the very end her father has had a letter from her brother, who is now stationed in Luxembourg.
“Luxembourg. Don’t you think that’s a lovely name?”
Berenice roused herself. “Well, Baby – it brings to my mind soapy water. But it’s a kind of pretty name.”
“There is a basement in the new house. And a laundry room.” She added, after a minute, “We will most likely pass through Luxembourg when we go around the world together.”
Frances turned back to the window. It was almost five o’clock and the geranium glow had faded from the sky. The last pale colors were crushed and cold on the horizon. Dark, when it came, would come on quickly, as it does in wintertime. “I am simply mad about—”
But the sentence was left unfinished for the hush was shattered when, with an instant shock of happiness, she heard the ringing of the bell.
More literary tomboys to explore in Girls in Bloom Charlie Laborde ( Charlie by Kate Chopin , 1900)Peggy Vaughan (A Terrible Tomboy by Angela Brazil, 1904)Irene Ashleigh (A Modern Tomboy: A Story for Girls by LT Meade, 1913) Petrova Fossil (Ballet Shoes by Noel Streatfeild, 1932)George Fayne (The Secret of Red Gate Farm by ‘Caroline Keene’, 1931)George Kirrin (Five On a Treasure Island by Enid Blyton, 1942)Mick Kelly (The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers, 1940). . . . . . . . .
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 The Member of the Wedding Wikipedia Reader discussion on Goodreads 1952 film of The Member of the Wedding All-American Loneliness and a Universe of Yearning 1997 made for television film*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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February 1, 2021
5 Early English Women Writers to Discover
In A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf espoused the cause of the playwright and novelist Aphra Behn (1640 – 1689) as the great precursor of free women writers — though the first book in English was written by Julian of Norwich, the first autobiography was written by Margery Kempe, the first playwright and female poet since antiquity was Hrotsvitha, and the first professional woman writer was probably Christine of Pizan. And we can’t leave out Sappho, the ancient Greek poet.
Presented here are five early English women writers who may not be as well known as Aphra Behn, though each came before her, and set the stage for those who came after — Julian of Norwich, Margery Kempe, Jane Anger, Æmalia Lanyer, and Margaret Cavendish.
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Julian of Norwich
The first book written in the modern English language, Revelations of Divine Love, was begun in 1373 by a woman: the abbess Julian of Norwich; it famously repeats the phrase, ‘all shall be well and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.’ Like some of her predecessors and successors, Julian transgressively insisted that being a woman was no bar to writing about the love of God. ‘But for I am a woman should I therefore live that I should not tell you the goodness of God?’
Following her near death from a serious illness at the age of thirty, Julian began to receive revelations or ‘Shewings’ which she believed came straight from God without any ‘mean’ [intermediary].
This transgresses, as do the revelations of all the female mystics, the Catholic idea that God would only speak to the people through a male priest, and in Latin at that. It was men like Luther and Calvin objecting to this idea that led to the Reformation and Protestantism, though the Wycliffe and Tyndale Bibles in English and the Lollards of the late fourteenth century, Julian’s contemporaries, had preceded them. Like other female mystics, Julian stressed the Virgin Mary’s status as the most perfect human; a woman superior in grace to any man.
In this [Shewing] He brought our blessed Lady to my understanding. I saw her ghostly, in bodily likeness: a simple maid and a meek, young of age and little waxen above a child, in the stature that she was when she conceived. Also God shewed in part the wisdom and the truth of her soul: wherein I understood the reverent beholding in which she beheld her God and Maker, marvelling with great reverence that He would be born of her that was a simple creature of His making. . . I understood soothly that she is more than all that God made beneath her in worthiness and grace; for above her is nothing that is made but the blessed [Manhood] of Christ.
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Margery Kempe
Shortly after Julian wrote the first book in English, Margery Kempe began a work in 1436 that also transgressed ideas of what a woman should do and say, in what would become the first autobiography in English: compiled over many years it became known simply as The Book of Margery Kempe.
