Nava Atlas's Blog, page 46

Petrova Fossil & Tania Whichart: Noel Streatfeild’s Literary Tomboys

This intriguing look at Petrova Fossil, one of the three Fossil sisters of Noel Streatfeild’s best-known work of children’s literature, Ballet Shoes (1932),  is excerpted from Girls in Bloom: Coming of Age in mid-20th Century Women’s Fiction by Francis Booth, reprinted with permission

Noel Streatfeild (1895 – 1986; note that she was a female author with a male-sounding first name and an unconventionally-spelled surname), was born in Sussex, England and was the daughter of the Bishop of Lewes.

She wrote several children’s books, of which Ballet Shoes – beautifully illustrated by her older sister – was the first and most well-known and well-loved by more than one generation of girls; her subsequent books were renamed by the publishers to have the word Shoes in the title, though in fact they are not a series.

 

Petrova Fossil  of Ballet Shoes (1932)

Like Jo March, Petrova in Ballet Shoes by is one of a group of sisters but very unlike the others. She is a different kind of tomboy to outdoorsy, sporty girls like Kate Chopin’s Charlie Laborde: she does not charge around on a horse or play boys’ games but loves staying in the house and tinkering with mechanical things, unlike her more conventionally feminine, artistic sisters Posy and Pauline.

Petrova is said to be ‘very stupid with her needle, but very neat with her fingers; she was working at a model made in Meccano. It was a difficult model of an aeroplane, meant for much older children to make.’

Like a conventional boy, Petrova ‘knows heaps about aeroplanes and motor-cars,’ and, like Carson McCullers’ Frankie Addams (of The Member of the Wedding), wants to be a pilot when she grows up.

When it is suggested that the sisters, who want to be famous for something artistic, learn ballet, Petrova does not seem to be ballet material.

‘Well, she won’t be good at it to my way of thinking, but it might be just the thing for her – turn her more like a little lady; always messing about with the works of clocks and that just like a boy; never plays with dolls, and takes no more interest in her clothes than a scarecrow.’ 

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Predictably, Petrova is bored by the dancing but finds something interesting to do at the weekends.

Petrova had a thin, pale face and high cheekbones, very different to Pauline’s pink-and-white oval and Posy’s round, dimpled look; she was naturally more serious than the others, and so, being bored for eight hours in each week did not show on her, as it would on them. It was Sundays that saved her.

After morning church she went straight to the garage, put on her jeans, and though only emergency work was really done on Sundays, the foreman always had something ready for her. Very dirty and happy, she would work until they had to dash home for lunch. Afterwards, occasionally, they came back until tea-time; then they washed and popped across the road to Lyons, but usually they went on expeditions in the car.

Those expeditions were their secret; Petrova never even told the other two about them. The best of them were to the civil flying-grounds, where they watched the planes take off and alight, and often went up themselves. Sometimes they saw some motor-car or dirt-track races; but Petrova like the flying Sundays best.

Although, of course, she was years too young to fly, in bed, and at her very few odd moments, she studied for a ground license; she knew that when she did, an aeroplane would obey her, just as certainly as Posy knew that her feet and body would obey her.

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Girls in Bloom by Francis Booth on Amazon*
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Tania Whichart of The Whicharts (1931)

Before she wrote the universally-loved and continuously in-print Ballet Shoes for children, Streatfeild wrote her first published novel The Whicharts, 1931 for adults, universally ignored and out of print for decades. It has an almost identical plot and characters to the later book; in a way it is Ballet Shoes’ evil twin.

Streatfeild wrote several sequels to Ballet Shoes, the semi-autobiographical  A Vicarage Family, 1963 and returned to the subject of orphan girls dancing professionally much later with Wintle’s Wonders, 1957.

In The Whicharts the three sisters have different mothers but the same father: the Brigadier. They are not exactly orphans but they are all brought up by another of the Brigadier’s lovers who worships him, as do the children, though they never know him and he dies when they are very young. They give themselves the surname Whichart after him, ‘our Father which art in heaven.’

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The tomboy in this novel is again the middle sister, here called Tania. Like Petrova Fossil she loves mechanical devices, especially when they are in bits and need mending.

Tania loved machinery, too. To screw things together, to find out why some thing wouldn’t go, was an absorbing game. All the week she was too busy to play at anything, so on Sunday mornings he always had something waiting for her. A clock that wouldn’t go. A toy engine in need of repairs. A sewing-machine that had stuck.

Also like Petrova, Tania hates the dancing she is forced into but loves cars and planes and dreams of working in a garage.

“Pity you aren’t a boy, you could have got a job in this line.”
“If I was a boy I’d learn to fly.”
 “Why?”
 “They goes so fast.”

Tania later pays the owner of the garage to let her work there. ‘The garage life seemed to Tania as near the life of Heaven as was possible while still on earth.’ She even finds a chauffeur who teaches her to drive even though she is only sixteen. Older sister Maimie is not interested in cars, except when they are driven by boys.

‘Maimie bitterly resented interference, she wanted a good time. And a good time was going out with boys. She adored boys . . . Some of the ones she knew had cars; they all had enough money to take her to the pictures.’

Maimie’s coming of age moment happens with an older theatre producer, bizarrely named Dolly, when she is seventeen.

Dolly sat down beside Maimie. He ran his fingers through her hair. ‘You’ve got pretty hair, Baby.’ Maimie only smiled. ‘And a pretty face, and a very pretty little figure’; his hand wandered over her. Her experience with the boys who had taken her motoring and to the pictures had left her quite unprepared for Dolly. She thought: ‘Surely it must have been an accident, he couldn’t have meant to touch me quite like that. Not there!’

But that is exactly where and how Dolly meant to touch Maimie. Shortly afterwards she loses her virginity to him, though Streatfeild seamlessly elides the act itself from the text:

She heard a clock strike. Dolly from behind slipped his hands under her armpits. She shivered. He pulled her round to face him. ‘Little innocent Baby.’ Maimie moved away with a jerk. ‘I think I’d better go home,’ she laughed nervously. ‘It does seem silly, but do you know, I feel frightened, Dolly.’ He pulled her down beside him on the divan. His hands slowly stroked her. Soothed her. She felt almost sleepy. He put his lips to hers. She turned her body towards him. When she put on her hat she couldn’t look at him. She was amazed when she got into the street to find that she didn’t look different. Nobody stared. Nobody seemed to guess.

As they get older the three girls go looking for their mothers. Tania drives herself across the country to meet hers. It turns out to have been worth it; her rich new mother wants to take her traveling to Java.

      “I want to take you about, and show you the world, and perhaps later on find you a husband.”
       “I’d rather have an aeroplane,” exclaimed Tania, horrified out of her usual reticence.
        “Would you? Do you want to fly? Well, could you bear to try traveling for a year first, and after that you can do what you like. I think you’ll find Java fun, you know. The people are too attractive, and they have –”
       But Tania wasn’t listening. Her mind was on the skyline, where an aeroplane, like some giant silver bird, was darting towards them.

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See also:
Literary Tomboys in Classic Coming-of-Age Novels by Women Authors
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More literary tomboys to explore in Girls in BloomCharlie 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)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)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 Petrova Fossil & Tania Whichart: Noel Streatfeild’s Literary Tomboys appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.

The Storm by Kate Chopin (1898) – full text

“The Storm” by Kate Chopin is a short story written in 1898, just a year before what is now her best-known work, The Awakening (a novella). Had it been published it would surely have been just as controversial, since it also explores extramarital passion as its theme. 

At the time these works were written, women — especially married mothers — were supposed to be “the angels in the house.” Any hint of agency over one’s sexual desires in a work of fiction, particularly from a woman’s pen, was considered shocking. The Awakening, now considered a proto-feminist work and a staple in literature courses, was reviled by critics and banned in many quarters long after its publication.

Even before the brutal reception of The Awakening, Kate Chopin seemed to have sensed not to send “The Storm” out for consideration. It was never published in her lifetime, and indeed, not for many decades afterwards. Dated July 19, 1898, it wasn’t published until 1969, in The Complete Works of Kate Chopin. Chopin biographer Per Seyersted wrote:

“Sex in this story is a force as strong, inevitable, and natural as the Louisiana storm which ignites it.” The story “covers only one day and one storm and does not exclude the possibility of later misery. The emphasis is on the momentary joy of the amoral cosmic force.”

[Chopin] “was not interested in the immoral in itself, but in life as it comes, in what she saw as natural — or certainly inevitable— expressions of universal Eros, inside or outside of marriage. She focuses here on sexuality as such, and to her, it is neither frantic nor base, but as ‘healthy’ and beautiful as life itself.”

“The Storm” was actually a sequel to another Chopin short story, “At the ‘Cadian Ball” (1892), which featured some of the same characters.  

More about “The Storm” by Kate Chopin

Complete history, resources at KateChopin.org Plot summary and analysis on Wikipedia Reader discussion on Goodreads Themes and setting in “The Storm” Listen to this short story on Librivox

 

“The Storm” by Kate Chopin

I

The leaves were so still that even Bibi thought it was going to rain. Bobinot, who was accustomed to converse on terms of perfect equality with his little son, called the child’s attention to certain sombre clouds that were rolling with sinister intention from the west, accompanied by a sullen, threatening roar. They were at Friedheimer’s store and decided to remain there till the storm had passed. They sat within the door on two empty kegs. Bibi was four years old and looked very wise.

“Mama’ll be ‘fraid, yes, he suggested with blinking eyes.

“She’ll shut the house. Maybe she got Sylvie helpin’ her this evenin’,” Bobinot responded reassuringly.

“No; she ent got Sylvie. Sylvie was helpin’ her yistiday,’ piped Bibi.

Bobinot arose and going across to the counter purchased a can of shrimps, of which Calixta was very fond. Then he returned to his perch on the keg and sat stolidly holding the can of shrimps while the storm burst. It shook the wooden store and seemed to be ripping great furrows in the distant field. Bibi laid his little hand on his father’s knee and was not afraid.

II

Calixta, at home, felt no uneasiness for their safety. She sat at a side window sewing furiously on a sewing machine. She was greatly occupied and did not notice the approaching storm. But she felt very warm and often stopped to mop her face on which the perspiration gathered in beads. She unfastened her white sacque at the throat. It began to grow dark, and suddenly realizing the situation she got up hurriedly and went about closing windows and doors.

Out on the small front gallery she had hung Bobinot’s Sunday clothes to dry and she hastened out to gather them before the rain fell. As she stepped outside, Alce Laballire rode in at the gate. She had not seen him very often since her marriage, and never alone. She stood there with Bobinot’s coat in her hands, and the big rain drops began to fall. Alce rode his horse under the shelter of a side projection where the chickens had huddled and there were plows and a harrow piled up in the corner.

“May I come and wait on your gallery till the storm is over, Calixta?” he asked.

“Come ‘long in, M’sieur Alce.”

His voice and her own startled her as if from a trance, and she seized Bobinot’s vest. Alce, mounting to the porch, grabbed the trousers and snatched Bibi’s braided jacket that was about to be carried away by a sudden gust of wind. He expressed an intention to remain outside, but it was soon apparent that he might as well have been out in the open: the water beat in upon the boards in driving sheets, and he went inside, closing the door after him. It was even necessary to put something beneath the door to keep the water out.

