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Miss Brill by Katherine Mansfield (1920) — full text

“Miss Brill” by Katherine Mansfield (1888 – 1923) is a much-anthologized short story by this New Zealand-born author considered a master of the genre. It was first published in The Garden Party and Other Stories in 1920.

Miss Brill is an elderly woman who has created her own illusory world.Some of the themes in this classic short story include loneliness, aging, and alienation. It’s considered a modernist piece and is replete with symbolism rather than plot.

Here is some supplementary information on Miss Brill:

General analysis here and here
Plot summary here and here
The story’s conflict
Symbolism in the story

Here is the entire text of The Garden Party and Other Stories by Katherine Mansfield (1920), the original source of “Miss Brill.”

The paragraphs in the original full text of this short story, following, have been broken up for readability. This short story is in the public domain.

. . . . . . . . .

Miss Brill by Katherine Mansfield

Although it was so brilliantly fine—the blue sky powdered with gold and great spots of light like white wine splashed over the Jardins Publiques—Miss Brill was glad that she had decided on her fur. The air was motionless, but when you opened your mouth there was just a faint chill, like a chill from a glass of iced water before you sip, and now and again a leaf came drifting—from nowhere, from the sky.

Miss Brill put up her hand and touched her fur. Dear little thing! It was nice to feel it again. She had taken it out of its box that afternoon, shaken out the moth-powder, given it a good brush, and rubbed the life back into the dim little eyes.

“What has been happening to me?” said the sad little eyes. Oh, how sweet it was to see them snap at her again from the red eiderdown!… But the nose, which was of some black composition, wasn’t at all firm. It must have had a knock, somehow. Never mind—a little dab of black sealing-wax when the time came—when it was absolutely necessary…. Little rogue!

Yes, she really felt like that about it. Little rogue biting its tail just by her left ear. She could have taken it off and laid it on her lap and stroked it. She felt a tingling in her hands and arms, but that came from walking, she supposed. And when she breathed, something light and sad—no, not sad, exactly—something gentle seemed to move in her bosom.

There were a number of people out this afternoon, far more than last Sunday. And the band sounded louder and gayer. That was because the Season had begun. For although the band played all the year round on Sundays, out of season it was never the same.

It was like some one playing with only the family to listen; it didn’t care how it played if there weren’t any strangers present. Wasn’t the conductor wearing a new coat, too? She was sure it was new. He scraped with his foot and flapped his arms like a rooster about to crow, and the bandsmen sitting in the green rotunda blew out their cheeks and glared at the music.

Now there came a little “flutey” bit—very pretty!—a little chain of bright drops. She was sure it would be repeated. It was; she lifted her head and smiled.

Only two people shared her “special” seat: a fine old man in a velvet coat, his hands clasped over a huge carved walking-stick, and a big old woman, sitting upright, with a roll of knitting on her embroidered apron. They did not speak. This was disappointing, for Miss Brill always looked forward to the conversation. She had become really quite expert, she thought, at listening as though she didn’t listen, at sitting in other people’s lives just for a minute while they talked round her.

She glanced, sideways, at the old couple. Perhaps they would go soon. Last Sunday, too, hadn’t been as interesting as usual. An Englishman and his wife, he wearing a dreadful Panama hat and she button boots.

And she’d gone on the whole time about how she ought to wear spectacles; she knew she needed them; but that it was no good getting any; they’d be sure to break and they’d never keep on. And he’d been so patient. He’d suggested everything—gold rims, the kind that curved round your ears, little pads inside the bridge. No, nothing would please her. “They’ll always be sliding down my nose!” Miss Brill had wanted to shake her.

The old people sat on the bench, still as statues. Never mind, there was always the crowd to watch. To and fro, in front of the flower-beds and the band rotunda, the couples and groups paraded, stopped to talk, to greet, to buy a handful of flowers from the old beggar who had his tray fixed to the railings.

Little children ran among them, swooping and laughing; little boys with big white silk bows under their chins, little girls, little French dolls, dressed up in velvet and lace. And sometimes a tiny staggerer came suddenly rocking into the open from under the trees, stopped, stared, as suddenly sat down “flop,” until its small high-stepping mother, like a young hen, rushed scolding to its rescue.

Other people sat on the benches and green chairs, but they were nearly always the same, Sunday after Sunday, and—Miss Brill had often noticed—there was something funny about nearly all of them. They were odd, silent, nearly all old, and from the way they stared they looked as though they’d just come from dark little rooms or even—even cupboards!

Behind the rotunda the slender trees with yellow leaves down drooping, and through them just a line of sea, and beyond the blue sky with gold-veined clouds.

Tum-tum-tum tiddle-um! tiddle-um! tum tiddley-um tum ta! blew the band.

Two young girls in red came by and two young soldiers in blue met them, and they laughed and paired and went off arm-in-arm. Two peasant women with funny straw hats passed, gravely, leading beautiful smoke-coloured donkeys. A cold, pale nun hurried by. A beautiful woman came along and dropped her bunch of violets, and a little boy ran after to hand them to her, and she took them and threw them away as if they’d been poisoned. Dear me!

Miss Brill didn’t know whether to admire that or not! And now an ermine toque and a gentleman in grey met just in front of her. He was tall, stiff, dignified, and she was wearing the ermine toque she’d bought when her hair was yellow. Now everything, her hair, her face, even her eyes, was the same colour as the shabby ermine, and her hand, in its cleaned glove, lifted to dab her lips, was a tiny yellowish paw.

Oh, she was so pleased to see him—delighted! She rather thought they were going to meet that afternoon. She described where she’d been—everywhere, here, there, along by the sea. The day was so charming—didn’t he agree? And wouldn’t he, perhaps?…

But he shook his head, lighted a cigarette, slowly breathed a great deep puff into her face, and even while she was still talking and laughing, flicked the match away and walked on. The ermine toque was alone; she smiled more brightly than ever. But even the band seemed to know what she was feeling and played more softly, played tenderly, and the drum beat, “The Brute! The Brute!” over and over.

What would she do? What was going to happen now? But as Miss Brill wondered, the ermine toque turned, raised her hand as though she’d seen some one else, much nicer, just over there, and pattered away. And the band changed again and played more quickly, more gayly than ever, and the old couple on Miss Brill’s seat got up and marched away, and such a funny old man with long whiskers hobbled along in time to the music and was nearly knocked over by four girls walking abreast.

Oh, how fascinating it was! How she enjoyed it! How she loved sitting here, watching it all! It was like a play. It was exactly like a play. Who could believe the sky at the back wasn’t painted? But it wasn’t till a little brown dog trotted on solemn and then slowly trotted off, like a little “theatre” dog, a little dog that had been drugged, that Miss Brill discovered what it was that made it so exciting.

They were all on the stage. They weren’t only the audience, not only looking on; they were acting. Even she had a part and came every Sunday. No doubt somebody would have noticed if she hadn’t been there; she was part of the performance after all. How strange she’d never thought of it like that before!

And yet it explained why she made such a point of starting from home at just the same time each week—so as not to be late for the performance—and it also explained why she had quite a queer, shy feeling at telling her English pupils how she spent her Sunday afternoons.

No wonder! Miss Brill nearly laughed out loud. She was on the stage. She thought of the old invalid gentleman to whom she read the newspaper four afternoons a week while he slept in the garden. She had got quite used to the frail head on the cotton pillow, the hollowed eyes, the open mouth and the high pinched nose.

If he’d been dead she mightn’t have noticed for weeks; she wouldn’t have minded. But suddenly he knew he was having the paper read to him by an actress! “An actress!” The old head lifted; two points of light quivered in the old eyes. “An actress—are ye?” And Miss Brill smoothed the newspaper as though it were the manuscript of her part and said gently; “Yes, I have been an actress for a long time.”

The band had been having a rest. Now they started again. And what they played was warm, sunny, yet there was just a faint chill—a something, what was it?—not sadness—no, not sadness—a something that made you want to sing. The tune lifted, lifted, the light shone; and it seemed to Miss Brill that in another moment all of them, all the whole company, would begin singing.

The young ones, the laughing ones who were moving together, they would begin, and the men’s voices, very resolute and brave, would join them. And then she too, she too, and the others on the benches—they would come in with a kind of accompaniment—something low, that scarcely rose or fell, something so beautiful—moving…. And Miss Brill’s eyes filled with tears and she looked smiling at all the other members of the company. Yes, we understand, we understand, she thought—though what they understood she didn’t know.

Just at that moment a boy and girl came and sat down where the old couple had been. They were beautifully dressed; they were in love. The hero and heroine, of course, just arrived from his father’s yacht. And still soundlessly singing, still with that trembling smile, Miss Brill prepared to listen.

“No, not now,” said the girl. “Not here, I can’t.”

“But why? Because of that stupid old thing at the end there?” asked the boy. “Why does she come here at all—who wants her? Why doesn’t she keep her silly old mug at home?”

“It’s her fu-fur which is so funny,” giggled the girl. “It’s exactly like a fried whiting.”

“Ah, be off with you!” said the boy in an angry whisper. Then: “Tell me, ma petite chère—”

“No, not here,” said the girl. “Not yet.”

On her way home she usually bought a slice of honey-cake at the baker’s. It was her Sunday treat. Sometimes there was an almond in her slice, sometimes not. It made a great difference. If there was an almond it was like carrying home a tiny present—a surprise—something that might very well not have been there. She hurried on the almond Sundays and struck the match for the kettle in quite a dashing way.

But to-day she passed the baker’s by, climbed the stairs, went into the little dark room—her room like a cupboard—and sat down on the red eiderdown. She sat there for a long time. The box that the fur came out of was on the bed. She unclasped the necklet quickly; quickly, without looking, laid it inside. But when she put the lid on she thought she heard something crying.

. . . . . . . . . 

More full texts of short stories by Katherine Mansfield on this site

“The Garden Party” (1920)
“Bliss” (1918)

The post Miss Brill by Katherine Mansfield (1920) — full text appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.

A Few Figs from Thistles by Edna St. Vincent Millay (1921)

Presented here is the full text of A Few Figs from Thistles: Poems and Sonnets by Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892 – 1950). A Few Figs from Thistles was her second collection, published in 1921. 

As a poet, Millay is considered as a major twentieth-century figure in the genre. Wildly popular, and actually famous as a poet in her lifetime, she’s no longer as widely read and studied, though still well regarded in the field of poetry.

The poetry in this collection explored love and female sexuality, among other themes. In the poems, including the oft-quoted “First Fig,” Millay both celebrates and satirizes herself.

Here are a few reviews, analyses, and commentaries on Millay’s inaugural published work, which is in the public domain:

Analysis on JStor
Bolstered by Thoughts
What’s Up with the Title?
Another Night of Reading

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See also: 12 Poems by Edna St. Vincent Millay

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A Few Figs from Thistles (1921) – full text

First Fig

  My candle burns at both ends;

    It will not last the night;

  But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends—

    It gives a lovely light!

. . . . . . . . .

Second Fig

  Safe upon the solid rock the ugly houses stand:

  Come and see my shining palace built upon the sand!