As she makes clear, Kempe could neither read nor write and struggled to find someone to write down her experiences. Kempe eventually found a priest who was willing to write it out legibly from the various existing badly-written sections, ‘asking him to write this book and never to reveal it as long as she lived, granting him a great sum of money for his labour.’
Because of the ad hoc nature of its composition, ‘this book is not written in order, every thing after another as it was done, but just as the matter came to this creature’s mind when it was to be written down, for it was so long before it was written that she had forgotten the time and the order when things occurred.’
Kempe refers to herself throughout in the third person, mostly as ‘this creature.’ Like Julian and the other mystics she claims her revelations came directly from God, after she had been led astray by devils.
‘She slandered her husband, her friends, and her own self. She spoke many sharp and reproving words; she recognized no virtue nor goodness; she desired all wickedness.’ Jesus then appeared to her, ‘clad in a mantle of purple silk, sitting upon her bedside.’ After this Margery wanted to devote herself entirely to God, at the expense of sexual relations with her husband; transgressively she refuses her husband his conjugal rights.
And after this time she never had any desire to have sexual intercourse with her husband, for paying the debt of matrimony was so abominable to her that she would rather, she thought, have eaten and drunk the ooze and muck in the gutter than consent to intercourse.
Kempe wants to make a vow of chastity and regrets being married. ‘Ah, Lord, maidens are now dancing merrily in heaven. Shall I not do so? Because I am no virgin, lack of virginity is now great sorrow to me.’ But God forgives her. ‘Ah, daughter, how often have I told you that your sins are forgiven you and that we are united.’ But her husband has become so afraid that he does not even try to have sex with her anymore:
… Then she said with great sorrow, ‘Truly, I would rather see you being killed, than that we should turn back to our un-cleanness.’
And he replied, ‘You are no good wife.’
And then she asked her husband what was the reason that he had not made love to her for the last eight weeks, since she lay with him every night in his bed. And he said that he was made so afraid when he would have touched her, that he dared do no more.
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Jane Anger
Like many of the works written by transgressive women, Her Protection for Women (1585) by Jane Anger (1560 – 1600) was addressed explicitly to an audience of other women. It was probably the first book-length defence of women’s place in society to be published in English. In 1558, the Scots preacher John Knox had published The First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women. The appropriately-named Anger’s book was the first blast of women in return and very angry indeed.
To all Women in general,
and gentle Reader whatsoever.
FIE on the falshood of men, whose minds go oft a madding, & whose tongues can not so soon be wagging, but straight they fall a railing. Was there ever any so abused, so slandered, so railed upon, or so wickedly handled undeservedly, as are we women? . . But judge what the cause should be, of this their so great malice towards simple women.
Doubtless the weakness of our wits, and our honest bashfulness, by reason whereof they suppose that there is not one amongst us who can, or dare reprove their slanders and false reproaches: their slanderous tongues are so short, and the time wherein they have lavished out their words freely, hath been so long, that they know we cannot catch hold of them to pull them out, and they think we will not write to reprove their lying lips.
Like other transgressive, pre-feminist writers going back to Hildegard of Bingen, Anger claims that Eve’s original transgression is more than balanced by the Virgin Mary’s grace, bestowed upon her by God. Again, she is specifically addressing a female audience.
And now (seeing I speak to none but to you which are of mine own Sex,) give me leave like a scholar to prove our wisdom more excellent then theirs, though I never knew what sophistry meant. There is no wisdom but it comes by grace, this is a principle, & Contra principium non est disputandum: but grace was first given to a woman, because to our lady: which premises conclude that women are wise. Now Primum est optimum, & therefore women are wiser than men.
GOD making woman of man’s flesh, that she might be purer then he, doth evidently show, how far we women are more excellent then men. Our bodies are fruitful, whereby the world increaseth, and our care wonderful, by which man is preserved. From woman sprang man’s salvation. A woman was the first that believed, & a woman likewise the first that repented of sin.