“My! what a rain! It’s good two years sence it rain’ like that,” exclaimed Calixta as she rolled up a piece of bagging and Alce helped her to thrust it beneath the crack.

She was a little fuller of figure than five years before when she married; but she had lost nothing of her vivacity. Her blue eyes still retained their melting quality; and her yellow hair, dishevelled by the wind and rain, kinked more stubbornly than ever about her ears and temples.

The rain beat upon the low, shingled roof with a force and clatter that threatened to break an entrance and deluge them there. They were in the dining room the sitting room the general utility room. Adjoining was her bed room, with Bibi’s couch along side her own. The door stood open, and the room with its white, monumental bed, its closed shutters, looked dim and mysterious.

Alce flung himself into a rocker and Calixta nervously began to gather up from the floor the lengths of a cotton sheet which she had been sewing.

“If this keeps up, Dieu sait if the levees goin’ to stan it!” she exclaimed.

“What have you got to do with the levees?”

“I got enough to do! An’ there’s Bobinot with Bibi out in that storm if he only didn’ left Friedheimer’s!”

“Let us hope, Calixta, that Bobinot’s got sense enough to come in out of a cyclone.”

She went and stood at the window with a greatly disturbed look on her face. She wiped the frame that was clouded with moisture. It was stiflingly hot. Alce got up and joined her at the window, looking over her shoulder. The rain was coming down in sheets obscuring the view of far-off cabins and enveloping the distant wood in a gray mist. The playing of the lightning was incessant. A bolt struck a tall chinaberry tree at the edge of the field. It filled all visible space with a blinding glare and the crash seemed to invade the very boards they stood upon.

Calixta put her hands to her eyes, and with a cry, staggered backward. Alce’s arm encircled her, and for an instant he drew her close and spasmodically to him.

“Bont!” she cried, releasing herself from his encircling arm and retreating from the window, the house’ll go next! If I only knew w’ere Bibi was!” She would not compose herself; she would not be seated. Alce clasped her shoulders and looked into her face. The contact of her warm, palpitating body when he had unthinkingly drawn her into his arms, had aroused all the old-time infatuation and desire for her flesh.

“Calixta,” he said, “don’t be frightened. Nothing can happen. The house is too low to be struck, with so many tall trees standing about. There! aren’t you going to be quiet? say, aren’t you?”

He pushed her hair back from her face that was warm and steaming. Her lips were as red and moist as pomegranate seed. Her white neck and a glimpse of her full, firm bosom disturbed him powerfully.

As she glanced up at him the fear in her liquid blue eyes had given place to a drowsy gleam that unconsciously betrayed a sensuous desire. He looked down into her eyes and there was nothing for him to do but to gather her lips in a kiss. It reminded him of Assumption.

“Do you remember in Assumption, Calixta?” he asked in a low voice broken by passion.

Oh! she remembered; for in Assumption he had kissed her and kissed and kissed her; until his senses would well nigh fail, and to save her he would resort to a desperate flight. If she was not an immaculate dove in those days, she was still inviolate; a passionate creature whose very defenselessness had made her defense, against which his honor forbade him to prevail. Now well, now her lips seemed in a manner free to be tasted, as well as her round, white throat and her whiter breasts.

They did not heed the crashing torrents, and the roar of the elements made her laugh as she lay in his arms. She was a revelation in that dim, mysterious chamber; as white as the couch she lay upon. Her firm, elastic flesh that was knowing for the first time its birthright, was like a creamy lily that the sun invites to contribute its breath and perfume to the undying life of the world.

The generous abundance of her passion, without guile or trickery, was like a white flame which penetrated and found response in depths of his own sensuous nature that had never yet been reached.

When he touched her breasts they gave themselves up in quivering ecstasy, inviting his lips. Her mouth was a fountain of delight. And when he possessed her, they seemed to swoon together at the very borderland of life’s mystery.

He stayed cushioned upon her, breathless, dazed, enervated, with his heart beating like a hammer upon her. With one hand she clasped his head, her lips lightly touching his forehead. The other hand stroked with a soothing rhythm his muscular shoulders.

The growl of the thunder was distant and passing away. The rain beat softly upon the shingles, inviting them to drowsiness and sleep. But they dared not yield.

The rain was over; and the sun was turning the glistening green world into a palace of gems. Calixta, on the gallery, watched Alce ride away. He turned and smiled at her with a beaming face; and she lifted her pretty chin in the air and laughed aloud.

III

Bobinot and Bibi, trudging home, stopped without at the cistern to make themselves presentable.

“My! Bibi, w’at will yo’ mama say! You ought to be ashame’. You oughta’ put on those good pants. Look at ’em! An’ that mud on yo’ collar! How you got that mud on yo’ collar, Bibi? I never saw such a boy!” Bibi was the picture of pathetic resignation.

Bobinot was the embodiment of serious solicitude as he strove to remove from his own person and his son’s the signs of their tramp over heavy roads and through wet fields. He scraped the mud off Bibi’s bare legs and feet with a stick and carefully removed all traces from his heavy brogans. Then, prepared for the worst the meeting with an over-scrupulous housewife, they entered cautiously at the back door.

Calixta was preparing supper. She had set the table and was dripping coffee at the hearth. She sprang up as they came in.

“Oh, Bobinot! You back! My! But I was uneasy. W’ere you been during the rain? An’ Bibi? he ain’t wet? he ain’t hurt?” She had clasped Bibi and was kissing him effusively. Bobinot’s explanations and apologies which he had been composing all along the way, died on his lips as Calixta felt him to see if he were dry, and seemed to express nothing but satisfaction at their safe return.

“I brought you some shrimps, Calixta,” offered Bobinot, hauling the can from his ample side pocket and laying it on the table.

“Shrimps! Oh, Bobinot! you too good fo’ anything!” and she gave him a smacking kiss on the cheek that resounded, “J’vous reponds, we’ll have a feas’ to-night! umph-umph!”

Bobinot and Bibi began to relax and enjoy themselves, and when the three seated themselves at table they laughed much and so loud that anyone might have heard them as far away as Laballiere’s.

IV

Alce Laballiere wrote to his wife, Clarisse, that night. It was a loving letter, full of tender solicitude. He told her not to hurry back, but if she and the babies liked it at Biloxi, to stay a month longer. He was getting on nicely; and though he missed them, he was willing to bear the separation a while longer realizing that their health and pleasure were the first things to be considered.

V

As for Clarisse, she was charmed upon receiving her husband’s letter. She and the babies were doing well. The society was agreeable; many of her old friends and acquaintances were at the bay. And the first free breath since her marriage seemed to restore the pleasant liberty of her maiden days. Devoted as she was to her husband, their intimate conjugal life was something which she was more than willing to forego for a while.

So the storm passed and everyone was happy.

 

More full texts of Chopin’s works  Désirée’s Baby (1893) The Story of an Hour (1894) A Matter of Prejudice (1897) The Awakening (1899)

The post The Storm by Kate Chopin (1898) – full text appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.

Charlie Laborde, Tomboy-Poet of Kate Chopin’s “Charlie”(1900)

One of Kate Chopin’s most interesting heroines is the tomboyish teen Charlie Laborde of the eponymous short story “Charlie” (1900). This fascinating musing on this little-known character is excerpted from Girls in Bloom: Coming of Age in mid-20th Century Women’s Fiction by Francis Booth, reprinted with permission:

Girls in coming of age novels often keep diaries: it is a very good device for an author to let us in on the girl’s feelings, and in this case for the author to enjoy herself playing with ideas of fiction, style and truth.

The authors themselves had in many cases kept diaries as a teenager: as a fourteen-year-old, Louisa May Alcott wrote in hers: ‘I have made a plan for my life, as I am in my teens, and no more a child. I have not told anyone about my plan; but I’m going to be good.’

New Orleans-based novelist and short-story writer Kate Chopin (1859-1904) also kept a diary throughout her childhood and adolescence. ‘You are the only one, my book, with whom I take the liberty of talking about myself.’

Something of a tomboy herself when she was younger, Chopin resented the social life of the debutante that she was forced into. At the age of eighteen she wrote in her diary:

‘What a nuisance all this is – I wish it were over. I write in my book for the first time in months; parties, operas, concerts, skating and amusements ad infinitum have so taken up my time that my dear reading and writing that I love so well have suffered much neglect.’

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Girls in Bloom by Francis Booth on Amazon*
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Chopin’s work was in its day considered immoral and dangerous: she was almost a proto-feminist and anti-racist; something of a literary godmother to later Southern women writers, especially Catholics like Flannery O’Connor.

Chopin’s late novella The Awakening, 1899, is indeed about the awakening – sexual and emotional – of its married protagonist, Edna Pontellier, who, dissatisfied with her marriage, finds freedom and falls in love with another man, Robert. They do everything together except sleep with each other, including going swimming, which Edna regards as the height of freedom.

To avoid consummating their relationship, he moves away and Edna leaves her husband and sets herself up in her own house, a free woman. She has an affair with the town Lothario, though it is purely physical for her. Robert refuses to live with her and, free but alone she swims off into the sea, perhaps never to be seen again.

 Introducing Charlie Laborde

With her gender-neutral name, her masculine interests and her many sisters, Chopin’s Charlie Laborde is in many respects Jo March’s immediate successor (Charlie was written in 1900 but remained unpublished until 1969; it is still only available in print in Chopin’s collected works). And in her fondness for and friendliness with the black servants on her father’s estate in New Orleans, she is a precursor to Carson McCullers’ Frankie Addams of A Member of the Wedding.

And, like many of her successors, she loves her father above anyone else in the world. In turn, her father is proud of her, in her role as his only – substitute – son. ‘Charlie could ride and shoot and fish; she was untiring and fearless. In many ways she filled the place of that ideal son he had always hope for and that had never come.’

In the space of this short story/novella, Charlie, who is seventeen at the beginning, does come of age, moving from tomboy to lady to mistress of her father’s estate. We first see her, late for the school lesson at which all her sisters are already present, ‘galloping along the green levee summit on a big black horse, as if pursued by demons.’

She is ‘robust and pretty well grown for her age,’ with short hair and wearing ‘a costume of her own devising, something between bloomers and a divided skirt which she called her “trouserlets.”

Canvas leggings, dusty boots and a single spur completed her costume.’ Charlie does not do well at her lessons and does not even understand the need for them; like many tomboys she does not want her free thinking and creativity to be squashed into the metaphorical corsets of academic study any more than she wants her body squashed into the actual corsets of a fine lady.

‘What was the use of learning tasks one week only to forget them the next? What was the use of hammering a lot of dates and figures into her head beclouding her intelligence and imagination?’

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See also:
Literary Tomboys in Classic Coming-of-Age Novels by Women Authors
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A rough and tumble poet

Unusually for a tomboy, though quite normally for the heroine of a coming of age novel, Charlie writes poetry.

‘She was greatly celebrated for two notable achievements in her life. One was the writing of a lengthy ode upon the occasion of her Grandmother’s seventieth birthday; but she was perhaps more distinguished for having once saved the levee during a time of perilous overflow when her father was away.’

Nevertheless, Charlie is considered to have many shortcomings and ‘never seemed to do anything that anyone except her father approved of. Yet she was popularly described as not having a mean bone in her body.’