 

. . . . . . . . .

Recuerdo

  We were very tired, we were very merry—

  We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry.

  It was bare and bright, and smelled like a stable—

  But we looked into a fire, we leaned across a table,

  We lay on a hill-top underneath the moon;

  And the whistles kept blowing, and the dawn came soon.

  We were very tired, we were very merry—

  We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry;

  And you ate an apple, and I ate a pear,

  From a dozen of each we had bought somewhere;

  And the sky went wan, and the wind came cold,

  And the sun rose dripping, a bucketful of gold.

  We were very tired, we were very merry,

  We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry.

  We hailed, “Good morrow, mother!” to a shawl-covered head,

  And bought a morning paper, which neither of us read;

  And she wept, “God bless you!” for the apples and pears,

  And we gave her all our money but our subway fares.

. . . . . . . . .

Thursday

  And if I loved you Wednesday,

    Well, what is that to you?

  I do not love you Thursday—

    So much is true.

  And why you come complaining

    Is more than I can see.

  I loved you Wednesday,—yes—but what

    Is that to me?

. . . . . . . . .

To the Not Impossible Him

  How shall I know, unless I go

    To Cairo and Cathay,

  Whether or not this blessed spot

    Is blest in every way?

  Now it may be, the flower for me

    Is this beneath my nose;

  How shall I tell, unless I smell

    The Carthaginian rose?

  The fabric of my faithful love

    No power shall dim or ravel

  Whilst I stay here,—but oh, my dear,

    If I should ever travel!

 

. . . . . . . . .

Macdougal Street

  As I went walking up and down to take the evening air,

    (Sweet to meet upon the street, why must I be so shy?)

  I saw him lay his hand upon her torn black hair;

    (“Little dirty Latin child, let the lady by!”)

  The women squatting on the stoops were slovenly and fat,

    (Lay me out in organdie, lay me out in lawn!)

  And everywhere I stepped there was a baby or a cat;

    (Lord God in Heaven, will it never be dawn?)

  The fruit-carts and clam-carts were ribald as a fair,

    (Pink nets and wet shells trodden under heel)

  She had haggled from the fruit-man of his rotting ware;

    (I shall never get to sleep, the way I feel!)

  He walked like a king through the filth and the clutter,

    (Sweet to meet upon the street, why did you glance me by?)

  But he caught the quaint Italian quip she flung him from the gutter;

    (What can there be to cry about that I should lie and cry?)

  He laid his darling hand upon her little black head,

    (I wish I were a ragged child with ear-rings in my ears!)

  And he said she was a baggage to have said what she had said;

    (Truly I shall be ill unless I stop these tears!)

. . . . . . . . .

The Singing-Woman from the Wood’s Edge

  What should I be but a prophet and a liar,

  Whose mother was a leprechaun, whose father was a friar?

  Teethed on a crucifix and cradled under water,

  What should I be but the fiend’s god-daughter?

  And who should be my playmates but the adder and the frog,

  That was got beneath a furze-bush and born in a bog?

  And what should be my singing, that was christened at an altar,

  But Aves and Credos and Psalms out of the Psalter?

  You will see such webs on the wet grass, maybe,

  As a pixie-mother weaves for her baby,

  You will find such flame at the wave’s weedy ebb

  As flashes in the meshes of a mer-mother’s web,

  But there comes to birth no common spawn

  From the love of a priest for a leprechaun,

  And you never have seen and you never will see

  Such things as the things that swaddled me!

  After all’s said and after all’s done,

  What should I be but a harlot and a nun?

  In through the bushes, on any foggy day,

  My Da would come a-swishing of the drops away,

  With a prayer for my death and a groan for my birth,

  A-mumbling of his beads for all that he was worth.

  And there’d sit my Ma, with her knees beneath her chin,

  A-looking in his face and a-drinking of it in,

  And a-marking in the moss some funny little saying

  That would mean just the opposite of all that he was praying!

  He taught me the holy-talk of Vesper and of Matin,

  He heard me my Greek and he heard me my Latin,

  He blessed me and crossed me to keep my soul from evil,

  And we watched him out of sight, and we conjured up the devil!

  Oh, the things I haven’t seen and the things I haven’t known.

  What with hedges and ditches till after I was grown,

  And yanked both ways by my mother and my father,

  With a “Which would you better?” and a “Which would you rather?”

  With him for a sire and her for a dam,

  What should I be but just what I am?

 

. . . . . . . . .

She Is Overheard Singing

  Oh, Prue she has a patient man,

    And Joan a gentle lover,

  And Agatha’s Arth’ is a hug-the-hearth,—

    But my true love’s a rover!

  Mig, her man’s as good as cheese

    And honest as a briar,

  Sue tells her love what he’s thinking of,—

    But my dear lad’s a liar!

  Oh, Sue and Prue and Agatha

    Are thick with Mig and Joan!

  They bite their threads and shake their heads

    And gnaw my name like a bone;

  And Prue says, “Mine’s a patient man,

    As never snaps me up,”

  And Agatha, “Arth’ is a hug-the-hearth,

    Could live content in a cup;”

  Sue’s man’s mind is like good jell—

    All one colour, and clear—

  And Mig’s no call to think at all

    What’s to come next year,

  While Joan makes boast of a gentle lad,

    That’s troubled with that and this;—

  But they all would give the life they live

    For a look from the man I kiss!

  Cold he slants his eyes about,

    And few enough’s his choice,—

  Though he’d slip me clean for a nun, or a queen,

    Or a beggar with knots in her voice,—

  And Agatha will turn awake

    While her good man sleeps sound,

  And Mig and Sue and Joan and Prue

    Will hear the clock strike round,

  For Prue she has a patient man,

    As asks not when or why,

  And Mig and Sue have naught to do

    But peep who’s passing by,

  Joan is paired with a putterer

    That bastes and tastes and salts,

  And Agatha’s Arth’ is a hug-the-hearth,—

    But my true love is false!

 

. . . . . . . . .

The Prisoner

  All right,

  Go ahead!

  What’s in a name?

  I guess I’ll be locked into

  As much as I’m locked out of!

. . . . . . . . .

The Unexplorer

  There was a road ran past our house

  Too lovely to explore.

  I asked my mother once—she said

  That if you followed where it led

  It brought you to the milk-man’s door.

  (That’s why I have not traveled more.)

. . . . . . . . .

Grown-up

  Was it for this I uttered prayers,

  And sobbed and cursed and kicked the stairs,

  That now, domestic as a plate,

  I should retire at half-past eight?

. . . . . . . . .

The Penitent

  I had a little Sorrow,

    Born of a little Sin,

  I found a room all damp with gloom

    And shut us all within;

  And, “Little Sorrow, weep,” said I,

    “And, Little Sin, pray God to die,

  And I upon the floor will lie

    And think how bad I’ve been!”

  Alas for pious planning—

    It mattered not a whit!

  As far as gloom went in that room,

    The lamp might have been lit!

  My little Sorrow would not weep,

    My little Sin would go to sleep—

  To save my soul I could not keep

    My graceless mind on it!

  So up I got in anger,

    And took a book I had,

  And put a ribbon on my hair

    To please a passing lad,

  And, “One thing there’s no getting by—

  I’ve been a wicked girl,” said I;

  “But if I can’t be sorry, why,

    I might as well be glad!”

 

. . . . . . . . .

Daphne

  Why do you follow me?—

  Any moment I can be

  Nothing but a laurel-tree.

  Any moment of the chase

  I can leave you in my place

  A pink bough for your embrace.

  Yet if over hill and hollow

  Still it is your will to follow,

  I am off;—to heel, Apollo!

. . . . . . . . .

Portrait by a Neighbor

  Before she has her floor swept

    Or her dishes done,

  Any day you’ll find her

    A-sunning in the sun!

  It’s long after midnight

    Her key’s in the lock,

  And you never see her chimney smoke

    Till past ten o’clock!

  She digs in her garden

    With a shovel and a spoon,

  She weeds her lazy lettuce

    By the light of the moon,

  She walks up the walk

    Like a woman in a dream,

  She forgets she borrowed butter

    And pays you back cream!

  Her lawn looks like a meadow,

    And if she mows the place

  She leaves the clover standing

    And the Queen Anne’s lace!

. . . . . . . . .

Midnight Oil

  Cut if you will, with Sleep’s dull knife,

    Each day to half its length, my friend,—

  The years that Time takes off my life,

    He’ll take from off the other end!

. . . . . . . . .

The Merry Maid

  Oh, I am grown so free from care

    Since my heart broke!

  I set my throat against the air,

    I laugh at simple folk!

  There’s little kind and little fair

    Is worth its weight in smoke

  To me, that’s grown so free from care

    Since my heart broke!

  Lass, if to sleep you would repair

    As peaceful as you woke,

  Best not besiege your lover there

    For just the words he spoke

  To me, that’s grown so free from care

    Since my heart broke!

 

. . . . . . . . .

To Kathleen

  Still must the poet as of old,

  In barren attic bleak and cold,

  Starve, freeze, and fashion verses to

  Such things as flowers and song and you;

  Still as of old his being give

  In Beauty’s name, while she may live,

  Beauty that may not die as long

  As there are flowers and you and song.

. . . . . . . . .

To S. M.

If he should lie a-dying

  I am not willing you should go

  Into the earth, where Helen went;

  She is awake by now, I know.

  Where Cleopatra’s anklets rust

  You will not lie with my consent;

  And Sappho is a roving dust;

  Cressid could love again; Dido,

  Rotted in state, is restless still:

  You leave me much against my will.

. . . . . . . . .

The Philosopher

  And what are you that, wanting you

    I should be kept awake

  As many nights as there are days

    With weeping for your sake?

  And what are you that, missing you,

    As many days as crawl

  I should be listening to the wind

    And looking at the wall?

  I know a man that’s a braver man

    And twenty men as kind,

  And what are you, that you should be

    The one man in my mind?

  Yet women’s ways are witless ways,

    As any sage will tell,—

  And what am I, that I should love

    So wisely and so well?

 

. . . . . . . . .

Four Sonnets

I

  Love, though for this you riddle me with darts,

  And drag me at your chariot till I die,—

  Oh, heavy prince! Oh, panderer of hearts!—

  Yet hear me tell how in their throats they lie

  Who shout you mighty: thick about my hair

  Day in, day out, your ominous arrows purr

  Who still am free, unto no querulous care

  A fool, and in no temple worshiper!

  I, that have bared me to your quiver’s fire,

  Lifted my face into its puny rain,

  Do wreathe you Impotent to Evoke Desire

  As you are Powerless to Elicit Pain!

  (Now will the god, for blasphemy so brave,

  Punish me, surely, with the shaft I crave!)

II

  I think I should have loved you presently,

  And given in earnest words I flung in jest;

  And lifted honest eyes for you to see,

  And caught your hand against my cheek and breast;

  And all my pretty follies flung aside

  That won you to me, and beneath your gaze,

  Naked of reticence and shorn of pride,

  Spread like a chart my little wicked ways.