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Æmelia Lanyer
Æmalia Lanyer, or Emilia Lanier (1569 – 1645), is said to be the first English woman to publish a book, though she was in fact preceded by Isabella Whitney; but Whitney only published a pamphlet, mostly comprising poetry written by others, including the Cornish woman Anne Dowriche, and the Scot Elizabeth Melville.
Nevertheless, Lanier was the first British woman to assert her status as a professional writer, though her book of poems Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, published in 1611 when she was forty-two, is advertised as being by a wife. ‘Written by Mistris Æmilia Lanyer, Wife to Captaine Alfonso Lanyer, Seruant to the Kings Majestie.’
The book is addressed specifically to women and dedicated to several female aristocrats, seeking their patronage woman to woman, begging pardon for her ‘defects.’ They include a dedication ‘To the Queenes most Excellent Majestie’.
Renowned Empresse, and great Britaines Queene,
Most gratious Mother of succeeding Kings;
Vouchsafe to view that which is seldome seene,
A Womans writing of diuinest things:
Reade it faire Queene, though it defectiue be,
Your Excellence can grace both It and Mee. . .
And since all Arts at first from Nature came,
That goodly Creature, Mother of Perfection,
Whom Ioues almighty hand at first did frame,
Taking both her and hers in his protection:
Why should not She now grace my barren Muse,
And in a Woman all defects excuse.
Lanier was born Aemilia Bassano, a member of the Venetian Bassano family of musical instrument makers who lived and worked in London and has been a candidate for Shakespeare’s Dark Lady. The thrust of her book is female virtue and obedience to God’s will; in this sense she is no bad girl. But, like Jane Anger before her and Margaret Cavendish later, Lanier complains that it is unfair that, because of Eve, ‘we (poore women) must endure it all.’ Eve cannot be blamed for man’s fall.
And ‘If Eue did erre, it was for knowledge sake,’ and in any case, Adam ate too: ‘The fruit beeing faire perswaded him to fall: / No subtill Serpents falshood did betray him.’ Adam wanted to share in the knowledge which eating the fruit gave Eve; human knowledge comes from Eve but men have claimed it. ‘Men will boast of Knowledge, which he tooke / From Eues faire hand, as from a learned Booke.’ The evil was not in Eve, who was, quite literally, made from Adam, but in men’s betrayal of God’s intentions.
Like many other women writers, Lanier extols at length the obedient virtue of the Virgin Mary, who more than compensates for any sins of Eve. But, also like other women writers, she also extols strong women in history who have physically overcome powerful men, Like the Scythian Women, or Amazons.
Lanier also mentions with approval the biblical judge and prophet Deborah and the great pre-feminist Judith, who cut off the head of Holofernes before he could rape her and so set her people free, though what Lanier is celebrating in Judith’s act is a woman defeating a man who has ignored God’s will rather than a woman’s:
Yea Judeth had the powre likewise to queale
Proud Holifernes, that the just might see
What small defence vaine pride and greatnesse hath
Against the weapons of Gods word and faith.
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Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle
Men are so Unconscionable and Cruel against us, as they Endeavour to Bar us of all Sorts or Kinds of Liberty, as not to Suffer us Freely to Associate amongst our Own Sex, but would fain Bury us in their Houses or Beds, as in a Grave; the truth is, we Live like Bats or Owls, Labour like Beasts, and Die like Worms.
— Margaret Cavendish, To All Noble and Worthy Ladies
Also writing for an exclusively female audience and also angry at men was the eccentric Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle (1623 – 1673), whom Virginia Woolf called a ‘giant cucumber,’ which ‘had spread itself over all the roses and carnations in the garden and choked them to death.’ She addressed some of her writings explicitly to ‘ladies.’ Her Poems and Fancies of 1653 begins:
Noble, Worthy Ladies, Condemn me not as a dishonour of your Sex, for setting forth this Work; for it is harmless and free from all dishonesty; I will not say from Vanity: for that is so natural to our Sex, as it were unnatural, not to be so. Besides, Poetry, which is built upon Fancy, Women may claim, as a work belonging most properly to themselves.