Charlie seems more at ease in the shacks of the black plantation workers and their families than in her own home. ‘Charlie seemed not to have many ideas above corn bread and molasses herself when she sat down to dine with the Bichous. She shared the children’s couche couché in the homely little yellow bowl like the rest of them.’

Charlie likes to tell the children tall tales of how she goes into the woods killing tigers and bears and a story about a magic ring which, when she turns it three times and repeats a Latin verse enables her to disappear.

She takes one of the children out shooting with her, although her father does not approve of her taking out the gun. She accidentally shoots a stranger coming to the estate, though he is not seriously wounded and takes it in good part. Nevertheless, it is decided that Charlie has gone too far this time and has to be sent away to school.

 

Time to act like a young lady

Surprisingly, Charlie very quickly begins to act and dress like a young lady; the diamond ring that had belonged to her late mother becomes not just a memento but ‘an adornment,’ and other items of family jewelry which previously only had sentimental associations become objects to help ‘proclaim the gentle quality of sex.’

Charlie grows her hair and wants ‘lace and embroideries upon her garments; and she longed to be deck herself with ribbons and passementeries which the shops displayed in such tempting array.’ When she enters the Seminary, ‘no fault could have been found with her appearance which was in every way consistent with that of a well-mannered girl of seventeen.’ She is determined to ‘transform herself from a hoyden to a fascinating young lady, if persistence and hard work could do it.’

Charlie takes up poetry again, with great success. ‘Equipped with a very fine pen point and the filmiest sheet filmy writing paper, Charlie wrote some lines of poetry in the smallest possible cramped hand.’ Soon afterwards she wins a competition to write an address to the founder of the Seminary.

 

Coming of age

All goes well until her father nearly dies in an accident back at their estate, Les Palmiers, and Charlie goes home. While there she and her other sisters gets a letter from their eldest sister saying she is to marry the man whom Charlie shot, and for whom Charlie herself had had feelings and aspirations.

Charlie is appalled, and briefly reverts to her hoydenish ways, riding wildly off on her horse like did when she was younger; it is as if the devil had taken hold of her, according to one of the black estate workers. But this ride is cathartic.

In her mad ride Charlie had thrown off the savage impulse which had betrayed itself in such bitter denunciation of her sister. Shame and regret had followed and now she was steeped in humiliation such as she had never felt before. She did not feel worthy to approach a her father or her sisters. The girlish infatuation which had blinded her was swept away in the torrents of a deeper emotion, and left her a woman.

Charlie literally comes of age. In the end, she seems to resign herself to the attentions of Mr Gus, a very shy family friend and neighbor who helps out on the estate while the father is ill and who has always had feelings for Charlie.

There is no telling what would have become of Les Palmiers that summer if it had not been for Charlie and Mister Gus. It was precisely a year since Charlie had been hustled away to the boarding school in a state of semi-disgrace. Now, with all the dignity and grace which the term implied, she was mistress of Les Palmiers.

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Note: Though “Charlie” is in the public domain, as are all of Chopin’s works, it’s generally not available online. Though it was written April, 1900, it was  only first published only in 1969, in The Complete Works of Kate Chopin, edited by Per Seyersted (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press). For some reason, Chopin didn’t persist in placing the story after an initial rejection by a magazine editor. Lots more about “Charlie” by Kate Chopin at KateChopin.org.

 

More literary tomboys to explore in Girls in BloomPeggy 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)Frankie Addams (The Member of the Wedding by Carson McCullers, 1946)

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

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

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

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

The post Charlie Laborde, Tomboy-Poet of Kate Chopin’s “Charlie”(1900) appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.

Literary Tomboys in Classic Coming-of-Age Novels by Women Authors

According to the dictionary, a tomboy is “an energetic, sometimes boisterous girl whose behavior and pursuits … are considered more typical of boys than girls.” This anachronistic social construct is, alas, still present in this day and age, even as gender norms have loosened. The insightful musing on literary tomboys presented here is excerpted from Girls in Bloom: Coming of Age in mid-20th Century Women’s Fiction by Francis Booth, reprinted with permission:

The word tomboy goes back to the sixteenth century in England; it was first recorded in 1553, when it meant a ‘boisterous boy,’ but it soon changed its meaning. The Oxford English Dictionary of 1579 defines it as a ‘bold or immodest woman;’ perhaps from the word ‘tom,’ which had the implication of a prostitute for centuries. Shakespeare used tomboy in this sense in Cymbeline, 1611, as did Thomas Middleton in A Game at Chess, 1624.

Tomboy then seems to have gone back to its original meaning and was at one time almost interchangeable with the wonderful word hoyden, of Dutch origin, also originating in the sixteenth century.

Hoyden was almost entirely unused in the twentieth century, except by the wonderful Maude Hutchins, whose work we will look at later, but George Eliot (a female author using a man’s name) has a hoyden in Middlemarch (1872): ‘Mary was a little hoyden, and Fred at six years old thought her the nicest girl in the world.’

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Miss Matilda of Anne Brontë’s Agnes Grey

In Agnes Grey, 1847, Anne Brontë (who published under the male name Acton Bell) has ‘Miss Matilda, a strapping hoyden of about fourteen, with a short frock and trousers.’

Miss Matilda Murray was a veritable hoyden, of whom little need be said. She was about two years and a half younger than her sister; her features were larger, her complexion much darker. She might possibly make a handsome woman; but she was far too big-boned and awkward ever to be called a pretty girl, and at present she cared little about it… still less did she care about the cultivation of her mind, and the acquisition of ornamental accomplishments.

… As an animal, Matilda was all right, full of life, vigour, and activity; as an intelligent being, she was barbarously ignorant, indocile, careless and irrational; and, consequently, very distressing to one who had the task of cultivating her understanding, reforming her manners, and aiding her to acquire those ornamental attainments which, unlike her sister, she despised as much as the rest… As a moral agent, Matilda was reckless, headstrong, violent, and unamenable to reason. One proof of the deplorable state of her mind was, that from her father’s example she had learned to swear like a trooper.

 

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Girls in Bloom by Francis Booth on Amazon*
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Jo March of Little Women by Louisa May Alcott

The most well-known and well-loved tomboy in the novel is also the earliest fully-realized example: Jo March of Little Women. Although she is only one of the sisters, she is undoubtedly the best loved.

Of all the March sisters, Jo is deliberately the strongest and most sympathetic as a literary character; as with other novels we will look at, her author clearly loves her. With her gender-neutral name, she embodies many of the elements of the heroines of later female coming of age novels.

Like many of Jo’s successors, she finds that, as she is growing older, and changing from a girl into a ‘little woman,’ it is becoming hard to hold on to her tomboy ways, which seem to come from her physical as much as her mental attributes.

‘Fifteen-year-old Jo was very tall, thin and brown, and reminded one of a colt; for she never seemed to know what to do with her long limbs, which were very much in her way… Round shoulders had Jo, big hands and feet, a fly-away look to her clothes, and the uncomfortable appearance of a girl who was rapidly shooting up into a woman, and didn’t like it.’

In her case the pressure to become more feminine is not so much from the adults around her as from her sisters.

‘Jo does use such slang words,’ observed Amy, with a reproving look at the long figure stretched on the rug. Jo immediately sat up, put her hands in her apron pockets, and began to whistle.
      ‘Don’t, Jo; it’s so boyish.’
      ‘That’s why I do it.’
      ‘I detest rude unlady-like girls.’
      ‘I hate affected, niminy, piminy chits.’
      ‘Birds in the little nests agree,’ sang Beth, the peace-maker, with such a funny face that both sharp voices softened to a laugh and the ‘pecking’ ended for that time.
      ‘Really, girls, you are both to be blamed,’ said Meg, beginning to lecture in her elder sisterly fashion. ‘You are old enough to leave off boyish tricks, and behave better, Josephine. It didn’t matter so much when you were a little girl; but now you are so tall, and turn up your hair, you should remember that you are a young lady.’
      ‘I ain’t! and if turning up my hair makes me one, I’ll wear it in two tails till I’m twenty,’ cried Jo, pulling off her net, and shaking down her chestnut mane. ‘I hate to think I’ve got to grow up and be Miss March, and wear long gowns, and look as prim as a China-aster. It’s bad enough to be a girl, anyway, when I like boys’ games, and work, and Mellors. I can’t get over my disappointment in not being a boy, and it’s worse than ever now, for I’m dying to go and fight with papa, and I can only stay at home and knit like a pokey old woman.’

Girls in coming of age novels often keep diaries: it is a very good device for an author to let us in on the girl’s feelings, and in this case for the author to enjoy herself playing with ideas of fiction, style and truth. The authors themselves had in many cases kept diaries as a teenager: as a fourteen-year-old, Jo March’s author Louisa May Alcott wrote in hers:

‘I have made a plan for my life, as I am in my teens, and no more a child. I have not told anyone about my plan; but I’m going to be good.’

 

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Rose of Louisa May Alcott’s Eight Cousins

Louisa May Alcott’s Eight Cousins, (1875) has ‘Mrs. Jessie, who had been a pretty hoyden years ago herself,’ but who worries about the tomboyishness of young Rose. The doctor tells her not to.

‘Let the girl run and shout as much as she will, it is a sure sign of health, and as natural to a happy child as frisking is to any young animal full of life. Tomboys make strong women usually, and I had far rather find Rose playing football with Mac than puttering over bead-work.’ Mrs Jessie objects that ‘she cannot go on playing football very long, and we must not forget that she has a woman’s work to do by and by.’

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Laura of Wilder’s Little House Books

Also a frontier tomboy was young Laura from Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House  series of nine novels set in the 1870s and running from 1934 to 1943 which became two different TV series and a planned movie, which at the time of writing had run into difficulties. The casting team for the movie, inviting girls aged from ten to fourteen to audition for the part of Laura, described her as the classic Midwestern tomboy who also has brothers and a more ‘feminine’ older sister:

The smart and spirited middle child of Charles and Caroline Ingalls, Laura is a tomboy and adventure-seeker living in the Prairie Lands in 1870. Laura is the type of girl who marches to the beat of her own drum and prefers the outdoors to reading and homework. She has a close relationship with her family and dearly loves her ‘Pa’ and older sister Mary. When her family moves from their home in the Big Woods of Wisconsin to Independence, Kansas, she embraces the adventures she encounters on their journey. Life is not easy, but Laura rises to the challenge.

 

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Sally of Willa Cather’s My Ántonia

Staying in the Midwest, in Willa Cather’s My Ántonia (1918) another frontier novel, the narrator has a similar character for a neighbor:

‘Sally, the tomboy with short hair,’ who is fourteen. ‘She was nearly as strong as I, and uncannily clever at all boys’ sports. Sally was a wild thing, sunburned yellow hair, bobbed about her ears, and a brown skin, for she never wore a hat. She raced all over town on one roller skate, often cheated at “keeps,” but was such a quick shot one couldn’t catch her at it.’

  How does a literary tomboy come of age?

This description contains many of the elements of the tomboy in women’s fiction: bobbed hair, dark skin, frenzied behavior and skill at traditionally male sports. In some later novels, a girl who is labelled a tomboy may willingly adhere to the stereotype to take off the pressure of having to be attractive to boys, for example the sixteen-year-old Rette in Betty Cavanna’s A Girl Can Dream, 1948 (later called Girls Can Dream Too).