  I, that had been to you, had you remained,

  But one more waking from a recurrent dream,

  Cherish no less the certain stakes I gained,

  And walk your memory’s halls, austere, supreme,

  A ghost in marble of a girl you knew

  Who would have loved you in a day or two.

III

  Oh, think not I am faithful to a vow!

  Faithless am I save to love’s self alone.

  Were you not lovely I would leave you now;

  After the feet of beauty fly my own.

  Were you not still my hunger’s rarest food,

  And water ever to my wildest thirst,

  I would desert you—think not but I would!—

  And seek another as I sought you first.

  But you are mobile as the veering air,

  And all your charms more changeful than the tide,

  Wherefore to be inconstant is no care:

  I have but to continue at your side.

  So wanton, light and false, my love, are you,

  I am most faithless when I most am true.

IV

  I shall forget you presently, my dear,

  So make the most of this, your little day,

  Your little month, your little half a year,

  Ere I forget, or die, or move away,

  And we are done forever; by and by

  I shall forget you, as I said, but now,

  If you entreat me with your loveliest lie

  I will protest you with my favorite vow.

  I would indeed that love were longer-lived,

  And oaths were not so brittle as they are,

  But so it is, and nature has contrived

  To struggle on without a break thus far,—

  Whether or not we find what we are seeking

  Is idle, biologically speaking.

 

The post A Few Figs from Thistles by Edna St. Vincent Millay (1921) appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.

27 Quotes from Silent Spring by Rachel Carson

Silent Spring (1962) is the best-known work by Rachel Carson (1907 – 1964), noted American marine biologist and environmental trailblazer. The following selection of quotes from Silent Spring is a passionate argument for protecting the environment from manmade pesticides.

A work of nonfiction by Carson, the book is a gracefully written indictment of the pesticide industry that arose in the late 1950s. It presents a piercing look at the damage these chemicals cause to bird, bees, wildlife, and plant life.

From Rachel Carson’s official website:

“Silent Spring inspired the modern environmental movement, which began in earnest a decade later. It is recognized as the environmental text that changed the world.”

She aimed at igniting a democratic activist movement that would not only question the direction of science and technology but would also demand answers and accountability. Rachel Carson was a prophetic voice and her ‘witness for nature’ is even more relevant and needed if our planet is to survive into a 22nd century.”

From this site’s biography of Rachel Carson:

“The public’s growing awareness of the dangers of chemicals created a natural readership for Silent Spring, serialized in The New Yorker beginning June 16, 1962, and published as a book on September 27, 1962.

Silent Spring sold more than 100,000 copies in the first week and was on the bestseller list by Christmas. By now it has sold more than two million copies and has been translated into more than twenty languages.”

Not everyone applauded Carson’s prescient book. Not surprisingly, she was attacked by the pesticide industry, which conspired to discredit her.  A 2012 article in Yale Environment 360 titled “Fifty Years After Silent Spring, Attacks on Science Continue” observed:

“When Silent Spring was published in 1962, author Rachel Carson was subjected to vicious personal assaults that had nothing do with the science or the merits of pesticide use. Those attacks find a troubling parallel today in the campaigns against climate scientists who point to evidence of a rapidly warming world.”

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Rachel Carson U.S. postage stamp, 1981

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“Over increasingly large areas of the United States, spring now comes unheralded by the return of the birds, and the early mornings are strangely silent where once they were filled with the beauty of bird song.”

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“Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts. There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature — the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after winter.”

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“In nature nothing exists alone.”

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“We stand now where two roads diverge. But unlike the roads in Robert Frost‘s familiar poem, they are not equally fair. The road we have long been traveling is deceptively easy, a smooth superhighway on which we progress with great speed, but at its end lies disaster. The other fork of the road — the one less traveled by — offers our last, our only chance to reach a destination that assures the preservation of the earth.”

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“A Who’s Who of pesticides is therefore of concern to us all. If we are going to live so intimately with these chemicals eating and drinking them, taking them into the very marrow of our bones — we had better know something about their nature and their power.”

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“Why should we tolerate a diet of weak poisons, a home in insipid surroundings, a circle of acquaintances who are not quite our enemies, the noise of motors with just enough relief to prevent insanity? Who would want to live in a world which is just not quite fatal?”

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“The more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us, the less taste we shall have for destruction.”

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“Nature has introduced great variety into the landscape, but man has displayed a passion for simplifying it. Thus he undoes the built-in checks and balances by which nature holds the species within bounds.”

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“How could intelligent beings seek to control a few unwanted species by a method that contaminated the entire environment and brought the threat of disease and death even to their own kind? Yet this is precisely what we have done. We have done it, moreover, for reasons that collapse the moment we examine them.”

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“We urgently need an end to these false assurances, to the sugar coating of unpalatable facts. It is the public that is being asked to assume the risks that the insect controllers calculate. The public must decide whether it wishes to continue on the present road, and it can do so only when in full possession of the facts.”

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“As crude a weapon as the cave man’s club, the chemical barrage has been hurled against the fabric of life — a fabric on the one hand delicate and destructible, on the other miraculously tough and resilient, and capable of striking back in unexpected ways.”

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“Can anyone believe it is possible to lay down such a barrage of poisons on the surface of the Earth without making it unfit for all life?”

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“We are accustomed to look for the gross and immediate effects and to ignore all else. Unless this appears promptly and in such obvious form that it cannot be ignored, we deny the existence of hazard. Even research men suffer from the handicap of inadequate methods of detecting the beginnings of injury. The lack of sufficiently delicate methods to detect injury before symptoms appear is one of the great unsolved problems in medicine.”

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“It is not my contention that chemical insecticides must never be used. I do contend that we have put poisonous and biologically potent chemicals indiscriminately into the hands of persons largely or wholly ignorant of their potentials for harm. We have subjected enormous numbers of people to contact with these poisons, without their consent and often without their knowledge.”

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“If, having endured much, we have at last asserted our ‘right to know,’ and if by knowing, we have concluded that we are being asked to take senseless and frightening risks, then we should no longer accept the counsel of those who tell us that we must fill our world with poisonous chemicals; we should look about and see what other course is open to us.”

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“To have risked so much in our efforts to mold nature to our satisfaction and yet to have failed in achieving our goal would indeed by the final irony. Yet this, it seems, is our situation.”

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“Have we fallen into a mesmerized state that makes us accept as inevitable that which is inferior or detrimental, as though having lost the will or the vision to demand that which is good?”

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Silent Spring by Rachel Carson on Amazon*

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“If the Bill of Rights contains no guarantee that a citizen shall be secure against lethal poisons distributed either by private individuals or by public officials, it is surely only because our forefathers, despite their considerable wisdom and foresight, could conceive of no such problem.”

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“When the public protests. confronted with some obvious evidence of damaging results of pesticide applications, it is fed little tranquilizers pills of half truth.”

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“No witchcraft, no enemy action had silenced the rebirth of new life in this stricken world. The people had done it themselves.”

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“Most of us walk unseeing through the world, unaware alike of its beauties, its wonders, and the strange and sometimes terrible intensity of the lives that are being lived about us.”

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“The fact that every meal we eat carries its load of chlorinated hydrocarbons is the inevitable consequence of the almost universal spraying or dusting of agricultural crops with these poisons.”

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“When one is concerned with the mysterious and wonderful functioning of the human body, cause and effect are seldom simple and easily demonstrated relationships. They may be widely separated both in space and time. To discover the agent of disease and death depends on a patient piecing together of many seemingly distinct and unrelated facts developed through a vast amount of research in widely separated fields.”

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“By their very nature chemical controls are self-defeating, for they have been devised and applied without taking into account the complex biological systems against which they have been blindly hurled.”

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“The balance of nature is not a status quo; it is fluid, ever shifting, in a constant state of adjustment. Man, too, is part of this balance.”

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“We in this generation, must come to terms with nature, and I think we’re challenged as mankind has never been challenged before to prove our maturity and our mastery, not of nature, but of ourselves.”

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“In this now universal contamination of the environment, chemicals are the sinister and little-recognized partners of radiation in changing the very nature of the world—the very nature of its life.”

More about Silent Spring by Rachel Carson

The Story of Silent Spring
How Silent Spring Ignited the Environmental Movement
Reader discussion on Goodreads
Wikipedia

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

The post 27 Quotes from Silent Spring by Rachel Carson appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.

Rachel Carson

Rachel Carson (May 27, 1907 – April 14, 1964) was a noted American marine biologist, conservationist, and writer whose holistic view of the natural world shaped today’s environmental science. Her writing as a popular scientist educated readers about how every entity interacts with the broader web of life.

This interconnectedness influenced her research into the indiscriminate use of chemical insecticides and the resulting book, Silent Spring (1962), her best known, raised questions and awareness that contributed to the formation of the Environmental Protection Agency.

Though Rachel Carson is regarded more as a scientist and environmentalist, there’s no question that her passion for literature fueled her graceful and impassioned writings.

 

Childhood and family history

Rachel Louise Carson’s mother, Maria, was the daughter of a Presbyterian minister, who received a classical education in an all-female seminary school. Her father, Robert, didn’t complete high school and worked at a series of unfulfilling jobs. The couple married when Maria was twenty-five and Robert was thirty years old.

Maria gave piano lessons to supplement Robert’s erratic employment earnings. Their first child, Marian, was born in 1897, followed by young Robert, in 1899, before Rachel eight years later, on May 27, on a small Pennsylvania farm in the town of Springdale, along the Allegheny River.

The Carson home had four rooms, a fireplace for heat, and no indoor plumbing, with 64 acres of fields and orchards and brush to explore, which fostered a curiosity and intensity in young Rachel. Her mother nurtured her creativity, with books and art supplies, games, and puzzles. Rachel especially loved stories about animals: Beatrix Potter’s books, when a young reader, Kenneth Grahame’s A Wind in the Willows (1908) and, as an older reader, Gene Stratton Porter’s novels.

In 1913, at six years of age, Rachel attended Springdale Grammar School. Two years later, she wrote a story called “The Little Brown House” about a pair of wrens seeking shelter. In the fourth grade, she wrote another, “The Sleeping Rabbit.”

In 1918, the children’s magazine, St. Nicholas, published “A Battle in the Clouds by Rachel L. Carson (Age 10),” for which she received a Silver Badge. By the time she was twelve years old, she had had four stories published and earned ten dollars for her writing.

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Education

After completing the tenth grade in Springdale Grammar School, Rachel studied at Parnassus High School in Kensington, Pennsylvania, and graduated top of her class.

She received a scholarship at the Pennsylvania College for Women in Pittsburgh (now Chatham University) and began to study English in 1925, but switched to biology in her junior year, inspired by the teachings of Mary Scott Skinker, who emphasized the natural world’s interconnectivity.

She graduated magna cum laude in 1928 and in August received a Full Fellowship at Wood’s Hole marine biological laboratory in Maine. Inspired to continue her studies, she applied twice to Johns Hopkins University; on her second attempt, they offered a scholarship, and she completed her masters in zoology in 1932.