Cavendish asserts here that poetry is the natural realm of women’s imagination. In the introduction to her proto-science fiction novel The Blazing World, she also addresses a female audience and asserts her right to write whatever she pleases; if the present world is not to her taste she has the right to invent one that is and to be the mistress of it.
And if (Noble Ladies) you should chance to take pleasure in reading these Fancies, I shall account myself a Happy Creatoress: If not, I must be content to live a Melancholy Life in my own World . . . I am not Covetous, but as Ambitious as ever any of my Sex was, is, or can be; which is the cause, That though I cannot be Henry the Fifth, or Charles the Second; yet, I will endeavour to be, Margaret the First: and, though I have neither Power, Time nor Occasion, to be a great Conqueror, like Alexander, or Cesar; yet, rather than not be Mistress of a World, since Fortune and the Fates would give me none, I have made One of my own.
Cavendish transgressively published under her own name: not only fiction but scientific and philosophical works, including many short pieces on the natural sciences, and especially about the atom, written in verse ‘because I thought errors might better pass there than in prose – since poets write most fiction, and fiction is not given for truth, but pastime – and I fear my atoms will be as small pastime as themselves, for nothing can be less than an atom.’
Cavendish knew philosophers and scientists like Descartes and Thomas Hobbes and in 1667 she was the first woman to attend a meeting of the Royal Society, which did not admit women until 1945. Like several other early transgressive writers, Cavendish assumes that as a woman she will be subjected to harsher criticism than a male writer, not just by men but by women too. Her short apologia To All Noble and Worthy Ladies ends:
I imagine I shall be censured by my own sex, and men will cast a smile of scorn upon my book, because they think thereby women encroach too much upon men’s prerogatives. For they hold books as their crown and the sword as their sceptre by which they rule and govern. . . Therefore pray strengthen my side in defending my book, for I know women’s tongues are as sharp as two-edged swords, and wound as much when they are angered. And in this battle may your wit be quick and your speech ready, and your arguments so strong as to beat them out of the field of dispute. So shall I get honour and reputation by your favours, otherwise I may chance to be cast into the fire. But if I burn, I desire to die your martyr.
Unlike Joan of Arc and the thousands of European ‘witches,’ Cavendish was not literally burned at the stake and unlike the French writer Olympe de Gouges she was not sent to the guillotine; she stayed out of politics and though she was hardly the Angel of the House she mostly stayed out of trouble. But like several early women writers Cavendish was keen to stir women to action, to make the best of themselves and ignore men’s efforts to keep them down.
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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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*This is an Amazon Affiliate link. If a product is purchased by linking through, Literary Ladies Guide receives a modest commission, which helps maintain our site and helps it to continue growing!
The post 5 Early English Women Writers to Discover appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.
January 26, 2021
Can A Wrinkle in Time Ever be Successfully Filmed?
As the 60th anniversary of Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time (1962) approaches, with it will come a wave of nostalgia. A Wrinkle in Time follows the story of siblings, Meg and Charles Wallace, in their cosmic search to find the whereabouts of their missing father.
The story is cinematic in all ways possible; however, it has already had two unsuccessful attempts at being brought to the big screen. Why have both of these films flopped? Can A Wrinkle in Time ever be successfully filmed?
I vividly remember the first time I read this novel. I was in eighth grade, and I reveled in its whimsical details. A Wrinkle in Time is a complex novel that has resonated with generations of readers.
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A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle (1962)
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The main theme — the idea that being unique should be celebrated — is universal. It can be applied to social media today, and the resulting “sameness” that comes from it. It’s a children’s book that deals with not-so-childish subjects; the loss of a parent and the turmoil that accompanies it, and the fear of inadequacy and how to overcome it.
A Wrinkle in Time is also an irresistible combination of fantasy and science fiction that can’t help but stand out. Meg and Charles Wallace find help from three angelic women who guide them in their quest to find their father and save the universe all in one sweep. It has underlying elements of magic that meld with scientific ideas, such as traveling through dimensions and spacetime.