‘The tomboy type’— how Rette hated that phrase! Yet she felt compelled to continue the pose because it at least accounted for her not having dates like the other girls. It had become a shield to hide behind, and, though Rette despised herself for using it, she couldn’t seem to let it drop.’

So how do these literary tomboys come of age? In most cases they don’t: the children in children’s novels never grow up so we never find out whether they become ‘normal’ women as they mature. There is never the slightest hint in any of the many such novels that a girl with short hair, a boy’s name and boyish interests might come of age as lesbians; there were a number of books from the 1950s, however, about girls who do.

  More literary tomboys to explore in Girls in BloomCharlie 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)Frankie Addams (The Member of the Wedding by Carson McCullers, 1946)

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

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

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

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

The post Literary Tomboys in Classic Coming-of-Age Novels by Women Authors appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.

The Sublime Poetry of Sappho, Ancient Greek Poetess

This celebration of the indescribably brilliant and sublime poetry by ancient Greek poetess, Sappho (born around 620 BCE in Lesbos, Greece) was originally published in BookRiot. Contributed by Nancy Snyder; reprinted by permission. The poems by Sappho presented following the introduction were all translated from the Greek.

“Although only breath, words which I command are immortal,” wrote Sappho around 510 BC. And how glad we are that we have Sappho’s words all these centuries later.

Sappho’s lyric poetry, poetry meant to be accompanied by a lyre and sung, entices us to discover Eros and Aphrodite (the god and goddess of romantic love) and all the earthly delights that accompanies such natural pursuits.

Sappho’s poetry was a detour from the impersonal, heroic epic singing of wars and battle that played very well in Athens. Sappho extolled the virtues of love, of the primacy of emotion and the subjective experience. 

 

The demonization of Sappho

Sappho’s verse came to be viewed as a significant milestone in the evolution of poetry – there was just one problem.

Sappho repeatedly became the vicious target of the Church and literary critics and historians who were literally out to crush Sappho’s very being. Because it was deemed impossible, unheard of, that Sappho (or any woman) would write such exquisite words to another woman, exalting their beauty and becoming tongue-tied in their presence, Sappho was morphed into a “licentious whore” and her work was publicly burned by Pope Gregory in 1073.

Translators and scholars felt free to rearrange a few words to appear that Sappho was singing to a man – to spare potential readers any possible gender confusion about the proper focus for a young woman or man. In brief, Sappho’s life was appropriated to fit the strictures of moralists.

The demonization of Sappho became so entrenched that her home, the island of Lesbos, morphed into the word Lesbian.  This homosexual woman was at best, promiscuous; at worse, Lesbian was a clear and present danger to society.

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 Scant details of Sappho’s  life

There are just a handful of details regarding the facts of Sappho’s life. It has been established that Sappho was born around 615 BC to an aristocratic family on the Greek island of Lesbos during a period of a great artistic rebirth on the island. Sappho had several brothers, married a wealthy man named Cercylas and had a daughter, Cleis. Sappho spent nearly all of her life on Lesbos in the city of Mytilene and died around 550 BC.

However, given the unabashed delight Sappho found in the company and beauty of women, Sappho created a world of dominant feminine sensuality that was unimpressed with wars and all of the brutal pursuits of men.

Sappho’s subject matter was the feminine world; to deny and disrespect Sappho’s choices is to deny Sappho her humanity and to lessen her work.

We will not allow that to happen: let’s celebrate Sappho every month, not just in June during PRIDE, because Sappho brings us an abundance of joy and the moralists who would censor our dear Sappho, are immoral.

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

Poems included in this post:

Ode to Aphrodite24 Sapphic FragmentsMidnight Poem (fragment 48)Epithalamium, [Happy Bridegroom]Like the Very GodsThe Anactoria PoemCharaxos and Larichos

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More about Sappho’s poetry

Poetry Foundation Guide to the Classics: Sappho, a Poet in Fragments Reading Sappho

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Ode to Aphrodite

Immortal Aphrodite, on your intricately brocaded throne,
child of Zeus, weaver of wiles, this I pray:
Dear Lady, don’t crush my heart
with pains and sorrows.

Rapidly they came. And you, O Blessed Goddess,
a smile on your immortal face,
asked what had happened this time,
why did I call again,

and what did I especially desire
for myself in my frenzied heart:
“Who this time as I to persuade
to your love? Sappho, who is doing you wrong?

For even if she flees, soon she shall pursue.
And if she refuses gifts, soon she shall give them.
If she doesn’t love you, soon she shall love
even if she’s unwilling.”

Come to me now once again and release me
from grueling anxiety.
All that my heart longs for,
fulfill. And be yourself my ally in love’s battle.

Some say an army of horsemen,
some of foot soldiers, some of ships,
is the fairest thing on the black earth,
but I say it is what one loves.

It’s very easy to make this clear
to everyone, for Helen,
by far surpassing mortals in beauty,
left the best of all husbands

and sailed to Troy,
mindful of neither her child
nor her dear parents, but
with one glimpse she was seduced by

Aphrodite. For easily bent..
and nimbly..
has reminded me now
of Anactoria who is not here;

I would much prefer to see the lovely
way she walks and the radiant glance of her face
than the war-chariots of the Lydians or
their foot soldiers in arms.

That man to me seems equal to the gods,
the man who sits opposite you
and close by listens to your sweet voice

and your enticing laughter –
that indeed has stirred up the heart in my breath.
For whenever I look at you even briefly
I can no longer say a single thing,

but my tongue is frozen in silence;
instantly a delicate flame runs beneath my skin;
with my eyes I see nothing;
my ears make a whirring noise.

A cold sweat covers me,
trembling seizes my body,
and I am greener than grass.
Lacking but little of death do I seem.

 

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24 Sapphic Fragments

1
Come now, luxuriant Graces, and beautiful-haired Muses.

2
I tell you
someone will remember us
in the future.

3
Now, I shall sing these songs
Beautifully
for my companions.

4
The moon shone full
And when the maidens stood around the altar…

5
“He is dying, Aphrodite;
luxuriant Adonis is dying.
What should we do?”

“Beat your breasts, young maidens.
And tear your garments
in grief.”

6
O, weep for Adonis!

7
But come, dear companions,
For day is near.

8
The moon is set. And the Pleiades.
It’s the middle of the night.
Time [hôrâ] passes.
But I sleep alone.

9
I love the sensual.
For me this
and love for the sun
has a share in brilliance and beauty

10
I desire
And I crave.

11
You set me on fire.

12
A servant
of wile-weaving
Aphrodite…

13
Eros
Giver of pain…

 

14
Eros
Coming from heaven
throwing off
his purple cloak.

15
Again love, the limb-loosener, rattles me
bittersweet,
irresistible,
a crawling beast.

16
As a wind in the mountains
assaults an oak,
Love shook my breast.

17
I loved you, Atthis, long ago
even when you seemed to me
a small graceless child.

18
But you hate the very thought of me, Atthis,
And you flutter after Andromeda.

19
Honestly, I wish I were dead.
Weeping many tears, she left me and said,
“Alas, how terribly we suffer, Sappho.
I really leave you against my will.”

And I answered: “Farewell, go and remember me.
You know how we cared for you.

If not, I would remind you
…of our wonderful times.

For by my side you put on
many wreaths of roses
and garlands of flowers
around your soft neck.
And with precious and royal perfume
you anointed yourself.

On soft beds you satisfied your passion.

And there was no dance,
no holy place
from which we were absent.”

20
They say that Leda once found
an egg—
like a hyacinth.
“Virginity, virginity
Where will you go when you’ve left me?”
“I’ll never come back to you , bride,
I’ll never come back to you.”

22
Sweet mother, I can’t do my weaving—
Aphrodite has crushed me with desire
for a tender youth.

23
Like a sweet-apple
turning red
high
on the tip
of the topmost branch.
Forgotten by pickers.

Not forgotten—
they couldn’t reach it.

24
Like a hyacinth
in the mountains
that shepherds crush underfoot.

(Translated by Julie Dubnoff)

 

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Moonlight Poem (Fragment 48)

The moon has set,
and the Pleiades;
it is midnight, the time is going by
and I recline alone.

The sinking moon has left the sky,
The Pleiades have also gone.
Midnight comes–and goes, the hours fly
And solitary still, I lie.

The Moon has left the sky,
Lost is the Pleiads’ light;
It is midnight,
And time slips by,
But on my couch alone I lie.

(Translated by J. A. Symonds, 1883)

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Epithalamium, [Happy Bridegroom]

Happy bridegroom, Hesper brings
All desired and timely things.
All whom morning sends to roam,
Hesper loves to lead them home.
Home return who him behold,
Child to mother, sheep to fold,
Bird to nest from wandering wide:
Happy bridegroom, seek your bride.

(Translation by A. E. Housman, 1922)

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Like the very gods

Like the very gods in my sight is he who
sits where he can look in your eyes, who listens
close to you, to hear the soft voice, its sweetness
      murmur in love and

laughter, all for him. But it breaks my spirit;
underneath my breast all the heart is shaken.
Let me only glance where you are, the voice dies,
      I can say nothing,

but my lips are stricken to silence, under-
neath my skin the tenuous flame suffuses;
nothing shows in front of my eyes, my ears are
      muted in thunder.

And the sweat breaks running upon me, fever
Shakes my body, paler I turn than grass is;
I can feel that I have been changed, I feel that
death has come near me.

(From Greek Lyrics, edited by Richmond Lattimore, The University of Chicago, 1949, 1960)

 

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The Anactoria Poem

Some there are who say that the fairest thing seen
on the black earth is an array of horsemen;
some, men marching; some would say ships; but I say
      she whom one loves best

is the loveliest. Light were the work to make this
plain to all, since she, who surpassed in beauty
all mortality, Helen, once forsaking
      her lordly husband,

fled away to Troy—land across the water.
Not the thought of child nor beloved parents
was remembered, after the Queen of Cyprus
     won her at first sight.

Since young brides have hearts that can be persuaded
easily, light things, palpitant to passion
as am I, remembering Anaktória
      who has gone from me

and whose lovely walk and the shining pallor
of her face I would rather see before my
eyes than Lydia’s chariots in all their glory
     armored for battle.

(From Greek Lyrics, edited by Richmond Lattimore, The University of Chicago, 1949, 1960)

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Charaxos and Larichos

Say what you like about Charaxos,
that’s a fellow with a fat-bellied ship
always in some port or other.
What does Zeus care, or the rest of his gang?
Now you’d like me on my knees,
crying out to Hera, “Blah, blah, blah,
bring him home safe and free of warts,”
or blubbering, “Wah, wah, wah, thank you,
thank you, for curing my liver condition.”
Good grief, gods do what they like.
They call down hurricanes with a whisper
or send off a tsunami the way you would a love letter.
If they have a whim, they make some henchmen
fix it up, like those idiots in the Iliad.
A puff of smoke, a little fog, away goes the hero,
it’s happily ever after. As for Larichos,
that lay-a-bed lives for the pillow. If for once
he’d get off his ass, he might make something of himself.
Then from that reeking sewer of my life
I might haul up a bucket of spring water.