As a doctoral candidate, she taught part-time to support her family, but dropped out after her father died in 1935 to work full-time.

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Working life

When Rachel began working at the Federal Bureau of Fisheries (now the Fish and Wildlife Service), in 1935, she was one of two women employed in non-secretarial positions. Her first assignment was to write the scripts for a 52-episode-long series called Romance under the Waters.

She continued to write radio scripts and pamphlets and eventually she climbed the ranks to aquatic geologist but she never had any scientific duties. The substantial promotion she received, at the age of 42, after a male colleague left the position vacant, did not result in an increase of status and pay comparable to his.

While employed at the Bureau, Rachel also contributed articles to the Baltimore Sun under the name R.L. Carson and she continued to pursue publication elsewhere.

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Writing life

One eleven-page essay originally prepared for the Bureau, but deemed better-suited for another kind of audience, was ultimately published in The Atlantic in 1937 as Undersea. This was the basis for her first book and her favorite. Under the Sea Wind (1941) combines biology with aspects of paleontology and geology, and it presents the interactions of species and landscapes against a backdrop of human history.

After WWII, chemical companies sought peace-time uses for products designed as weapons. Rachel edited reports about scientific tests and prepared two alerts about the effects of dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT) at work. When she pitched an article on the subject to Reader’s Digest in 1945, they rejected it. In 1946, she began to work more concertedly towards conservation, traveling with Kay Howe or Shirley Briggs, who accompanied her in the field and illustrated her booklets.

In 1948, she completed the first chapter of The Sea Around Us, and met Marie Rodell for lunch at the Algonquin Hotel, who took Rachel as her first client. When the book was first published, as a series of long articles for The New Yorker in June 1951, the first part alone was 59 pages long.

By July of 1951, the book proper appeared on The New York Times’ bestseller list, where it stayed for 86 weeks. While there, it won the National Book Award, in January 1952.

The following summer, Rachel bought land in Maine on Southport Island, where Dorothy and Stan Freeman summered. The couple first visited with Rachel on July 12, 1953, which launched an intimate and enduring relationship between the women.

Their correspondence has been edited by Martha Freeman and published as Always, Rachel: The Letters of Rachel Carson and Dorothy Freeman, 1952-1964 The Story of a Remarkable Friendship (1995) and provides detailed and abundant insight to all aspects of Rachel’s work and life from that point.

In October 1955, The Edge of the Sea was published, also after having been serialized in The New Yorker, displaying both her creative and scientific prowess once again—another bestseller. The following year, Rachel’s mother had a fall and, as she had been the primary caregiver for Rachel’s sister’s child, Rachel’s familial responsibilities increased with the need to care for her mother and six-year-old nephew. But her work was now crucial too.

In 1958, the annual production of pesticides had increased 700%, compared to pre-world-war levels; it was now big business, and people were beginning to recognize the link between their impact on human health in comparison to the effects of radioactive fallout observed after WWII.

The public’s growing awareness of the dangers of chemicals created a natural readership for Silent Spring, serialized in The New Yorker beginning June 16, 1962, and published as a book on September 27, 1962.

Silent Spring sold more than 100,000 copies in the first week and was on the bestseller list by Christmas. By now it has sold more than two million copies and has been translated into more than twenty languages.

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Rachel Carson page on Amazon*

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The legacy of Rachel Carson

Even while engaged with preparations for her second book, in 1950, Rachel had her first surgery, to remove a benign tumor from her left breast. Her second surgery in 1959, revealed that the tumor was malignant, but her doctor concealed the results (the paternalism of medical practices dictated that she was ill-prepared to accept the truth as a single woman, without a husband’s or father’s guidance).

She died on April 14, 1964, having concealed her illness, in part to avoid conjecture that her personal health was the primary motivation for her research into the health risks posed by chemical insecticides.

In the year before she died, she testified before a Washington subcommittee on pesticides, although she never advocated for a complete ban on the pesticides, only objected to their indiscriminate use.

In 1970, the National Environmental Policy Act was passed, the Environmental Protection Agency was formed, and the first Earth Day was celebrated that April. In 1972, DDT was banned for agricultural use in the United States.

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Rachel Carson U.S. postage stamp, 1981

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In 1980, Rachel was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and the following year, a postage stamp was issued in her honor. The house where she wrote Silent Spring—11701 Berwick Road, Colesville, Maryland—was designated a national landmark in 1991. A conservation area in Maine was renamed The Rachel Carson National Wildlife Refuge in 1969.

These are tangible impacts, but immeasurable is the impact of having a woman dare to triumph quality of life over profit. She defied cultural norms and questioned the supremacy of science when it was used to alter the Earth’s natural processes.

As a popular science writer, she identified and valued unity and interconnectivity. She promoted the principles of ecology before that term was in widespread usage and invited other ordinary people to consider their impact on ecosystems.

In an interview with CBS on April 3, 1963, she stated:

“We still talk in terms of conquest. We still haven’t become mature enough to think of ourselves as only a very tiny part of a vast and incredible universe. Now I truly believe that we in this generation must come to terms with nature. And I think we’re challenged as mankind has never been challenged before to prove our maturity and our mastery not of nature, but of ourselves.”

Rachel Carson’s challenge remains unproven today.

More about Rachel Carson

Major works

Under the Sea-Wind (1941)
The Sea Around Us (1951)
Silent Spring (1962)
The Edge of the Sea (1962)
The Sense of Wonder (1965)
Lost Woods: The Discovered Writing of Rachel Carson (1998)

Biographies and Letters

Always, Rachel: The Letters of Rachel Carson and Dorothy Freeman, 1952-1964 (1994)
Rachel Carson: Witness for Nature by Linda Lear (1997)
Rachel Carson: The Writer at Work by Paul Brooks (1998)
The Gentle Subversive: Rachel Carson, Silent Spring, and the Rise of the Environmental Movement by Mark H. Lytle, 2007
Courage for the Earth: Writers, Scientists, and Activists Celebrate the Life and Writing of Rachel Carson, edited by Peter Matthiessen (2007)

More information

Rachel Carson Official Website
Rachel Carson Council
Wikipedia
Reader discussion of  Rachel Carson books on Goodreads
National Women’s History Museum
Rachel Carson on U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service

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

The post Rachel Carson appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.

12 Poems by Anne Brontë

Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Brontë are best known for their classic novels; each was also a poet in her own right. Though Emily is acknowledged as the finest poet of the trio, Anne’s poetry is more than worthy of consideration. Here are presented 12 poems by Anne Brontë (1820 – 1849).

Anne wrote two novels, Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, before her death at age 29. Before the sisters attempted to publish their first novels, Charlotte undertook the task of putting together and finding a home for a collaborative book of their poems, hoping that it would be a stepping stone (it wasn’t, as it turned out). They assumed masculine (or at least vague) noms de plume to disguise their identities. In Charlotte’s words:

“We had very early cherished the dream of one day becoming authors. This dream, never relinquished even when distance divided and absorbing tasks occupied us, now suddenly acquired strength and consistency: it took the character of a resolve. We agreed to arrange a small section of our poems, and, if possible, get them printed … The book was printed: it is scarcely known … and all of it that merits to be known are the poems of Ellis Bell [Emily].”

The resulting book, The Poems of Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell, published in 1846 at the sisters’ own expense, sold exactly two copies. Learn more about the Brontë sisters’ path to publication.

Anne Brontë: ‘Amid the Brave and Strong’ (published by The Brontë Society, ©2020) offers this brief assessment of Anne as a poet:

“Much of Anne’s poetry is considered to be autobiographical in some way and it often focuses on subjects that were significant in her life at the time of their writing … a constant theme in Anne’s poems is her strong Christian faith, and they are often introspective and sincere, dealing with her struggles to reconcile her religion with her own life experiences.”

Charlotte’s views of Anne’s poetry can be found by scrolling down to the end of this post. All poems by Anne Brontë that follow are from The Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell.

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A Reminiscence

Yes, thou art gone! and never more

Thy sunny smile shall gladden me;

But I may pass the old church door,

And pace the floor that covers thee,

May stand upon the cold, damp stone,

And think that, frozen, lies below

The lightest heart that I have known,

The kindest I shall ever know.

Yet, though I cannot see thee more,

‘Tis still a comfort to have seen;

And though thy transient life is o’er,

‘Tis sweet to think that thou hast been;

To think a soul so near divine,

Within a form so angel fair,

United to a heart like thine,

Has gladdened once our humble sphere.

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Home

How brightly glistening in the sun

The woodland ivy plays!

While yonder beeches from their barks

Reflect his silver rays.

That sun surveys a lovely scene

From softly smiling skies;

And wildly through unnumbered trees

The wind of winter sighs:

Now loud, it thunders o’er my head,

And now in distance dies.

But give me back my barren hills

Where colder breezes rise;

Where scarce the scattered, stunted trees

Can yield an answering swell,

But where a wilderness of heath

Returns the sound as well.

For yonder garden, fair and wide,

With groves of evergreen,

Long winding walks, and borders trim,

And velvet lawns between;

Restore to me that little spot,

With gray walls compassed round,

Where knotted grass neglected lies,

And weeds usurp the ground.

Though all around this mansion high

Invites the foot to roam,

And though its halls are fair within—

Oh, give me back my HOME!

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The Penitent

I mourn with thee, and yet rejoice

That thou shouldst sorrow so;

With angel choirs I join my voice

To bless the sinner’s woe.

Though friends and kindred turn away,

And laugh thy grief to scorn;

I hear the great Redeemer say,

“Blessed are ye that mourn.”

Hold on thy course, nor deem it strange

That earthly cords are riven:

Man may lament the wondrous change,

But “there is joy in heaven!”

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Stanzas

Oh, weep not, love! each tear that springs

In those dear eyes of thine,

To me a keener suffering brings

Than if they flowed from mine.

And do not droop! however drear

The fate awaiting thee;

For MY sake combat pain and care,

And cherish life for me!

I do not fear thy love will fail;

Thy faith is true, I know;

But, oh, my love! thy strength is frail

For such a life of woe.

Were ‘t not for this, I well could trace

(Though banished long from thee)

Life’s rugged path, and boldly face

The storms that threaten me.

Fear not for me—I’ve steeled my mind

Sorrow and strife to greet;

Joy with my love I leave behind,

Care with my friends I meet.

A mother’s sad reproachful eye,

A father’s scowling brow—

But he may frown and she may sigh:

I will not break my vow!

I love my mother, I revere

My sire, but fear not me—

Believe that Death alone can tear

This faithful heart from thee.

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If This Be All

O God! if this indeed be all

That Life can show to me;

If on my aching brow may fall

No freshening dew from Thee;

If with no brighter light than this

The lamp of hope may glow,

And I may only dream of bliss,

And wake to weary woe;

If friendship’s solace must decay,

When other joys are gone,

And love must keep so far away,

While I go wandering on,—

Wandering and toiling without gain,

The slave of others’ will,

With constant care, and frequent pain,

Despised, forgotten still;

Grieving to look on vice and sin,

Yet powerless to quell

The silent current from within,

The outward torrent’s swell

While all the good I would impart,

The feelings I would share,

Are driven backward to my heart,

And turned to wormwood there;

If clouds must EVER keep from sight

The glories of the Sun,

And I must suffer Winter’s blight,

Ere Summer is begun;

If Life must be so full of care,

Then call me soon to thee;

Or give me strength enough to bear

My load of misery.