It isn’t often that a children’s book can successfully combine a surrealist cosmic fantasy with tangible, approachable characters. Like many kids, I related to Meg, with her braces and just-so-average nature. Like Meg’s Charles Wallace, I too have a younger brother. It almost felt as if I was reading a story about my own life. For a young reader, the imagination you bring to a novel like A Wrinkle in Time makes it all the more mystical, all the more relatable. I knew when I was reading it that I had come across something significant.
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A Wrinkle in Time (2018 film) official trailer
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When I heard that A Wrinkle in Time was coming to the big screen in 2018, I begged my friends, a bunch of twenty-year-olds, to accompany me to the theater. I was so excited to see how a book I had adored when I was young would be brought to life. Unfortunately, I left the theater with the sense that I had been misled. The film came so close to encapsulating the things I loved about the novel, but fell short, leaving me feeling unsatisfied.
The film was targeted towards children, so maybe I shouldn’t have gotten my hopes up. Yet, it wasn’t underwhelming because it was for children, it was underwhelming because it failed to illustrate the book. With a critic rating of 42% on Rotten Tomatoes and an astonishingly low 26% audience score, it’s safe to say it was not well received. It was comforting to know I wasn’t the only person who was disappointed.
Critic Alex Hudson wrote, “A Wrinkle in Time feels like a missed opportunity.” Another critic, Jason Fraley, put it perfectly: “Some stories work far better in literature than on the screen, as the screenwriters scrap necessary connecting tissue to trim the runtime down to two hours.”
Casting decisionsThe film was directed by , the producer of Selma. She made a point to diversify the cast list, which I wholeheartedly celebrate. Meg was played by , who undoubtedly stole the show. She did an amazing job at portraying the character I loved so dearly. DuVernay’s decision to cast this iconic literary character as a black girl was refreshing, and her other casting choices made the film more relatable as a whole.
It was an interesting decision to make Charles Wallace’s character an adoptee in the film. It didn’t go along with the plot line of the book series, in which the entire family is directly related to their father, resulting in their “special powers.” It’s unclear what the intent was to add the adoption plot line, or whether it was really necessary.
The film was also visually pleasing. It was colorful and lush, exactly what I envisioned when reading it as a kid. In theory, the film should have been a hit. The all-star cast alone was worthy of much attention. Featuring Reese Witherspoon, Mindy Kaling, and Oprah Winfrey, acting as mentor figures for Meg and Charles Wallace, had the potential and talent to add a fun dynamic to the storyline. However, all the star power simply overshadowed the storyline.
In the film, many of the characters strayed away from their lovable traits. I found myself seriously disliking the characters that I had once loved. Ms. Whatsit, played by Witherspoon, was transformed into a snide character spouting sassy remarks, as opposed to the eccentric and all-knowing guardian that I loved in the book.
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Plot holes and lack of character developmentIt was off-putting to see a timeless novel fizzling into an unrefined story line, updated with unnecessary modernity. I found the film version of Charles Wallace written in such a way that I couldn’t help but dislike him. His character is supposed to be a quiet prodigy, instead, he’s portrayed as a pompous, talkative kid. The personalities of the characters may have been altered to establish some 21st-century relatability in the movie version, but their likable qualities were erased in the process.
The actors seemed forced into roles they didn’t completely understand, and as a result, their performances fell short. The surrealist, astronomical flavor of the novel boiled down into a glitzy mess with glaring plot holes — and little to no character development.
So, why didn’t it work?
Translating A Wrinkle in Time to film wasn’t exactly a novel idea, so to speak. It had been attempted before, as a mini-series, in 2003. I’ve scoured the internet to find this series, curious to watch it, to no avail. The only option seems to be to buy the DVD, and most of us no longer have the disc drives to play this kind of media. So I was left to trust the author’s own words about the series; Madeleine L’Engle declared: “I have glimpsed it … I expected it to be bad, and it is.”