 (Translated by William Logan, Poetry – July/August 2016)

Explore more poetry by classic women authors on this site.

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A White Heron by Sarah Orne Jewett (full text)

“A White Heron” by Sarah Orne Jewett (1849 – 1900) is one of this esteemed New England author’s most widely anthologized short stories, originally published by Houghton, Mifflin and Co. in 1886. Shortly thereafter, it was the title story in Jewett’s collection, A White Heron and Other Stories. 

The story focuses on a city girl named Sylvia who comes to live in the countryside with her grandmother. She meets a hunter who is seeking a rare bird. Sylvia is torn as to whether she should tell him that she spotted the bird. As the story progresses, she grows to love country living and the animals who are part of its habitats.

Sarah Orne Jewett’s short stories and novels reflected her love for the natural surroundings of her native South Berwick, Maine. The coastal community served as the fictionalized setting for most of her novels and short stories.

With a childhood and youth spent in delicate health, she often accompanied her physician father as he did his calls to neighboring farms and villages in the region. She seemed to have gained as much knowledge of people and places by doing so as by attending school.

Her exquisitely crafted fiction was steeped in quiet observation of human nature and as well as love for the natural world that surrounded her. This is amply demonstrated in “A White Heron.” Celebrating female independence as well, this story is now considered proto-feminist.

Analyses of “A White Heron”

Wikipedia
A White Heron – Analysis
Symbolism and Themes in Jewett’s A White Heron

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A White Heron

The woods were already filled with shadows one June evening, just before eight o’clock, though a bright sunset still glimmered faintly among the trunks of the trees. A little girl was driving home her cow, a plodding, dilatory, provoking creature in her behavior, but a valued companion for all that. They were going away from whatever light there was, and striking deep into the woods, but their feet were familiar with the path, and it was no matter whether their eyes could see it or not.

There was hardly a night the summer through when the old cow could be found waiting at the pasture bars; on the contrary, it was her greatest pleasure to hide herself away among the high huckleberry bushes, and though she wore a loud bell she had made the discovery that if one stood perfectly still it would not ring.

So Sylvia had to hunt for her until she found her, and call Co’! Co’! with never an answering Moo, until her childish patience was quite spent. If the creature had not given good milk and plenty of it, the case would have seemed very different to her owners. Besides, Sylvia had all the time there was, and very little use to make of it.

Sometimes in pleasant weather it was a consolation to look upon the cow’s pranks as an intelligent attempt to play hide and seek, and as the child had no playmates she lent herself to this amusement with a good deal of zest. Though this chase had been so long that the wary animal herself had given an unusual signal of her whereabouts, Sylvia had only laughed when she came upon Mistress Moolly at the swamp-side, and urged her affectionately homeward with a twig of birch leaves.

The old cow was not inclined to wander farther, she even turned in the right direction for once as they left the pasture, and stepped along the road at a good pace. She was quite ready to be milked now, and seldom stopped to browse. Sylvia wondered what her grandmother would say because they were so late. It was a great while since she had left home at half-past five o’clock, but everybody knew the difficulty of making this errand a short one.

Mrs. Tilley had chased the hornéd torment too many summer evenings herself to blame any one else for lingering, and was only thankful as she waited that she had Sylvia, nowadays, to give such valuable assistance. The good woman suspected that Sylvia loitered occasionally on her own account; there never was such a child for straying about out-of-doors since the world was made!

Everybody said that it was a good change for a little maid who had tried to grow for eight years in a crowded manufacturing town, but, as for Sylvia herself, it seemed as if she never had been alive at all before she came to live at the farm. She thought often with wistful compassion of a wretched geranium that belonged to a town neighbor.

“‘Afraid of folks,'” old Mrs. Tilley said to herself, with a smile, after she had made the unlikely choice of Sylvia from her daughter’s houseful of children, and was returning to the farm. “‘Afraid of folks,’ they said! I guess she won’t be troubled no great with ’em up to the old place!”

When they reached the door of the lonely house and stopped to unlock it, and the cat came to purr loudly, and rub against them, a deserted pussy, indeed, but fat with young robins, Sylvia whispered that this was a beautiful place to live in, and she never should wish to go home.

The companions followed the shady wood-road, the cow taking slow steps and the child very fast ones. The cow stopped long at the brook to drink, as if the pasture were not half a swamp, and Sylvia stood still and waited, letting her bare feet cool themselves in the shoal water, while the great twilight moths struck softly against her.

She waded on through the brook as the cow moved away, and listened to the thrushes with a heart that beat fast with pleasure. There was a stirring in the great boughs overhead. They were full of little birds and beasts that seemed to be wide awake, and going about their world, or else saying good-night to each other in sleepy twitters.

Sylvia herself felt sleepy as she walked along. However, it was not much farther to the house, and the air was soft and sweet. She was not often in the woods so late as this, and it made her feel as if she were a part of the gray shadows and the moving leaves.

She was just thinking how long it seemed since she first came to the farm a year ago, and wondering if everything went on in the noisy town just the same as when she was there, the thought of the great red-faced boy who used to chase and frighten her made her hurry along the path to escape from the shadow of the trees.

Suddenly this little woods-girl is horror-stricken to hear a clear whistle not very far away. Not a bird’s-whistle, which would have a sort of friendliness, but a boy’s whistle, determined, and somewhat aggressive. Sylvia left the cow to whatever sad fate might await her, and stepped discreetly aside into the bushes, but she was just too late.

The enemy had discovered her, and called out in a very cheerful and persuasive tone, “Halloa, little girl, how far is it to the road?” and trembling Sylvia answered almost inaudibly, “A good ways.” She did not dare to look boldly at the tall young man, who carried a gun over his shoulder, but she came out of her bush and again followed the cow, while he walked alongside.

“I have been hunting for some birds,” the stranger said kindly, “and I have lost my way, and need a friend very much. Don’t be afraid,” he added gallantly. “Speak up and tell me what your name is, and whether you think I can spend the night at your house, and go out gunning early in the morning.”

Sylvia was more alarmed than before. Would not her grandmother consider her much to blame? But who could have foreseen such an accident as this? It did not seem to be her fault, and she hung her head as if the stem of it were broken, but managed to answer “Sylvy,” with much effort when her companion again asked her name.

Mrs. Tilley was standing in the doorway when the trio came into view. The cow gave a loud moo by way of explanation.

“Yes, you’d better speak up for yourself, you old trial! Where’d she tucked herself away this time, Sylvy?” But Sylvia kept an awed silence; she knew by instinct that her grandmother did not comprehend the gravity of the situation. She must be mistaking the stranger for one of the farmer-lads of the region.

The young man stood his gun beside the door, and dropped a lumpy game-bag beside it; then he bade Mrs. Tilley good-evening, and repeated his wayfarer’s story, and asked if he could have a night’s lodging.

“Put me anywhere you like,” he said. “I must be off early in the morning, before day; but I am very hungry, indeed. You can give me some milk at any rate, that’s plain.”

“Dear sakes, yes,” responded the hostess, whose long slumbering hospitality seemed to be easily awakened. “You might fare better if you went out to the main road a mile or so, but you’re welcome to what we’ve got. I’ll milk right off, and you make yourself at home. You can sleep on husks or feathers,” she proffered graciously. “I raised them all myself. There’s good pasturing for geese just below here towards the ma’sh. Now step round and set a plate for the gentleman, Sylvy!”

And Sylvia promptly stepped. She was glad to have something to do, and she was hungry herself.

It was a surprise to find so clean and comfortable a little dwelling in this New England wilderness. The young man had known the horrors of its most primitive housekeeping, and the dreary squalor of that level of society which does not rebel at the companionship of hens.

This was the best thrift of an old-fashioned farmstead, though on such a small scale that it seemed like a hermitage. He listened eagerly to the old woman’s quaint talk, he watched Sylvia’s pale face and shining gray eyes with ever growing enthusiasm, and insisted that this was the best supper he had eaten for a month, and afterward the new-made friends sat down in the door-way together while the moon came up.

Soon it would be berry-time, and Sylvia was a great help at picking. The cow was a good milker, though a plaguy thing to keep track of, the hostess gossiped frankly, adding presently that she had buried four children, so Sylvia’s mother, and a son (who might be dead) in California were all the children she had left.

“Dan, my boy, was a great hand to go gunning,” she explained sadly. “I never wanted for pa’tridges or gray squer’ls while he was to home. He’s been a great wand’rer, I expect, and he’s no hand to write letters. There, I don’t blame him, I’d ha’ seen the world myself if it had been so I could. “Sylvy takes after him,” the grandmother continued affectionately, after a minute’s pause.

“There ain’t a foot o’ ground she don’t know her way over, and the wild creaturs counts her one o’ themselves. Squer’ls she’ll tame to come an’ feed right out o’ her hands, and all sorts o’ birds. Last winter she got the jay-birds to bangeing here, and I believe she’d ‘a’ scanted herself of her own meals to have plenty to throw out amongst ’em, if I hadn’t kep’ watch. Anything but crows, I tell her, I’m willin’ to help support,—though Dan he had a tamed one o’ them that did seem to have reason same as folks. It was round here a good spell after he went away. Dan an’ his father they didn’t hitch,—but he never held up his head ag’in after Dan had dared him an’ gone off.”

The guest did not notice this hint of family sorrows in his eager interest in something else.

“So Sylvy knows all about birds, does she?” he exclaimed, as he looked round at the little girl who sat, very demure but increasingly sleepy, in the moonlight. “I am making a collection of birds myself. I have been at it ever since I was a boy.” (Mrs. Tilley smiled.) “There are two or three very rare ones I have been hunting for these five years. I mean to get them on my own ground if they can be found.”

“Do you cage ’em up?” asked Mrs. Tilley doubtfully, in response to this enthusiastic announcement.

“Oh no, they’re stuffed and preserved, dozens and dozens of them,” said the ornithologist, “and I have shot or snared every one myself. I caught a glimpse of a white heron a few miles from here on Saturday, and I have followed it in this direction. They have never been found in this district at all. The little white heron, it is,” and he turned again to look at Sylvia with the hope of discovering that the rare bird was one of her acquaintances. But Sylvia was watching a hop-toad in the narrow footpath.

“You would know the heron if you saw it,” the stranger continued eagerly. “A queer tall white bird with soft feathers and long thin legs. And it would have a nest perhaps in the top of a high tree, made of sticks, something like a hawk’s nest.”

Sylvia’s heart gave a wild beat; she knew that strange white bird, and had once stolen softly near where it stood in some bright green swamp grass, away over at the other side of the woods. There was an open place where the sunshine always seemed strangely yellow and hot, where tall, nodding rushes grew, and her grandmother had warned her that she might sink in the soft black mud underneath and never be heard of more.

Not far beyond were the salt marshes just this side the sea itself, which Sylvia wondered and dreamed much about, but never had seen, whose great voice could sometimes be heard above the noise of the woods on stormy nights.

“I can’t think of anything I should like so much as to find that heron’s nest,” the handsome stranger was saying. “I would give ten dollars to anybody who could show it to me,” he added desperately, “and I mean to spend my whole vacation hunting for it if need be. Perhaps it was only migrating, or had been chased out of its own region by some bird of prey.”