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Memory

Brightly the sun of summer shone

Green fields and waving woods upon,

And soft winds wandered by;

Above, a sky of purest blue,

Around, bright flowers of loveliest hue,

Allured the gazer’s eye.

But what were all these charms to me,

When one sweet breath of memory

Came gently wafting by?

I closed my eyes against the day,

And called my willing soul away,

From earth, and air, and sky;

That I might simply fancy there

One little flower—a primrose fair,

Just opening into sight;

As in the days of infancy,

An opening primrose seemed to me

A source of strange delight

Sweet Memory! ever smile on me;

Nature’s chief beauties spring from thee;

Oh, still thy tribute bring

Still make the golden crocus shine

Among the flowers the most divine,

The glory of the spring.

Still in the wallflower’s fragrance dwell;

And hover round the slight bluebell,

My childhood’s darling flower.

Smile on the little daisy still,

The buttercup’s bright goblet fill

With all thy former power.

For ever hang thy dreamy spell

Round mountain star and heather bell,

And do not pass away

From sparkling frost, or wreathed snow,

And whisper when the wild winds blow,

Or rippling waters play.

Is childhood, then, so all divine?

Or Memory, is the glory thine,

That haloes thus the past?

Not ALL divine; its pangs of grief

(Although, perchance, their stay be brief)

Are bitter while they last.

Nor is the glory all thine own,

For on our earliest joys alone

That holy light is cast.

With such a ray, no spell of thine

Can make our later pleasures shine,

Though long ago they passed.

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The Doubter’s Prayer

Eternal Power, of earth and air!

Unseen, yet seen in all around,

Remote, but dwelling everywhere,

Though silent, heard in every sound;

If e’er thine ear in mercy bent,

When wretched mortals cried to Thee,

And if, indeed, Thy Son was sent,

To save lost sinners such as me:

Then hear me now, while kneeling here,

I lift to thee my heart and eye,

And all my soul ascends in prayer,

OH, GIVE ME—GIVE ME FAITH! I cry.

Without some glimmering in my heart,

I could not raise this fervent prayer;

But, oh! a stronger light impart,

And in Thy mercy fix it there.

While Faith is with me, I am blest;

It turns my darkest night to day;

But while I clasp it to my breast,

I often feel it slide away.

Then, cold and dark, my spirit sinks,

To see my light of life depart;

And every fiend of Hell, methinks,

Enjoys the anguish of my heart.

What shall I do, if all my love,

My hopes, my toil, are cast away,

And if there be no God above,

To hear and bless me when I pray?

If this be vain delusion all,

If death be an eternal sleep,

And none can hear my secret call,

Or see the silent tears I weep!

Oh, help me, God! For thou alone

Canst my distracted soul relieve;

Forsake it not:it is thine own,

Though weak, yet longing to believe.

Oh, drive these cruel doubts away;

And make me know, that Thou art God!

A faith, that shines by night and day,

Will lighten every earthly load.

If I believe that Jesus died,

And waking, rose to reign above;

Then surely Sorrow, Sin, and Pride,

Must yield to Peace, and Hope, and Love.

And all the blessed words He said

Will strength and holy joy impart:

A shield of safety o’er my head,

A spring of comfort in my heart.

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The Consolation

Though bleak these woods, and damp the ground

With fallen leaves so thickly strown,

And cold the wind that wanders round

With wild and melancholy moan;

There IS a friendly roof, I know,

Might shield me from the wintry blast;

There is a fire, whose ruddy glow

Will cheer me for my wanderings past.

And so, though still, where’er I go,

Cold stranger-glances meet my eye;

Though, when my spirit sinks in woe,

Unheeded swells the unbidden sigh;

Though solitude, endured too long,

Bids youthful joys too soon decay,

Makes mirth a stranger to my tongue,

And overclouds my noon of day;

When kindly thoughts that would have way,

Flow back discouraged to my breast;

I know there is, though far away,

A home where heart and soul may rest.

Warm hands are there, that, clasped in mine,

The warmer heart will not belie;

While mirth, and truth, and friendship shine

In smiling lip and earnest eye.

The ice that gathers round my heart

May there be thawed; and sweetly, then,

The joys of youth, that now depart,

Will come to cheer my soul again.

Though far I roam, that thought shall be

My hope, my comfort, everywhere;

While such a home remains to me,

My heart shall never know despair!

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Lines composed in Wood on a Windy Day

My soul is awakened, my spirit is soaring

And carried aloft on the wings of the breeze;

For above and around me the wild wind is roaring,

Arousing to rapture the earth and the seas.

The long withered grass in the sunshine is glancing,

The bare trees are tossing their branches on high;

The dead leaves beneath them are merrily dancing,

The white clouds are scudding across the blue sky

I wish I could see how the ocean is lashing

The foam of its billows to whirlwinds of spray;

I wish I could see how its proud waves are dashing,

And hear the wild roar of their thunder to-day!

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The Captive Dove

Poor restless dove, I pity thee;

And when I hear thy plaintive moan,

I mourn for thy captivity,

And in thy woes forget mine own.

To see thee stand prepared to fly,

And flap those useless wings of thine,

And gaze into the distant sky,

Would melt a harder heart than mine.

In vain—in vain! Thou canst not rise:

Thy prison roof confines thee there;

Its slender wires delude thine eyes,

And quench thy longings with despair.

Oh, thou wert made to wander free

In sunny mead and shady grove,

And far beyond the rolling sea,

In distant climes, at will to rove!

Yet, hadst thou but one gentle mate

Thy little drooping heart to cheer,

And share with thee thy captive state,

Thou couldst be happy even there.

Yes, even there, if, listening by,

One faithful dear companion stood,

While gazing on her full bright eye,

Thou mightst forget thy native wood

But thou, poor solitary dove,

Must make, unheard, thy joyless moan;

The heart that Nature formed to love

Must pine, neglected, and alone.

 

Lines Written from Home

Though bleak these woods, and damp the ground,

With fallen leaves so thickly strewn,

And cold the wind that wanders round

With wild and melancholy moan;

There is a friendly roof I know,

Might shield me from the wintry blast;

There is a fire whose ruddy glow

Will cheer me for my wanderings past.

And so, though still where’er I go

Cold stranger glances meet my eye;

Though, when my spirit sinks in woe,

Unheeded swells the unbidden sigh;

Though solitude, endured too long,

Bids youthful joys too soon decay,

Makes mirth a stranger to my tongue,

And overclouds my noon of day;

When kindly thoughts that would have way

Flow back, discouraged, to my breast,

I know there is, though far away,

A home where heart and soul may rest.

Warm hands are there, that, clasped in mine,

The warmer heart will not belie;

While mirth and truth, and friendship shine

In smiling lip and earnest eye.

The ice that gathers round my heart

May there be thawed; and sweetly, then,

The joys of youth, that now depart,

Will come to cheer my soul again.

Though far I roam, that thought shall be

My hope, my comfort everywhere;

While such a home remains to me,

My heart shall never know despair.

(Charlotte wrote of this poem in the edition published after her sisters’ deaths: “My sister Anne had to taste the cup of life as it is mixed for the class termed “Governesses.”)

 
 
More about Anne Brontë as a poet

In an updated edition published after both Emily and Anne had died, Charlotte wrote:

“In looking over my sister Anne’s papers, I find mournful evidence that religious feeling had been to her but too much like what it was to Cowper; I mean, of course, in a far milder form.

Without rendering her a prey to those horrors that defy concealment, it subdued her mood and bearing to a perpetual pensiveness; the pillar of a cloud glided constantly before her eyes; she ever waited at the foot of a secret Sinai, listening in her heart to the voice of a trumpet sounding long and waxing louder.

Some, perhaps, would rejoice over these tokens of sincere though sorrowing piety in a deceased relative: I own, to me they seem sad, as if her whole innocent life had been passed under the martyrdom of an unconfessed physical pain: their effect, indeed, would be too distressing, were it not combated by the certain knowledge that in her last moments this tyranny of a too tender conscience was overcome; this pomp of terrors broke up, and passing away, left her dying hour unclouded.

Her belief in God did not then bring to her dread, as of a stern Judge,—but hope, as in a Creator and Saviour: and no faltering hope was it, but a sure and stedfast conviction, on which, in the rude passage from Time to Eternity, she threw the weight of her human weakness, and by which she was enabled to bear what was to be borne, patiently—serenely—victoriously.”

Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell
Poetry Foundation

 

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Forgotten Suffragists for Younger Readers: The Voice of Liberty by Angelica Shirley Carpenter

Matilda Joslyn Gage was born in 1826 in Cicero, New York, near Syracuse. The important role she played in the women’s suffrage movement has been marginalized, overshadowed by figures like Susan B. Anthony and Eliabeth Cady Stanton.

“All of the crimes which I was not guilty of rushed through my mind,” Gage wrote later, “but I failed to remember that I was a born criminal—a woman.” Her crime: registering to vote. The verdict: guilty as charged.

Angelica Shirley Carpenter has a new picture book out for grades 2 – 6: The Voice of Liberty, with illustrations by Edwin Fotheringham, published by the South Dakota Historical Society Press (2020). The book tells how three suffragists, Matilda Joslyn Gage, Lillie Devereux Blake, and Lillie’s daughter, Katherine “Katie” Devereux Blake, led a protest at the 1886 dedication of the Statue of Liberty.

Why protest that beautiful statue? Because they didn’t think it right for Liberty to be portrayed as a woman when women had no freedom, not even the right to vote, in the United States.

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Matilda Joslyn Gage

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Lillie, as president of the New York State Woman Suffrage Association (Matilda was vice president) had applied to speak on behalf of women at the dedication ceremony. Her request was denied. No women would be allowed to speak or even to set foot on the island where the statue stood, the men in charge replied.

Then Lillie applied for permission to sail in the naval parade, which was part of the celebration, and surprisingly, that request was approved. Now all they needed was a boat and the money to rent it.

The boat they found was less than perfect, but it carried two hundred protestors all the way to the statue, shouting slogans like “Votes for women!” through a megaphone. The women deemed their protest a success when it made the front page of the New York Times the next day.

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Carpenter wrote an earlier, full-length biography of Matilda, Born Criminal: Matilda Joslyn Gage, Radical Suffragist, published in 2018 by the South Dakota Historical Society Press. Lillie is the subject of a biography by Grace Farrell: Lillie Devereux Blake: Retracing a Life Erased, published in 2002 by the University of Massachusetts Press.

Besides being women’s rights leaders, Matilda and Lillie were authors, Matilda known for the first three volumes of the History of Woman Suffrage (published 1881-1886), co-written with Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and for her stand-alone book, Woman, Church and State (1893), a scathing history of how religion and government had oppressed women for centuries.