The book-to-film success rate is known to be low. So it isn’t entirely a surprise that the film didn’t stand up. Successful film franchises like Harry Potter or The Hunger Games are few and far between, which is what makes them special.
A Wrinkle in Time is an older novel. It doesn’t deal with a magical high school or dystopian societies that make for an epic, easily consumable cinematic experience. A Wrinkle in Time is convoluted. It’s whimsical and unique, with an essence I desperately wanted to see on film. But it seems doubtful that it can be captured on film. The 2018 mega-film had a $100 million budget and still managed to miss the mark. Why?
The answer may have to do with what makes the book so unique in the first place. It simply wasn’t built for film. Some novels can afford to cut plot corners when translated to film, but A Wrinkle in Time can’t. It’s a macrocosm, its own little universe that takes a well-tuned eye to successfully dissect.
Many successful adaptations rely on authors being on set, guiding the directors and cast to achieve a realistic vision that pleases the audience that loved the story first — the readers. That’s what made the film version of To Kill a Mockingbird, a book from the same era,so successful — Harper Lee was always on set as the 1962 film version of her 1960 novel was being produced. Neither the 2018 nor the 2003 mini-series did this.
L’Engle passed away in 2007, and wasn’t able to see the 2018 rendition of her novel. I wonder what she would have thought of it, and in my view, she would have absolutely done things differently.
The good news is the novel you grew up with and loved is still in print and readily available at bookstores and libraries. If you never read it as a child, it’s never too late to discover it as an adult. I recently reread the novel, and it captivated me just as much as it did the first time. Madeleine L’Engle’s celestial universe of mystique and wonder, and the lovable characters that explore it, still live on, in our imaginations and our hearts.
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If you’re still curious, the film is available to stream on Amazon*
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*This is an Amazon Affiliate links. If a product is purchased by linking through, Literary Ladies Guide receives a modest commission, which helps maintain our site and helps it to continue growing!
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Carson McCullers’ Mick Kelly: The Tomboy Author & Her Tomboy Heroine
This literary musing on Mick Kelly, the complex yet lovable tomboy character in The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers, is excerpted from Girls in Bloom: Coming of Age in mid-20th Century Women’s Fiction by Francis Booth. Reprinted by permission.
Carson McCullers (1917-1967) was born Lula Carson Smith but chose to use the gender-neutral Carson; she was the epitome of the literary tomboy: as tall as a man, with long, lanky limbs, short, bobbed hair, boyish dress, and elfin face – the ideal author to create fictional tomboys.
And that she did, in two of literature’s greatest tomboys, Mick Kelly (The Heart is a Lonely Hunter) and Frankie Addams (The Member of the Wedding), with their equally gender-neutral names.
McCullers had intended to be a musician rather than a writer, and at one time thought she might become a professional pianist. She was never academic and did not enjoy school; she was beaten up during her first week in high school and, as she says in her autobiography:
“I still wanted to be a concert pianist so my parents did not make me go every day. I just went enough to keep up with the classes. Now, years later, the high school teachers who taught me are extremely puzzled that anyone as negligent as I was could be a successful author. The truth is I don’t believe in school, whereas I believe very strongly in a thorough musical education. My parents agreed with me. I’m sure I missed certain social advantages by being such a loner but it never bothered me.”
Though her piano teacher encouraged her, McCullers “realized that Daddy would not be able to send me to Juilliard or any other great school of music to study.’ So she told him that she had ‘switched professions,’ and was going to be a writer. “That was something I could do at home, and I wrote every morning.”
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See also:
Literary Tomboys in Classic Coming-of-Age Novels by Women Authors
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In “Wunderkind,” McCullers’ first published story (1936) — she was only nineteen years old and a wunderkind herself — the teenage Frances is a precocious piano student, as McCullers herself was before she turned to writing; we will see shortly how for Mick Kelly in The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, having a piano would be the most wonderful thing in the world.