Mrs. Tilley gave amazed attention to all this, but Sylvia still watched the toad, not divining, as she might have done at some calmer time, that the creature wished to get to its hole under the door-step, and was much hindered by the unusual spectators at that hour of the evening. No amount of thought, that night, could decide how many wished-for treasures the ten dollars, so lightly spoken of, would buy.

The next day the young sportsman hovered about the woods, and Sylvia kept him company, having lost her first fear of the friendly lad, who proved to be most kind and sympathetic. He told her many things about the birds and what they knew and where they lived and what they did with themselves. And he gave her a jack-knife, which she thought as great a treasure as if she were a desert-islander.

All day long he did not once make her troubled or afraid except when he brought down some unsuspecting singing creature from its bough. Sylvia would have liked him vastly better without his gun; she could not understand why he killed the very birds he seemed to like so much. But as the day waned, Sylvia still watched the young man with loving admiration. She had never seen anybody so charming and delightful; the woman’s heart, asleep in the child, was vaguely thrilled by a dream of love.

Some premonition of that great power stirred and swayed these young creatures who traversed the solemn woodlands with soft-footed silent care. They stopped to listen to a bird’s song; they pressed forward again eagerly, parting the branches,—speaking to each other rarely and in whispers; the young man going first and Sylvia following, fascinated, a few steps behind, with her gray eyes dark with excitement.

She grieved because the longed-for white heron was elusive, but she did not lead the guest, she only followed, and there was no such thing as speaking first. The sound of her own unquestioned voice would have terrified her,—it was hard enough to answer yes or no when there was need of that. At last evening began to fall, and they drove the cow home together, and Sylvia smiled with pleasure when they came to the place where she heard the whistle and was afraid only the night before.

II

Half a mile from home, at the farther edge of the woods, where the land was highest, a great pine-tree stood, the last of its generation. Whether it was left for a boundary mark, or for what reason, no one could say; the woodchoppers who had felled its mates were dead and gone long ago, and a whole forest of sturdy trees, pines and oaks and maples, had grown again. But the stately head of this old pine towered above them all and made a landmark for sea and shore miles and miles away.

Sylvia knew it well. She had always believed that whoever climbed to the top of it could see the ocean; and the little girl had often laid her hand on the great rough trunk and looked up wistfully at those dark boughs that the wind always stirred, no matter how hot and still the air might be below. Now she thought of the tree with a new excitement, for why, if one climbed it at break of day, could not one see all the world, and easily discover from whence the white heron flew, and mark the place, and find the hidden nest?

What a spirit of adventure, what wild ambition! What fancied triumph and delight and glory for the later morning when she could make known the secret! It was almost too real and too great for the childish heart to bear.

All night the door of the little house stood open and the whippoorwills came and sang upon the very step. The young sportsman and his old hostess were sound asleep, but Sylvia’s great design kept her broad awake and watching. She forgot to think of sleep.

The short summer night seemed as long as the winter darkness, and at last when the whippoorwills ceased, and she was afraid the morning would after all come too soon, she stole out of the house and followed the pasture path through the woods, hastening toward the open ground beyond, listening with a sense of comfort and companionship to the drowsy twitter of a half-awakened bird, whose perch she had jarred in passing.

Alas, if the great wave of human interest which flooded for the first time this dull little life should sweep away the satisfactions of an existence heart to heart with nature and the dumb life of the forest! There was the huge tree asleep yet in the paling moonlight, and small and silly Sylvia began with utmost bravery to mount to the top of it, with tingling, eager blood coursing the channels of her whole frame, with her bare feet and fingers, that pinched and held like bird’s claws to the monstrous ladder reaching up, up, almost to the sky itself.

First she must mount the white oak tree that grew alongside, where she was almost lost among the dark branches and the green leaves heavy and wet with dew; a bird fluttered off its nest, and a red squirrel ran to and fro and scolded pettishly at the harmless housebreaker. Sylvia felt her way easily. She had often climbed there, and knew that higher still one of the oak’s upper branches chafed against the pine trunk, just where its lower boughs were set close together. There, when she made the dangerous pass from one tree to the other, the great enterprise would really begin.

She crept out along the swaying oak limb at last, and took the daring step across into the old pine-tree. The way was harder than she thought; she must reach far and hold fast, the sharp dry twigs caught and held her and scratched her like angry talons, the pitch made her thin little fingers clumsy and stiff as she went round and round the tree’s great stem, higher and higher upward. The sparrows and robins in the woods below were beginning to wake and twitter to the dawn, yet it seemed much lighter there aloft in the pine-tree, and the child knew she must hurry if her project were to be of any use.

The tree seemed to lengthen itself out as she went up, and to reach farther and farther upward. It was like a great main-mast to the voyaging earth; it must truly have been amazed that morning through all its ponderous frame as it felt this determined spark of human spirit wending its way from higher branch to branch. Who knows how steadily the least twigs held themselves to advantage this light, weak creature on her way!

The old pine must have loved his new dependent. More than all the hawks, and bats, and moths, and even the sweet voiced thrushes, was the brave, beating heart of the solitary gray-eyed child. And the tree stood still and frowned away the winds that June morning while the dawn grew bright in the east.

Sylvia’s face was like a pale star, if one had seen it from the ground, when the last thorny bough was past, and she stood trembling and tired but wholly triumphant, high in the tree-top. Yes, there was the sea with the dawning sun making a golden dazzle over it, and toward that glorious east flew two hawks with slow-moving pinions.

How low they looked in the air from that height when one had only seen them before far up, and dark against the blue sky. Their gray feathers were as soft as moths; they seemed only a little way from the tree, and Sylvia felt as if she too could go flying away among the clouds. Westward, the woodlands and farms reached miles and miles into the distance; here and there were church steeples, and white villages, truly it was a vast and awesome world

The birds sang louder and louder. At last the sun came up bewilderingly bright. Sylvia could see the white sails of ships out at sea, and the clouds that were purple and rose-colored and yellow at first began to fade away. Where was the white heron’s nest in the sea of green branches, and was this wonderful sight and pageant of the world the only reward for having climbed to such a giddy height?

Now look down again, Sylvia, where the green marsh is set among the shining birches and dark hemlocks; there where you saw the white heron once you will see him again; look, look! a white spot of him like a single floating feather comes up from the dead hemlock and grows larger, and rises, and comes close at last, and goes by the landmark pine with steady sweep of wing and outstretched slender neck and crested head.

And wait! wait! do not move a foot or a finger, little girl, do not send an arrow of light and consciousness from your two eager eyes, for the heron has perched on a pine bough not far beyond yours, and cries back to his mate on the nest and plumes his feathers for the new day! The child gives a long sigh a minute later when a company of shouting cat-birds comes also to the tree, and vexed by their fluttering and lawlessness the solemn heron goes away.

She knows his secret now, the wild, light, slender bird that floats and wavers, and goes back like an arrow presently to his home in the green world beneath. Then Sylvia, well satisfied, makes her perilous way down again, not daring to look far below the branch she stands on, ready to cry sometimes because her fingers ache and her lamed feet slip. Wondering over and over again what the stranger would say to her, and what he would think when she told him how to find his way straight to the heron’s nest.

“Sylvy, Sylvy!” called the busy old grandmother again and again, but nobody answered, and the small husk bed was empty and Sylvia had disappeared.

The guest waked from a dream, and remembering his day’s pleasure hurried to dress himself that might it sooner begin. He was sure from the way the shy little girl looked once or twice yesterday that she had at least seen the white heron, and now she must really be made to tell. Here she comes now, paler than ever, and her worn old frock is torn and tattered, and smeared with pine pitch. The grandmother and the sportsman stand in the door together and question her, and the splendid moment has come to speak of the dead hemlock-tree by the green marsh.

But Sylvia does not speak after all, though the old grandmother fretfully rebukes her, and the young man’s kind, appealing eyes are looking straight in her own. He can make them rich with money; he has promised it, and they are poor now. He is so well worth making happy, and he waits to hear the story she can tell.

No, she must keep silence! What is it that suddenly forbids her and makes her dumb? Has she been nine years growing and now, when the great world for the first time puts out a hand to her, must she thrust it aside for a bird’s sake?

The murmur of the pine’s green branches is in her ears, she remembers how the white heron came flying through the golden air and how they watched the sea and the morning together, and Sylvia cannot speak; she cannot tell the heron’s secret and give its life away. Dear loyalty, that suffered a sharp pang as the guest went away disappointed later in the day, that could have served and followed him and loved him as a dog loves!

Many a night Sylvia heard the echo of his whistle haunting the pasture path as she came home with the loitering cow. She forgot even her sorrow at the sharp report of his gun and the sight of thrushes and sparrows dropping silent to the ground, their songs hushed and their pretty feathers stained and wet with blood. Were the birds better friends than their hunter might have been,—who can tell? Whatever treasures were lost to her, woodlands and summer-time, remember! Bring your gifts and graces and tell your secrets to this lonely country child!

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Wise Quotes by Sarah Orne Jewett

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The post A White Heron by Sarah Orne Jewett (full text) appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.

Mother and Poet by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

“Mother and Poet” is a poem by esteemed British poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806 – 1861). Written in a confessional manner, it’s a mother’s lament for having lost two sons serving in war. Though this poem isn’t autobiographical, Elizabeth had endured the sudden death of a beloved brother, and perhaps this allowed her to effectively convey the trauma of losing loved ones.

Suffused with grief and guilt, the mother narrating the poem exalts the bravery of her soldier sons doing battle in Italy. At the same time, it conveys the mother’s pain of the personal loss.

“Mother and Poet” was one of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s later poems, published in Last Poems (1862). If she wasn’t speaking of herself in this poem, to who might it have been referring?

A note in Last Poems explains that it was inspired by the true story of Baroness Olimpia (sometimes referred to as “Laura”) Savio (1815–1889), who was indeed a mother, poet, and writer from Turin, Italy. Both of her sons died in the battle of the Risorgimento, or Italian reunification. 

“Mother and Poet” Analysis by Kristyn Baker and Miranda Butler (video) features some in-depth discussion.

 

More poetry by Elizabeth Barrett Browning on this site:

10 Shorter Poems by Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Sonnets from the Portuguese (full text)
“The Cry of the Children”
To Flush, My Dog
A Dead Rose
To George Sand, a Desire

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Elizabeth Barrett Browning and son Robert Wiedemann Barrett Browning, 1860

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Mother and Poet

I.

Dead! One of them shot by the sea in the east,

And one of them shot in the west by the sea.

Dead! both my boys! When you sit at the feast

And are wanting a great song for Italy free,

Let none look at me!

II.

Yet I was a poetess only last year,

And good at my art, for a woman, men said;

But this woman, this, who is agonized here,

— The east sea and west sea rhyme on in her head

For ever instead.

III.

What art can a woman be good at ? Oh, vain!

What art is she good at, but hurting her breast

With the milk-teeth of babes, and a smile at the pain ?

Ah boys, how you hurt! you were strong as you pressed,

And I proud, by that test.

IV.

What art’s for a woman ? To hold on her knees

Both darlings! to feel all their arms round her throat,

Cling, strangle a little! to sew by degrees

And ‘broider the long-clothes and neat little coat;

To dream and to do at.

V.

To teach them … It stings there!I made them indeed

Speak plain the word country. I taught them, no doubt,

That a country’s a thing men should die for at need.