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The Voice of Liberty is available on Amazon*

and wherever books are sold

Lillie, who as a young widow supported her two daughters during the Civil War as a newspaper reporter, also wrote fiction.

Her most famous novel, Fettered for Life, presents an alarming portrait of a young working woman facing incredible prejudice and danger in New York City in 1874. Katherine Devereux Blake, a young schoolteacher at the time the picture book takes place, became a famous principal and educator, a  women’s rights leader, and peace advocate.

Both Matilda and Lillie believed, and Katherine agreed with them, that they had been written out of history by Susan B. Anthony. Angelica Shirley Carpenter and Grace Farrell are writing them back in.

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Born Criminal: Matilda Joslyn Gage, Radical Suffragist

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Angelica Shirley Carpenter has master’s degrees from the University of Illinois in education and library science. Curator emerita of the Arne Nixon Center for the Study of Children’s Literature at California State University, Fresno, she lives in Fresno.

She has published five previous books about authors: Frances Hodgson Burnett (two books), Robert Louis Stevenson, Lewis Carroll, and L. Frank Baum, who was Matilda’s son-in-law. A past president of the International Wizard of Oz Club, she is active in the Lewis Carroll Society of North America and the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators. Find out more about her at angelicacarpenter.com.

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*This post contains affiliate links. If the product is purchased by linking through, Literary Ladies Guide receives a modest commission, which helps maintain our site and helps it to continue growing!

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The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter (1979)

The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories (1979) is perhaps the best-known work by British author Angela Carter (1940 – 1992). A novelist, short story writer, and journalist, she earned a reputation as one of Britain’s most original writers.

Her influences ranged from fairy tales, gothic fantasy, and Shakespeare to surrealism and the cinema of Godard and Fellini. Her work broken taboos and was often labeled as provocative.

The Bloody Chamber is a collection of re-envisioned imaginings (not, as often described, retellings) of classic European fairy tales. They range in length from very short stories to novellas, and include:

“The Bloody Chamber”
“The Courtship of Mr Lyon”
“The Tiger’s Bride”
“Puss-in-Boots”
“The Erl-King”
“The Snow Child”
“The Lady of the House of Love”
“The Werewolf”
“The Company of Wolves”
“Wolf-Alice”

Carter bristled at inaccurate descriptions of this collection, as described in this 2006 article by Helen Simpson in The Guardian, “Femme Fatale: Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber”:

“The Bloody Chamber is often wrongly described as a group of traditional fairy tales given a subversive feminist twist. In fact, these are new stories, not re-tellings. As Angela Carter made clear, ‘My intention was not to do ‘versions’ or, as the American edition of the book said, horribly, ‘adult’ fairy tales, but to extract the latent content from the traditional stories and to use it as the beginnings of new stories.’”

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Learn more about Angela Carter

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Here are a pair of reviews that appeared when the book was published in the U.S. in 1980.

 

The Bloody Chamber and Other Adult Tales 

From original review in the Chicago Tribune, April, 1980: This very uncompromising British writer has unsettled readers before — with her sex-laden futuristic fantasies (such as The Passion of New Eve) and her feminist study, The Sadeian Woman.

Here now are Carter’s fiendishly droll versions of fairy and folk tales like Little Red Riding Hood and Puss in Boots. Assorted elves and vampires prowl thought these weather overheated pages — but this is a world in which Beauty outwits her Beast and Bluebeard’s wives live to enjoy their husband’s worldly goods.

It is a world where virgins yawn impatiently at the mention of their purity, and Red Riding Hood can murmur, “I love the company of wolves.”

There’s a creepy lubricity in Carter’s elegant prose that will always make her a cult favorite; but to those who appreciated her voluptuous wit, these revisionist contes may seem her best work so far.

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The Bloody Chamber on Amazon*

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Fairy Tales Turned into Powerful Adult Stories

From the original review in the Austin Statesman, March, 1980: Angela Carter. novelist, sometimes feminist, has tried her hand at the near impossible and succeeded She has transformed classic fairy tales into potent adult tales.

Her cunning revisions render “Beauty and the Beast,” “Puss in Boots,” “Bluebeard,” and “Little Red Riding Hood” as dangerous and thrilling as they were in childhood. In sumptuous prose, no cozy moments; the landscape is always slightly askew and even happy endings leave unformed questions and unresolved tensions.

Whether inventing new tales or twisting old ones, Carter infuses her stories with disturbing eroticism as she carefully weaves her way back and forth over the fine line that separates sexuality and violence Sometimes a creature’s deviant need is so great that he must be killed; most often the revelation is that yielding is power and tenderness is salvation.

Carter adopts a different form for each of her ten stories: “Bluebeard” becomes a Gothic romance; “Puss in Boots” turns into a bawdy romp. Carter’s own “Werewolf” is a short brutal folk tale. Each story is a fresh invention and the reader is never allowed to be lulled into the simple litany of children’s stories.

All this intensity is eased by Carter’s wonderful comic ingenuity. She mocks forms even as she adopts them and she wryly returns phrases. Her vigorous, lurid prose finally carries this book and forces suspension of disbelief.

Thick and blood-rich, it overwhelms — Carter’s vivid images stayed with me in my dreams: She warns. “These woods enclose and then enclose again, like a system of Chinese boxes opening one into another; intimate perspective of the woods changes endlessly around the interloper … it is easy to lose yourself in these woods.”

More about The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter

An Introduction to The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories
Wikipedia
Reader discussion on Goodreads
Angela Carter’s Feminist Mythology

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The Mark on the Wall by Virginia Woolf (full text)

“The Mark on the Wall,” one of Virginia Woolf‘s early short stories, was published in her first collection of fiction, Monday or Tuesday (1921). It was a prime example of the kind of complex (and sometimes perplexing) modernist short stories that she produced especially in her first years of publishing.

Before getting to the full text of the story, here is a link to an excellent summary and analysis of the story, as well as Leonard Woolf’s foreword to A Haunted House and Other Short Stories, an updated collection that also included this story, published posthumously in 1944.

From Interesting Literature:

“In summary, ‘The Mark on the Wall’ is narrated by someone who recalls noticing a mark on the wall of their house. But the story is not really ‘about’ the mark on the wall, but rather what it prompts the narrator to think about, muse upon and recollect.

As well as speculating on what the mark on the wall might be – a small hole, or perhaps a leftover rose leaf – the narrator’s mind wanders to much bigger questions and meditations, such as the nature of life, where Shakespeare found his inspiration, and even what the afterlife might be like.”

Read the rest of the summary and analysis here.

 

A Foreword by Leonard Woolf

The original stories in Monday or Tuesday were later collected in A Haunted House and Other Short Stories. Monday or Tuesday  was included along with the several other original stories:  “A Haunted House,” “An Unwritten Novel,” “The String Quartet,” “Kew Gardens,” and “The Mark on the Wall.” 

Mr. Woolf, as he explains here, omitted two of the original stories, “Blue & Green,” and “A society,” as he felt that would have been Virginia’s preference. Here is the Foreword by Leonard Woolf introducing this volume, which was published in the early 1944, after Virginia’s death.

Monday or Tuesday, the only book of short stories by Virginia Woolf which appeared in her lifetime, was published in 1921. It has been out of print for years.

All through her life, Virginia Woolf used at intervals to write short stories. It was her custom, whenever an idea for one occurred to her, to sketch it out in a very rough form and then to put it away in a drawer. Later, if an editor asked her for a short story, and she felt in the mood to write one (which was not frequent), she would take a sketch out of her drawer and rewrite it, sometimes a great many times.

Or if she felt, as she often did, while writing a novel that she required to rest her mind by working at something else for a time, she would either write a critical essay or work upon one of her sketches for short stories. For some time before her death we had often discussed the possibility of her republishing Monday or Tuesday, or publishing a new volume of collected short stories.

Finally, in 1940, she decided that she would get together a new volume of such stories and include in it most of the stories which had appeared originally in Monday or Tuesday, as well as some published subsequently in magazines and some unpublished. Our idea was that she should produce a volume of critical essays in 1941 and the volume of stories in 1942.

In the present volume I have tried to carry out her intention. I have included in it six out of the eight stories or sketches which originally appeared in Monday or Tuesday. The two omitted by me are “A Society,” and “Blue and Green.” I know that she had decided not to include the first and I am practically certain that she would not have included the second.

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You might also enjoy reading the full texts of:

“A Haunted House”

“Monday or Tuesday”

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The Mark on the Wall by Virginia Woolf

Perhaps it was the middle of January in the present that I first looked up and saw the mark on the wall. In order to fix a date it is necessary to remember what one saw. So now I think of the fire; the steady film of yellow light upon the page of my book; the three chrysanthemums in the round glass bowl on the mantelpiece.

Yes, it must have been the winter time, and we had just finished our tea, for I remember that I was smoking a cigarette when I looked up and saw the mark on the wall for the first time. I looked up through the smoke of my cigarette and my eye lodged for a moment upon the burning coals, and that old fancy of the crimson flag flapping from the castle tower came into my mind, and I thought of the cavalcade of red knights riding up the side of the black rock.

Rather to my relief the sight of the mark interrupted the fancy, for it is an old fancy, an automatic fancy, made as a child perhaps. The mark was a small round mark, black upon the white wall, about six or seven inches above the mantelpiece.

How readily our thoughts swarm upon a new object, lifting it a little way, as ants carry a blade of straw so feverishly, and then leave it…If that mark was made by a nail, it can’t have been for a picture, it must have been for a miniature—the miniature of a lady with white powdered curls, powder-dusted cheeks, and lips like red carnations.

A fraud of course, for the people who had this house before us would have chosen pictures in that way—an old picture for an old room. That is the sort of people they were—very interesting people, and I think of them so often, in such queer places, because one will never see them again, never know what happened next.

They wanted to leave this house because they wanted to change their style of furniture, so he said, and he was in process of saying that in his opinion art should have ideas behind it when we were torn asunder, as one is torn from the old lady about to pour out tea and the young man about to hit the tennis ball in the back garden of the suburban villa as one rushes past in the train.

But as for that mark, I’m not sure about it; I don’t believe it was made by a nail after all; it’s too big, too round, for that. I might get up, but if I got up and looked at it, ten to one I shouldn’t be able to say for certain; because once a thing’s done, no one ever knows how it happened. Oh! dear me, the mystery of life; the inaccuracy of thought!

The ignorance of humanity! To show how very little control of our possessions we have—what an accidental affair this living is after all our civilization—let me just count over a few of the things lost in one lifetime, beginning, for that seems always the most mysterious of losses—what cat would gnaw, what rat would nibble—three pale blue canisters of book-binding tools?

Then there were the bird cages, the iron hoops, the steel skates, the Queen Anne coal-scuttle, the bagatelle board, the hand organ—all gone, and jewels, too. Opals and emeralds, they lie about the roots of turnips. What a scraping paring affair it is to be sure!