In ‘Wunderkind’ Frances has a negative kind of coming of age when she is suddenly unable to face the piano. ‘She felt that the marrows of her bones were hollow and there was no blood left in her. Her heart that had been springing against her chest all afternoon felt suddenly dead. She saw it gray and limp and shriveled at the edges like an oyster.’
McCullers became even better known as a wunderkind when her first novel, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, was published in 1940. She took the literary world’s breath away at the age of twenty-two; in the publicity photo, she looks even younger, like an eager, doe-eyed, chipmunk-faced teenager, though she is holding a cigarette in a very adult manner, as she nearly always is in photos.
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Carson McCullers
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A gangling, towheaded youngster, a girl of about twelve, stood looking in the doorway. She was dressed in khaki shorts, a blue shirt, and tennis shoes – so that at first glance she was like a very young boy.
This is very much in line with descriptions of typical tomboys, as well as contemporary descriptions of McCullers herself. Mick – we are not told her birth name – is part of a large cast of strange characters, including two deaf-mutes, in a poor, isolated southern town that could easily be a setting for a Eudora Welty or Flannery O’Connor story but could also be Columbus, Georgia where McCullers was born.
One of the characters is Biff Brannon, the owner of the New York Cafe, with “two fists and a quick tongue,” who has “a special friendly feeling for sick people and cripples,” including Mick – especially Mick. She is certainly an outsider even though she is not sick or crippled.
“He thought of the way Mick narrowed her eyes and pushed back the bangs of her hair with the palm of her hand. He thought of her hoarse, boyish voice and her habit of hitching up her khaki shorts and swaggering like a cowboy in the picture show. A feeling of tenderness came in him. He was uneasy.”
Although Mick is described as being like a young boy, she’s rather tall for her age, as was McCullers herself, and completely fearless, as McCullers wasn’t. “Five feet six inches tall and a hundred and three pounds, and she was only thirteen. Every kid at the party was a runt beside her.” Despite her tomboyishness and rough clothes, she has the pretensions and dreams of any teenager – any teenage boy, anyway.
McCullers’ sympathetic portrayal of African-Americans
Another character who is fond of Mick is Portia, the daughter of the town’s Black doctor, a wise and almost saintly figure. McCullers’ sympathetic portrayal of African-Americans and the way her Southern characters show no prejudice was quite shocking for 1940, though probably helped with her critical reception by the East Coast literary elite.
Portia’s Shakespearean name and the fact that her father is a doctor imply her parents had an education way beyond what would be expected of Southern Black families of the time, though she does talk in a kind of dialect. Portia works as a maid in the Kelly household but complains to her father that she is not being paid properly.
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The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
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But the biggest thing in Mick’s life in music, especially classical music; she walks around the streets of the town in the evenings listening to the radios in the houses playing different stations. “There was one special fellow’s music that made her heart shrink up every time she heard it. Sometimes this fellow’s music was like little colored pieces of crystal candy, and other times it was the softest, saddest thing she had ever imagined about.”
The composer turns out to be Mozart, though she cannot at first spell his name and has no idea who he is. She also listens to music by someone who turns out to be Beethoven; it makes her face her own littleness – big as she is she does not contain multitudes. “Wonderful music like this was the worst hurt there could be. The whole world was this symphony, and there was not enough of her to listen.”
The thing Mick wants most in the world is a piano: “If we had a piano I’d practice every single night and learn every piece in the world.” She also wants to write music, and notes down snatches of songs, “but she didn’t feel satisfied with them. If you could write a symphony!” In the private box that, like most teenage girls, she has under her bed, Mick has a notebook; she draws five lines across a test page.
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Girls in Bloom by Francis Booth on Amazon*
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Mick is in the middle of her family: her eldest sibling is Bill and she also has younger brothers, including Bubber. Mick also has two older sisters, Hazel and Etta, with whom she shares a room and who are “O.K. as far as sisters went.” The older girls complain about Mick’s “silly boys clothes,” but it is exactly because she has older sisters that she wears them.