I prated of liberty, rights, and about

The tyrant cast out.

VI.

And when their eyes flashed … O my beautiful eyes! …

I exulted; nay, let them go forth at the wheels

Of the guns, and denied not. But then the surprise

When one sits quite alone! Then one weeps, then one kneels!

God, how the house feels!

VII.

At first, happy news came, in gay letters moiled

With my kisses, — of camp-life and glory, and how

They both loved me; and, soon coming home to be spoiled

In return would fan off every fly from my brow

With their green laurel-bough.

VIII.

Then was triumph at Turin: Ancona was free!’

And some one came out of the cheers in the street,

With a face pale as stone, to say something to me.

My Guido was dead! I fell down at his feet,

While they cheered in the street.

IX.

I bore it; friends soothed me; my grief looked sublime

As the ransom of Italy. One boy remained

To be leant on and walked with, recalling the time

When the first grew immortal, while both of us strained

To the height he had gained.

X.

And letters still came, shorter, sadder, more strong,

Writ now but in one hand, I was not to faint, —

One loved me for two — would be with me ere long :

AndViva l’ Italia! — he died for, our saint,

Who forbids our complaint.”

XI.

My Nanni would add, he was safe, and aware

Of a presence that turned off the balls, — was imprest

It was Guido himself, who knew what I could bear,

And how ’twas impossible, quite dispossessed,

To live on for the rest.”

XII.

On which, without pause, up the telegraph line

Swept smoothly the next news from Gaeta : —Shot.

Tell his mother. Ah, ah, his, ‘ their ‘ mother, — not mine, ‘

No voice says “My mother” again to me. What!

You think Guido forgot ?

XIII.

Are souls straight so happy that, dizzy with Heaven,

They drop earth’s affections, conceive not of woe ?

I think not. Themselves were too lately forgiven

Through THAT Love and Sorrow which reconciled so

The Above and Below.

XIV.

O Christ of the five wounds, who look’dst through the dark

To the face of Thy mother! consider, I pray,

How we common mothers stand desolate, mark,

Whose sons, not being Christs, die with eyes turned away,

And no last word to say!

XV.

Both boys dead ? but that’s out of nature. We all

Have been patriots, yet each house must always keep one.

‘Twere imbecile, hewing out roads to a wall;

And, when Italy ‘s made, for what end is it done

If we have not a son ?

XVI.

Ah, ah, ah! when Gaeta’s taken, what then ?

When the fair wicked queen sits no more at her sport

Of the fire-balls of death crashing souls out of men ?

When the guns of Cavalli with final retort

Have cut the game short ?

XVII.

When Venice and Rome keep their new jubilee,

When your flag takes all heaven for its white, green, and red,

When you have your country from mountain to sea,

When King Victor has Italy’s crown on his head,

(And I have my Dead) —

XVIII.

What then ? Do not mock me. Ah, ring your bells low,

And burn your lights faintly!My country is there,

Above the star pricked by the last peak of snow :

My Italy ‘s THERE, with my brave civic Pair,

To disfranchise despair!

XIX.

Forgive me. Some women bear children in strength,

And bite back the cry of their pain in self-scorn;

But the birth-pangs of nations will wring us at length

Into wail such as this — and we sit on forlorn

When the man-child is born.

XX.

Dead! One of them shot by the sea in the east,

And one of them shot in the west by the sea.

Both! both my boys! If in keeping the feast

You want a great song for your Italy free,

Let none look at me !

 

The post Mother and Poet by Elizabeth Barrett Browning appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.

Marilyn French

Marilyn French (November 21, 1929 – May 2, 2009) was an American author and radical feminist activist best known for her debut novel, The Women’s Room. French wrote many other controversial works, though this novel made her a major literary star in the modern feminist movement.

Born Marilyn Edwards in Brooklyn, New York, she was the daughter of third-generation Polish immigrants. Her father, E. Charles Edwards was an engineer and her mother, Isabel Hazz Edwards, was a department store clerk.

While growing up, French recalled that her mother was the dominant figure in the family’s poor household. This became an early lesson in her life to not succumb to male authority.

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Family and Education

As a child, French played the piano and dreamed of one day becoming a composer. That changed once she arrived at Hofstra University, then known as Hofstra College, in 1951. Before attending Hofstra, she married Robert M. French Jr. in 1950.

While working on her education, she endured her husband’s disapproval of her education, all the while supporting him through his law school studies. Her marriage was reportedly unhappy, as she once said “I saw my mother’s life. I tried very hard to escape and I ended up in the same trap.” Despite this, she earned her bachelor’s degree in philosophy and English literature.

After the couple had two children, French returned to Hofstra and in 1964 earned her Master’s degree in English. After graduating, she became an English instructor at Hofstra, a post she held until 1968. In 1967, she divorced Robert French and went back to school yet again, earning a Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1972.

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The Women’s Room is French’s best-known work

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Early works

After earning her doctorate, French worked as an assistant professor of English at the College of the Holy Cross Worcester, Massachusetts from 1972 to 1976. At the same time, she began creating works that focused on patriarchy and women’s history. In particular, her thesis on James Joyce’s Ulysses gained a substantial amount of praise.

She credited her expanding awareness of feminism to her troubled marriage, the rape of her eighteen-year-old daughter in 1971, and Kate Millet’s Sexual Politics. In addition to working as an assistant professor, she was also a Mellon Fellow in English at Harvard from 1976 to 1977. 

In addition to the novels and other works she created, she also contributed articles and essays to journals, such as Soundings and Ohio Review, under the pen name Mara Solwoska.

 

Controversial works

In 1977, French published her first and best-known novel, The Women’s Room, which reflects on her own life. It follows a group of female friends living in 1960s America with a militant radical feminist named Val. At one point in the novel, Val says, “all men are rapists, and that’s all they are. They rape us with their eyes, their laws, and their codes.”

The controversial novel was translated into twenty languages and sold over twenty million copies. Although The Women’s Room was followed by notable gains in the three decades after its publication, she pointed out that there was still much lingering gender inequality. 

Aside from this novel, she created significant work in her later life called From Eve to Dawn: A History of Women. It was first published in Dutch in 1995 and translated to English in 2002. This novel examined how exclusion from intellectual histories has denied women of their past, present, and future. 

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Themes in French’s work

French primarily focused on the subjugation of women in her works. She often examined the expectations placed on married women after the World War II era. She also became an influential opinion-maker on gender issues she witnessed in the patriarchal society in which she lived. 

She once said, “My goal in life is to change the entire social and economic structure of Western civilization, to make it a feminist world.”

She also often declared that the oppression of women was a byproduct of an  entrenched male-dominated culture. In her 1992 novel, The War Against Women, she expanded on female oppression, writing: “Men’s need to dominate women may be based in their own sense of marginality or emptiness; we do not know its root, and men are making no effort to discover it.”

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Marilyn French books on Bookshop.org*

Marilyn French page on Amazon*

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Awards and honors

Despite negative reviews, The Women’s Room remained a best-seller for two years, was translated into over twenty languages, and was adapted to film. A few years later in 1982, the Berkley Publishing Group commended it as one of its top five paperback sellers of all time.

In 1993, French earned the Harvard Centennial Medal, the highest honor bestowed by the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.

After From Eve to Dawn: A History of Women was published in English in 2002, it was published again in four volumes by The Feminist Press and again in three volumes by MacArthur & Company.

 

Grim diagnosis

In 1992, French was diagnosed with esophageal cancer after being a longtime smoker. Doctors told her she only had a few months to live. In the years following her supposed death sentence, she continued publishing an astonishing amount of works. Her battle with illness became the basis of her book, A Season in Hell: A Memoir, published in 1998.

French won her battle with cancer. “I cannot say I am happy I was sick, but I am happy that sickness, if it had to happen, brought me to where I am now. It is a better place than I have been before.” 

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The legacy of Marilyn French

French died in 2009 of heart failure at age 79, in New York City. “She was in pain for fifteen years but she was extremely brave. She fought through it, she wrote through it and carried on her life. The printed word was a source of life for her,” said Carol Jenkins, a friend of the author, who runs the Women’s Media Center, an advocacy group in New York.

In the years prior to her death, French believed that she had seen a notable change in society’s attitude towards women, though progress was still needed. American author Florence Howe said of French’s work that “For the first time women have history. The world changed and she helped change it.”

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More about Marilyn French

Major works 

The Book as World: James Joyce’s Ulysses (1976)
The Women’s Room (1977)
The Bleeding Heart (1980)
Shakespeare’s Division of Experience (1981)
Beyond Power: On Women, Men, and Morals (1985)
Her Mother’s Daughter  (1987)
The War Against Women (1992)
Our Father (1994)
My Summer with George (1996)
A Season in Hell: A Memoir (1998)
From Eve to Dawn: A History of Women in Three Volumes (2003)

Critical studies

Feminist Criticism and Marilyn French
Marilyn French Critical Essays

More information and sources

Wikipedia
Marilyn French Obituary in the New York Times
Encyclopedia
Reader discussion of French’s books on Goodreads
Marilyn French papers at Columbia University

Skyler Isabella Gomez is a 2019 SUNY New Paltz graduate with a degree in Public Relations and a minor in Black Studies. Her passions include connecting more with her Latin roots by researching and writing about legendary Latina authors.

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Sic Transit Gloria Mundi — an early poem by Emily Dickinson (1852)

“Sic Transit Gloria Mundi” was the first poem by Emily Dickinson (1830 – 1886) to be published. Without her prior knowledge or consent, it appeared in the February 20, 1852 issue of the Springfield Daily Republican newspaper.

Emily, then age 21, wasn’t pleased. Still a budding poet, she was not at all interested in publication. In her teens and twenties, she may have been reserved and a bit shy, but nothing to hint at how reclusive she would become in her later years. In fact, she and her sister Lavinia (Vinnie) enjoyed quite an active social life in their youth.

One of the highlights of the year was Valentine’s Day, an occasion to brighten the long, cold winters of their home town, Amherst, Massachusetts. Young people enjoyed parties and lavish handmade cards and letters created for a holiday that wasn’t nearly as exclusive to couples as it has since become.

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Learn more about Emily Dickinson

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Emily was inspired to write the long, lively poem, still among her best known, that begins “Sic transit Gloria mundi.” Translated as “This passes the glory of the world,” here’s how it happened to get published, according to Krystyna Poray Goddu, in Becoming Emily: The Life of Emily Dickinson (2019):

“February [1852] also saw the usual flurry of Valentine’s Day notes and poems. To Emily’s surprise, her valentine to young William Howland, who had worked in her father’s law firm, was published, anonymously, in the February 20, 1852 issue of the Springfield Daily Republican newspaper.

The valentine, a poem of 17 quatrains (verses with four lines) with the second and fourth lines of each verse rhyming, holds two mysteries. First, to this day nobody knows who sent it to the newspaper.

Second, Emily never showed any special interest in Howland. Why she chose him as the recipient of this long poem is mystifying. The ambitious poem is noteworthy for being so cleverly written and technically well done.”

Though Howland never owned up to it, as the poem’s recipient, it might be logical to assume that he was the culprit who submitted it to the paper.