The wonder is that I’ve any clothes on my back, that I sit surrounded by solid furniture at this moment. Why, if one wants to compare life to anything, one must liken it to being blown through the Tube at fifty miles an hour—landing at the other end without a single hairpin in one’s hair!

Shot out at the feet of God entirely naked! Tumbling head over heels in the asphodel meadows like brown paper parcels pitched down a shoot in the post office! With one’s hair flying back like the tail of a race-horse. Yes, that seems to express the rapidity of life, the perpetual waste and repair; all so casual, all so haphazard…

But after life. The slow pulling down of thick green stalks so that the cup of the flower, as it turns over, deluges one with purple and red light. Why, after all, should one not be born there as one is born here, helpless, speechless, unable to focus one’s eyesight, groping at the roots of the grass, at the toes of the Giants?

As for saying which are trees, and which are men and women, or whether there are such things, that one won’t be in a condition to do for fifty years or so. There will be nothing but spaces of light and dark, intersected by thick stalks, and rather higher up perhaps, rose-shaped blots of an indistinct colour—dim pinks and blues—which will, as time goes on, become more definite, become—I don’t know what…

And yet that mark on the wall is not a hole at all. It may even be caused by some round black substance, such as a small rose leaf, left over from the summer, and I, not being a very vigilant housekeeper—look at the dust on the mantelpiece, for example, the dust which, so they say, buried Troy three times over, only fragments of pots utterly refusing annihilation, as one can believe.

The tree outside the window taps very gently on the pane…I want to think quietly, calmly, spaciously, never to be interrupted, never to have to rise from my chair, to slip easily from one thing to another, without any sense of hostility, or obstacle. I want to sink deeper and deeper, away from the surface, with its hard separate facts. To steady myself, let me catch hold of the first idea that passes…Shakespeare…Well, he will do as well as another.

A man who sat himself solidly in an arm-chair, and looked into the fire, so—A shower of ideas fell perpetually from some very high Heaven down through his mind. He leant his forehead on his hand, and people, looking in through the open door—for this scene is supposed to take place on a summer’s evening—But how dull this is, this historical fiction! It doesn’t interest me at all.

I wish I could hit upon a pleasant track of thought, a track indirectly reflecting credit upon myself, for those are the pleasantest thoughts, and very frequent even in the minds of modest mouse-coloured people, who believe genuinely that they dislike to hear their own praises. They are not thoughts directly praising oneself; that is the beauty of them; they are thoughts like this:

“And then I came into the room. They were discussing botany. I said how I’d seen a flower growing on a dust heap on the site of an old house in Kingsway. The seed, I said, must have been sown in the reign of Charles the First. What flowers grew in the reign of Charles the First?”

I asked—(but, I don’t remember the answer). Tall flowers with purple tassels to them perhaps. And so it goes on. All the time I’m dressing up the figure of myself in my own mind, lovingly, stealthily, not openly adoring it, for if I did that, I should catch myself out, and stretch my hand at once for a book in self-protection.

Indeed, it is curious how instinctively one protects the image of oneself from idolatry or any other handling that could make it ridiculous, or too unlike the original to be believed in any longer. Or is it not so very curious after all? It is a matter of great importance. Suppose the looking glass smashes, the image disappears, and the romantic figure with the green of forest depths all about it is there no longer, but only that shell of a person which is seen by other people—what an airless, shallow, bald, prominent world it becomes!

A world not to be lived in. As we face each other in omnibuses and underground railways we are looking into the mirror that accounts for the vagueness, the gleam of glassiness, in our eyes.

And the novelists in future will realize more and more the importance of these reflections, for of course there is not one reflection but an almost infinite number; those are the depths they will explore, those the phantoms they will pursue, leaving the description of reality more and more out of their stories, taking a knowledge of it for granted, as the Greeks did and Shakespeare perhaps—but these generalizations are very worthless.

The military sound of the word is enough. It recalls leading articles, cabinet ministers—a whole class of things indeed which as a child one thought the thing itself, the standard thing, the real thing, from which one could not depart save at the risk of nameless damnation. Generalizations bring back somehow Sunday in London, Sunday afternoon walks, Sunday luncheons, and also ways of speaking of the dead, clothes, and habits —like the habit of sitting all together in one room until a certain hour, although nobody liked it.

There was a rule for everything. The rule for tablecloths at that particular period was that they should be made of tapestry with little yellow compartments marked upon them, such as you may see in photographs of the carpets in the corridors of the royal palaces. Tablecloths of a different kind were not real tablecloths. How shocking, and yet how wonderful it was to discover that these real things, Sunday luncheons, Sunday walks, country houses, and tablecloths were not entirely real, were indeed half phantoms, and the damnation which visited the disbeliever in them was only a sense of illegitimate freedom.

What now takes the place of those things I wonder, those real standard things? Men perhaps, should you be a woman; the masculine point of view which governs our lives, which sets the standard, which establishes Whitaker’s Table of Precedency, which has become, I suppose, since the war half a phantom to many men and women, which soon—one may hope, will be laughed into the dustbin where the phantoms go, the mahogany sideboards and the Landseer prints, Gods and Devils, Hell and so forth, leaving us all with an intoxicating sense of illegitimate freedom—if freedom exists…

In certain lights that mark on the wall seems actually to project from the wall. Nor is it entirely circular. I cannot be sure, but it seems to cast a perceptible shadow, suggesting that if I ran my finger down that strip of the wall it would, at a certain point, mount and descend a small tumulus, a smooth tumulus like those barrows on the South Downs which are, they say, either tombs or camps.

Of the two I should prefer them to be tombs, desiring melancholy like most English people, and finding it natural at the end of a walk to think of the bones stretched beneath the turf… There must be some book about it. Some antiquary must have dug up those bones and given them a name…What sort of a man is an antiquary, I wonder?

Retired Colonels for the most part, I daresay, leading parties of aged labourers to the top here, examining clods of earth and stone, and getting into correspondence with the neighbouring clergy, which, being opened at breakfast time, gives them a feeling of importance, and the comparison of arrow-heads necessitates cross-country journeys to the county towns, an agreeable necessity both to them and to their elderly wives, who wish to make plum jam or to clean out the study, and have every reason for keeping that great question of the camp or the tomb in perpetual suspension, while the Colonel himself feels agreeably philosophic in accumulating evidence on both sides of the question.

It is true that he does finally incline to believe in the camp; and, being opposed, indites a pamphlet which he is about to read at the quarterly meeting of the local society when a stroke lays him low, and his last conscious thoughts are not of wife or child, but of the camp and that arrowhead there, which is now in the case at the local museum, together with the foot of a Chinese murderess, a handful of Elizabethan nails, a great many Tudor clay pipes, a piece of Roman pottery, and the wine-glass that Nelson drank out of—proving I really don’t know what.

No, no, nothing is proved, nothing is known. And if I were to get up at this very moment and ascertain that the mark on the wall is really—what shall we say?—the head of a gigantic old nail, driven in two hundred years ago, which has now, owing to the patient attrition of many generations of housemaids, revealed its head above the coat of paint, and is taking its first view of modern life in the sight of a white-walled fire-lit room, what should I gain?— Knowledge? Matter for further speculation? I can think sitting still as well as standing up.

And what is knowledge? What are our learned men save the descendants of witches and hermits who crouched in caves and in woods brewing herbs, interrogating shrew-mice and writing down the language of the stars? And the less we honour them as our superstitions dwindle and our respect for beauty and health of mind increases…Yes, one could imagine a very pleasant world. A quiet, spacious world, with the flowers so red and blue in the open fields.

A world without professors or specialists or house-keepers with the profiles of policemen, a world which one could slice with one’s thought as a fish slices the water with his fin, grazing the stems of the water-lilies, hanging suspended over nests of white sea eggs…How peaceful it is drown here, rooted in the centre of the world and gazing up through the grey waters, with their sudden gleams of light, and their reflections—if it were not for Whitaker’s Almanack—if it were not for the Table of Precedency!

I must jump up and see for myself what that mark on the wall really is—a nail, a rose-leaf, a crack in the wood?

Here is nature once more at her old game of self-preservation. This train of thought, she perceives, is threatening mere waste of energy, even some collision with reality, for who will ever be able to lift a finger against Whitaker’s Table of Precedency? The Archbishop of Canterbury is followed by the Lord High Chancellor; the Lord High Chancellor is followed by the Archbishop of York.

Everybody follows somebody, such is the philosophy of Whitaker; and the great thing is to know who follows whom. Whitaker knows, and let that, so Nature counsels, comfort you, instead of enraging you; and if you can’t be comforted, if you must shatter this hour of peace, think of the mark on the wall.

I understand Nature’s game—her prompting to take action as a way of ending any thought that threatens to excite or to pain. Hence, I suppose, comes our slight contempt for men of action—men, we assume, who don’t think. Still, there’s no harm in putting a full stop to one’s disagreeable thoughts by looking at a mark on the wall.

Indeed, now that I have fixed my eyes upon it, I feel that I have grasped a plank in the sea; I feel a satisfying sense of reality which at once turns the two Archbishops and the Lord High Chancellor to the shadows of shades. Here is something definite, something real. Thus, waking from a midnight dream of horror, one hastily turns on the light and lies quiescent, worshipping the chest of drawers, worshipping solidity, worshipping reality, worshipping the impersonal world which is a proof of some existence other than ours.

That is what one wants to be sure of…Wood is a pleasant thing to think about. It comes from a tree; and trees grow, and we don’t know how they grow. For years and years they grow, without paying any attention to us, in meadows, in forests, and by the side of rivers—all things one likes to think about.

The cows swish their tails beneath them on hot afternoons; they paint rivers so green that when a moorhen dives one expects to see its feathers all green when it comes up again. I like to think of the fish balanced against the stream like flags blown out; and of water-beetles slowly raiding domes of mud upon the bed of the river.

I like to think of the tree itself:—first the close dry sensation of being wood; then the grinding of the storm; then the slow, delicious ooze of sap. I like to think of it, too, on winter’s nights standing in the empty field with all leaves close-furled, nothing tender exposed to the iron bullets of the moon, a naked mast upon an earth that goes tumbling, tumbling, all night long.

The song of birds must sound very loud and strange in June; and how cold the feet of insects must feel upon it, as they make laborious progresses up the creases of the bark, or sun themselves upon the thin green awning of the leaves, and look straight in front of them with diamond-cut red eyes … One by one the fibres snap beneath the immense cold pressure of the earth, then the last storm comes and, falling, the highest branches drive deep into the ground again.

Even so, life isn’t done with; there are a million patient, watchful lives still for a tree, all over the world, in bedrooms, in ships, on the pavement, lining rooms, where men and women sit after tea, smoking cigarettes. It is full of peaceful thoughts, happy thoughts, this tree. I should like to take each one separately—but something is getting in the way…

Where was I? What has it all been about? A tree? A river? The Downs? Whitaker’s Almanack? The fields of asphodel? I can’t remember a thing. Everything’s moving, falling, slipping, vanishing …There is a vast upheaval of matter. Someone is standing over me and saying—

“I’m going out to buy a newspaper.”

“Yes?”