“I wear shorts because I don’t want to wear your old hand-me-downs. I don’t want to be like either of you and I don’t want to look like either of you. And I won’t. That’s why I wear shorts. I’d rather be a boy any day, and I wish I could move in with Bill.”
An unexpected coming of ageMick’s coming of age, such as it is, begins with a party she decides to hold at her house and the clothes she decides to wear for it.
“She stood in front of the mirror a long time, and finally decided she either looked like a sap or else she looked very beautiful. One way or the other… she stuck the rhinestones in her hair and put on plenty of lipstick and paint. When she finished she lifted up her chin and half-closed her eyes like a movie star. Slowly she turned her face from one side to the other. It was beautiful she looked – just beautiful. She didn’t feel like herself at all. She was somebody different from Mick Kelly entirely.”
The party gets out of hand and many people come uninvited, though nothing especially bad happens to her or anyone else. It ends with her and the others running around playing in ditches outdoors like children. But Mick is no longer a child by the time she gets home. “Her old shorts and shirt were lying on the floor just where she had left them. She put them on. She was too big to wear shorts any more after this. No more after this night. Not any more.”
Contemplating Mick maturing, McCullers uses the character of Biff to rehearse a rather bizarre but obviously highly personal and deeply heartfelt meditation on intersexuality.
Mick had grown so much in the past year that she would be taller than he was. She dressed in the red sweater and blue pleated skirt she had worn every day since school started. Now the pleats had come out and the hem dragged loose around her sharp, jutting knees. She was at the age when she looked as much like an overgrown boy as a girl.
Mick never seems to have any feelings for other girls, and there aren’t any in the novel. But she does get quite close to the boy Harry, who is very passionate about fascism and world events. They take a trip out to the lake to have a picnic one day; taking off their bathing suits, “they turned towards each other. Maybe it was half an hour they stood there – maybe not more than a minute,” before Harry says they ought to get dressed.
But then it happens, or at least it seems to: McCullers draws an impressionistic veil over it but shows how Mick’s coming of age is advanced by it.
An uneasy segue to young womanhood
Mick’s coming of age does not turn out the way she hoped: she goes directly from tomboy schoolgirl to overworked, overtired, and defeated mature woman when, to help the family’s disastrous finances, Mick leaves school to work in a shop, her dreams and ambitions unrealized.
While she was still at school, when she came home “she felt good and was ready to start working on the music. But now she was always too tired.”
Then things get even worse: John Singer dies; he is the deaf mute at the center of Lonely Hunter. Singer has been a lodger at the Kelly house and been very sympathetic to Mick, who had become quite obsessed with him (though not in a sexual way). “There were these two things she could never believe. That Mister Singer had killed himself and was dead. And that she was grown and had to work at Woolworth’s.”
“She was the one who found him. They had thought the noise was a backfire from a car, and it was not until the next day that they knew. She went in to play the radio. The blood was all over his neck and when her dad came he pushed her out the room. She had run from the house. The shock wouldn’t let her be still. She had run into the dark and hit herself with her fists. And then the next night he was in a coffin in the living room.”
All this changes Mick irrevocably. Biff notices the changes more perhaps than Mick herself. Mick has never had any idea of Biff’s feelings for her, which in any case have evaporated with her coming of age. Biff preferred Mick as a tomboy to Mick as a grown woman. By the end, Mick grows philosophical about her new womanhood.
More literary tomboys to explore in Girls in Bloom Charlie Laborde (“Charlie” by Kate Chopin, 1900)Peggy Vaughan (A Terrible Tomboy by Angela Brazil, 1904)Irene Ashleigh (A Modern Tomboy: A Story for Girls by LT Meade, 1913) Petrova Fossil (Ballet Shoes by Noel Streatfeild, 1932)George Fayne (The Secret of Red Gate Farm by ‘Caroline Keene’, 1931)George Kirrin (Five On a Treasure Island by Enid Blyton, 1942)Frankie Addams (The Member of the Wedding by Carson McCullers, 1946)
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 Carson McCullers’ Mick Kelly: The Tomboy Author & Her Tomboy Heroine appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.