All through her life, Emily remained disinterested in having her poems published, though she enjoyed sharing a small number with those she loved or trusted. After her death, over a thousand poems were discovered by her sister Lavinia. By some estimates the number of poems were 1,100; other sources state that it was closer to 1,800.

 

Analyses of Sic transit gloria mundi 

Blogging Dickinson
Emily Dickinson’s Valentines (preview on Jstor)

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Sic transit gloria mundi

“Sic transit gloria mundi,”

“How doth the busy bee,”

“Dum vivimus vivamus,”

I stay mine enemy!

Oh “veni, vidi, vici!”

Oh caput cap-a-pie!

And oh “memento mori”

When I am far from thee!

Hurrah for Peter Parley!

Hurrah for Daniel Boone!

Three cheers, sir, for the gentleman

Who first observed the moon!

Peter, put up the sunshine;

Patti, arrange the stars;

Tell Luna, tea is waiting,

And call your brother Mars!

Put down the apple, Adam,

And come away with me,

So shalt thou have a pippin

From off my father’s tree!

I climb the “Hill of Science,”

I “view the landscape o’er;”

Such transcendental prospect,

I ne’er beheld before!

Unto the Legislature

My country bids me go;

I’ll take my india rubbers,

In case the wind should blow!

During my education,

It was announced to me

That gravitation, stumbling,

Fell from an apple tree!

The earth upon an axis

Was once supposed to turn,

By way of a gymnastic

In honor of the sun!

It was the brave Columbus,

A sailing o’er the tide,

Who notified the nations

Of where I would reside!

Mortality is fatal—

Gentility is fine,

Rascality, heroic,

Insolvency, sublime!

Our Fathers being weary,

Laid down on Bunker Hill;

And tho’ full many a morning,

Yet they are sleeping still,—

The trumpet, sir, shall wake them,

In dreams I see them rise,

Each with a solemn musket

A marching to the skies!

A coward will remain, Sir,

Until the fight is done;

But an immortal hero

Will take his hat, and run!

Good bye, Sir, I am going;

My country calleth me;

Allow me, Sir, at parting,

To wipe my weeping e’e.

In token of our friendship

Accept this “Bonnie Doon,”

And when the hand that plucked it

Hath passed beyond the moon,

The memory of my ashes

Will consolation be;

Then, farewell, Tuscarora,

And farewell, Sir, to thee!

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Emily Dickinson on Bookshop.org*

Emily Dickinson page on Amazon*

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See also: 10 Well-Loved Poems by Emily Dickinson

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Bringing Daphne du Maurier’s Jamaica Inn to the Big Screen

The following is excerpted from Phantom Lady: Hollywood Producer Joan Harrison, the Forgotten Woman Behind Hitchcock, published by Chicago Review Press. © 2020 by Christina Lane.

In the summer of 1938, signed on to direct an adaptation of Daphne du Maurier‘s novel Jamaica Inn, which was to be his last British film before venturing to Hollywood. The preeminent producer Erich Pommer and lead actor Charles Laughton were already lined up to produce the movie through their jointly owned company Mayflower Pictures.

Jamaica Inn was to be the first screenwriting turn for Hitchcock’s assistant , who was effectively already a creative producer in his unit (though without the official credit). Harrison entertained affection for du Maurier’s material, but more than this, she and the writer were friends — traveling in the same social circles. Harrison resolved not to let her down.

 

The wild, beguiling Cornwall coast

Born to the popular actor Gerald du Maurier and Muriel Beaumont in London in 1907, Daphne du Maurier was one of the best-known English writers of her time (going on to become one of the most celebrated authors of the twentieth century). She thrived in gothic romance and psychological thrillers like the novel Rebecca and the short story “The Birds” (both equally well known to readers and cinephiles).

The wild, beguiling coastal region of Cornwall — with its spectacular harbor views, hidden coves, and dense, tangled woods — in particular obsessed her. When, on a trip with her mother and sisters at the age of nineteen, she first encountered Cornwall’s village of Fowey, she convinced her parents to purchase a cliffside house, which they did, and christened Ferryside.

Du Maurier found the setting gave her a space, both literally and figuratively, to create. “Here was the freedom I desired,” she later reflected. “Freedom to write, to walk, to wander.” The area would become the setting of most of her works. Inspired by Fowey, by the age of twenty-seven, du Maurier penned three novels and a biography of her father.

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Jamaica Inn by Daphne du Maurier

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Jamaica Inn — the 1936 novel

But it was the breakout success of Jamaica Inn in 1936 that guaranteed du Maurier’s place in literary circles. The historical novel follows twenty-three year-old Mary Yellen across the Cornish Moors to live with her Uncle Joss and Aunt Patience following the death of her mother. Helping them run the eponymous inn, she begins to suspect that her uncle is part of a band of murderous shipwreckers.

Du Maurier had stumbled upon the actual Jamaica Inn several years prior, while riding on Bodmin Moor to the north of Fowey and losing her bearings in sudden, thick fog. Rising before her unexpectedly, the inn (which indeed had been a smugglers’ haven) provided afternoon refuge — and eventually fodder for Mary’s story.

Little surprise that Fowey has since been dubbed “du Maurier country,” a description befitting not just her connection to the place, but the landscape of her imagination.

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Joan Harrison in 1943

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Casting and film production commences

Jamaica Inn was slated to begin production in September and end in October 1938, under the assumption that the Hollywood move might occur as early as January. In fact, Jamaica Inn’s production ended up running through January; nothing about the production process came easy. Producer and lead actor Charles Laughton had an enormous ego, and his producing partner Erich Pommer, the former head of Germany’s UFA, was overly hands-on.

For Joan Harrison, the script development process had been difficult. Clemence Dane (a pseudonym for Winifred Ashton) had written a screenplay in 1937 when the project had a false start. Now that Hitchcock was commissioned, Dane’s script went by the wayside and Sidney Gilliat came on board, along with novelist and playwright J. B. Priestley (brought in by Laughton to pen additional dialogue for his character).

Before Harrison and Gilliat’s involvement, Laughton had sent Dane’s draft to the Production Code Administration in anticipation of a successful American release. He heard back that there was an essential problem; they needed to alter the fact that the villain was a man of the cloth so as not to offend religious groups. After hearing this, Laughton nearly wanted off the picture.

Upon deciding to change the vicar into the town squire, Gilliat recalled, “We evolved (Hitch and Joan and I) a fairly satisfactory Jekyll-and-Hyde-character.” Then there was the challenge of how to handle the big reveal.

In the book, the reader doesn’t arrive at the mastermind’s identity until nearly the end. In the film, the aha moment occurs early on, partly because of narrative necessity  — the villain is now a legal authority and an integral part of the community—and partly because Laughton wasn’t about to be confined to the finale.

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A scene from Jamaica Inn, 1939

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Trouble on the set

Hitchcock found it troubling that the “surprise story” now became “a suspense story” (structured around the question of When will Mary and the others discover that which the spectators already know?). Hitchcock once said, “It’s very difficult to make a who-done-it. You see, this was like making a who-done-it, and making Charles Laughton the butler.”

With the director “truly discouraged,” each script meeting was filled with stress. To him, “it was completely absurd, because logically the judge should have entered the scene only at the end of the adventure.”

During the shooting of Jamaica Inn, there was also Laughton’s histrionic personality to contend with. As he struggled to find his character, he demanded numerous takes and more than a little hand-holding.

According to Hitchcock, the actor’s “mercurial” personality was so confounding that the director “tried to duck out of the picture two weeks before we started shooting,” but little could be done once the contract was signed. Joan’s role throughout it all was to serve as the buffer, doing the best she could to smooth out the tense back-and-forth among Hitchcock, Laughton, Pommer, the writers, and the actors.

Eighteen-year-old Maureen O’Hara, a relative newcomer from Ireland, played the female lead. Luckily, O’Hara enjoyed Laughton. She was riding high as a recent Mayflower Pictures discovery and had just signed a seven-picture deal.

What she may not have realized was that if the adaptation had remained more faithful to the novel, she would have enjoyed more screen time. As difficult as it was to compete with Laughton’s on-screen mugging, she turned in a respectable performance as a courageous, precocious, and self-possessed heroine.

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Phantom Lady on Bookshop.org*

Phantom Lady on Amazon*

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Du Maurier’s disappointment, a film flop

Upon Jamaica Inn’s release in 1939, du Maurier was so disappointed that she demanded her name be removed from the opening titles. The film’s reputation has not improved much with age, and the struggles that Laughton, Pommer, and Hitchcock’s team had over creative control are evident on the screen.

The movie suffers from Laughton’s overblown performance and a decided lack of suspense, based on the fact that his character is revealed to be the villain so early on. Several decades later, it was named one of the “fifty worst films of all time” in Harry Medved and Randy Dreyfuss’s book of the same title.

There have, however, been efforts to rehabilitate the film’s reputation and reclaim it for Hitchcock’s canon. Maurice Yacowar, author of Hitchcock’s British Films, concludes, “[Laughton’s] dominance over the director hurts the film. But the film remains a Hitchcock.”

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One of Joan Harrison’s other notable achievements was co-writing the screenplay for the brilliant 1940 film adaptation of Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier, which enjoyed far greater success.

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Anticipation of Joan Harrison’s later work

The case can be made that the film is also thoroughly “a Harrison,” given the ways it anticipates her later work. Jamaica Inn’s domestic gothic themes and disturbing psychology are reminiscent of those found in Phantom Lady (1944), The Strange Affair of Uncle Harry  (1945), Nocturne (1946), and They Won’t Believe Me (1947).

Its perverse textures and pathological violence speak directly to Joan Harrison’s preoccupation with what lies hidden beneath romantic, marital, and familial relations. Moreover, the scene in which Mary is trapped in her bedroom with her uncle may be viewed as a predecessor to Phantom Lady’s finale, in which Carol Richman is cornered by the murderous Marlow. (Women’s fearlessness in the face of jeopardy would become a recurring theme.)

There are additional distinguishing marks of Harrison’s signature: Mary’s investigative gaze, her rescue of the hero, and the idea of women saving women. Jamaica Inn sits neatly beside The Lady Vanishes, as these signature marks come into focus and a shift away from light seriocomic thrillers becomes more obvious.

Joan Harrison scored her first official screen credit on Jamaica Inn—as one of the writers. Some, even Hitchcock in one instance, have suggested this was chiefly a tactical maneuver, his way of ensuring her entree into Hollywood.

However, there is a good deal to indicate that she bore a significant influence on the film. Her day-to-day involvement in the writing sessions, her presence on the set, and Jamaica Inn’s close affinities with her other films authenticate this. Hitchcock’s passing pronouncement notwithstanding, Joan earned her Jamaica Inn writing credit.

Contributed by Christina  Lane: Christina Lane is the author of Phantom Lady: Hollywood Producer Joan Harrison, the Forgotten Woman Behind Hitchcock (Chicago Review Press, 2020). She has written extensively on film history, aesthetics, and women’s media production, including Feminist Hollywood: From Born in Flames to Point Break (2000) and Magnolia (2011), the first book-length treatment of the Paul Thomas Anderson film.

She is associate professor of film studies and chair of the Cinematic Arts department at the University of Miami. She is a member of the Women Film Critics Circle and has provided commentary to such outlets as Air Mail, NPR, Turner Classic Movies, and the Daily Mail.

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