“Though it’s no good buying newspapers … Nothing ever happens. Curse this war; God damn this war!…All the same, I don’t see why we should have a snail on our wall.”

Ah, the mark on the wall! It was a snail.

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Parable of the Sower & Parable of the Talents by Octavia E. Butler

Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents by Octavia E. Butler are a duo of books intended to have become a trilogy, though the third never came to be. Now that we inhabit the time in which the novels actually take place, they’re more eerily prescient than ever.

When Parable of Sower (1993) begins, Lauren Olamina is a young Black woman just emerging from her teens, navigating the apocalyptic world of Los Angeles in the 2020s. A fight — and flight — for survival leads to her create a new faith called Earthseed, in hopes of repairing the world.

We find Lauren once again at the center of Parable of the Talents, now a young mother and still fighting to salvage humanity with Earthseed, the new faith she founded. Now she’s battling violent bigots and religious fanatics.

Shading from dystopian literature to the kind of richly imagined science fiction Butler was known for, these award-winning novels contain the insightful social commentary that was this esteemed author’s hallmark.

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New editions of Octavia E. Butler’s works reissued by Grand Central Publishing

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Grand Central Publishing (a division of Hachette Book Group) has been keeping this important American author in the public eye by regularly reissuing her work in attractive contemporary editions. 

Here is a portion of N.K. Jemisin’s Foreword to the 2019 edition of Parable of the Sower:

“Butler does not appear to have intended the Parable novels to be a guidebook — and yet they are. That’s true for all of the most powerful science fiction novels: they offer not only accurate visions of the future, but also suggestions for coping with the resulting changes. We can only imagine what that vision might have included if Butler had been able to complete it; she apparently planned a third novel, Parable of the Trickster.

But maybe it’s just as well that she and Lauren were unable to “discover” that third book of Earthseed. Now, like the communities of Earthseed, it’s our job to create change in fiction and in life. Like Lauren, these days I am comforted not by the platitudes I was raised with, but by the idea that change is a tool I can shape to my advantage, if I am clever and lucky. Claiming the future will be an ugly, brutal struggle, but I’m prepared to go the distance in that fight. The future is worth it.”

(Excerpted from The Parable of the Sower, reissue, April 2019, foreword by N.K. Jemisin, 2018, copyright © 2019 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.)

 

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Parable of the Sower (1993)

Parable of the Sower on Amazon*

From the 2019 Grand Central Publishing / Hachette edition: From the “grand dame” of science fiction, a dystopian classic of terror and hope about a teenage girl trying to survive in an all-too-real future. When unattended environmental and economic crises lead to social chaos, not even gated communities are safe.

In a night of fire and death, Lauren Olamina, an empath and the daughter of a minister, loses her family and home and ventures out into the unprotected American landscape. But what begins as a flight for survival soon leads to something much more: a startling vision of human destiny and the birth of a new faith, as Lauren becomes a prophet carrying the hope of a new world and a revolutionary idea christened “Earthseed.”

First book in the Parable series, also known as Earthseed. Originally published in 1993, reissued April 30, 2019.

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From the original 1993 Four Walls Eight Windows edition of Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler:  Parable of the Sower is the odyssey of one woman who is twice as feeling in a world that has become doubly dehumanized.

The time is 2025. The place is California, where small walled communities must protect themselves from hordes of desperate scavengers and roaming bands of  “Paints,” people addicted to a drug that activates an orgasmic desire to burn, rape, and murder. When one small community is overrun, Lauren Olamina, an 18-year-old back woman, sets off on foot, moving north along the dangerous coastal highways.

She is a “sharer,” one who suffers from a hereditary trait called “hyperempathy,” which causes her to feel others’ pain as well as her own. Parable of the Sower is both a coming of age novel and a road novel, set in the near future, when the dying embers of our old civilization can either cool or be the catalyst for something new.

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Parable of the Talents (1998)

Parable of the Talents on Amazon*

From the 2019 Grand Central Publishing / Hachette edition: The follow-up to Parable of the Sower, this shockingly prescient novel’s timely message of hope and resistance in the face of fanaticism is more relevant than ever.

In 2032, Lauren Olamina has survived the destruction of her home and family and realized her vision of a peaceful community in northern California based on her newly founded faith, Earthseed.

The fledgling community provides refuge for outcasts facing persecution after the election of an ultra-conservative president who vows to “make America great again.” In an increasingly divided and dangerous nation, Lauren’s subversive colony, a minority religious faction led by a young black woman becomes a target for President Jarret’s reign of terror and oppression.

Years later, Asha Vere reads the journals of Lauren Olamina, a mother she never knew. As she searches for answers about her own past, she also struggles to reconcile with the legacy of a mother caught between her duty to her chosen family and her calling to lead humankind into a better future.

Second book in the Parable series, also known as Earthseed. Originally published in 1998, reissued August 20, 2019. Butler intended Earthseed to be a trilogy, but it was never completed.

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From the original  1998 Four Walls Eight Windows edition of Parable of the Talents by Octavia E. Butler:  Parable of the Talents celebrates the usual Butlerian themes of alienation and transcendence, violence and spirituality, slavery and freedom, and separation and community, to astonishing effect in the shockingly familiar, broken world of 2032.

A continuation of the travails of Lauren Olamina, the heroine of the 1994 Nebula Award finalist Parable of the Sower, Parable of the Talents is told in the voice of Lauren’s daughter Larkin, also called Asha Vere — from whom she has been separated for most of the girl’s life — with sections in the form of Lauren’s journal.

Against a background of a war-torn continent, and with a far-right religious crusader in the office of the U.S. presidency, this is a book about a society whose very fabric has been torn asunder.

As Ms. Butler explains, “Parable of the Sower was a book about problems. I originally intended that Parable of the Talents be a book about solutions. I don’t have solutions, so what I’ve done here is look at the solutions that people tend to reach for when they’re feeling troubled and confused.”

And yet human life, oddly, thrives in this unforgettable novel. And the Lauren of Parable of the Sower blossoms into the full strength of her womanhood, complex and entirely credible.

An incredible passage from Parable of the Talents:

Choose your leaders with wisdom and forethought.

To be led by a coward is to be controlled by all that the coward fears.

To be led by a fool is to be led by the opportunists who control the fool.

To be led by a thief is to offer up your most precious treasures to be stolen.

To be led by a liar is to ask to be told lies.

To be led by a tyrant is to sell yourself and those you love into slavery.

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More about Parable of the Sower & Parable of the Talents by Octavia E. Butler

Reader discussion of Parable of the Sower on Goodreads
Reader discussion of Parable of the Talents on Goodreads
Octavia Butler’s Prescient Vision of a Zealot Elected to “Make America Great Again”
Gloria Steinem on Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower

 

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

 

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Beautiful New Editions of Octavia E. Butler Classics

It’s possible that Octavia E. Butler’s speculative, dystopian, and science fiction novels and short stories have been over-described as “prescient.” But there’s hardly a better word to some of her major works, and in tandem with her keen observance of human nature, they’ve transcended genre to become classic literature.

In her New York Times obituary, Butler was described as “an internationally acclaimed science fiction writer whose evocative, often troubling novels explore far-reaching issues of race, sex, power, and ultimately, what it meant to be human.”

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Growing up in Pasadena. California in the 1950s, Butler was drawn to science fiction magazines like Amazing Stories, which sparked flights of imagination. Wondrous possibilities of worlds unknown were opened to a young Black girl who loved to read and write, and who described herself painfully shy and awkward.

With unyielding determination, Butler eventually broke into the white male-dominated genre of science fiction, where she became a trailblazer not only as a woman, but as an African-American.

 

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Works by Octavia E. Butler reissued by Grand Central Publishing

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Grand Central Publishing (a division of Hachette Book Group) has been keeping this important American author in the public eye by regularly reissuing her work in attractive contemporary editions.  The publisher offers this concise biography of Butler, who died at age 59 in 2006.

Octavia E. Butler was a renowned writer who received a MacArthur “Genius” Grant and PEN West Lifetime Achievement Award for her body of work.

She was the author of several award-winning novels including Parable of the Sower, which was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and was acclaimed for her lean prose, strong protagonists, and social observations in stories that range from the distant past to the far future.

Sales of her books have increased enormously since her death as the issues she addressed in her Afrofuturistic, feminist novels and short fiction have only become more relevant.

Here are some of the editions most recently reissued by Grand Central Publishing. This list will be updated as more are released.

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Parable of the Sower

From the publisher: From the “grand dame” of science fiction, a dystopian classic of terror and hope about a teenage girl trying to survive in an all-too-real future. When unattended environmental and economic crises lead to social chaos, not even gated communities are safe.

In a night of fire and death, Lauren Olamina, an empath and the daughter of a minister, loses her family and home and ventures out into the unprotected American landscape. But what begins as a flight for survival soon leads to something much more: a startling vision of human destiny and the birth of a new faith, as Lauren becomes a prophet carrying the hope of a new world and a revolutionary idea christened “Earthseed.”

First book in the Parable series, also known as Earthseed. Originally published in 1993, Parable of the Sower was reissued April 30, 2019.

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Parable of the Talents

From the publisher: The follow-up to Parable of the Sower, this shockingly prescient novel’s timely message of hope and resistance in the face of fanaticism is more relevant than ever.

In 2032, Lauren Olamina has survived the destruction of her home and family and realized her vision of a peaceful community in northern California based on her newly founded faith, Earthseed.

The fledgling community provides refuge for outcasts facing persecution after the election of an ultra-conservative president who vows to “make America great again.” In an increasingly divided and dangerous nation, Lauren’s subversive colony, a minority religious faction led by a young black woman becomes a target for President Jarret’s reign of terror and oppression.

Years later, Asha Vere reads the journals of Lauren Olamina, a mother she never knew. As she searches for answers about her own past, she also struggles to reconcile with the legacy of a mother caught between her duty to her chosen family and her calling to lead humankind into a better future.

Second book in the Parable series, also known as Earthseed. Originally published in 1998, Parable of the Talents was reissued August 20, 2019. Butler intended Earthseed to be a trilogy, but it was never completed.

 

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Mind of My Mind

From the publisher: A young woman harnesses the power of a viral mutation and challenges the ruthless man who controls her, in this brilliantly provocative novel from the award-winning author of Parable of the Sower.

Mary is a treacherous experiment. Her creator, an immortal named Doro, has molded the human race for generations, seeking out those with unusual talents like telepathy and breeding them into a new sub-race of humans who obey his every command. The result is Mary: a young black woman living on the rough outskirts of Los Angeles in the 1970s, who has no idea how much power she will soon wield. 

Doro knows he must handle Mary carefully or risk her ending like his previous experiments: dead, either by her own hand or Doro’s. What he doesn’t suspect is that Mary’s maturing telepathic abilities may soon rival his own power. By linking telepaths with a viral pattern, she will create the potential to break free of his control once and for all-and shift the course of humanity.

Second book in the Patternist series. Originally published in 1977, Mind of My Mind was reissued August 4, 2020.

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Wild Seed

From the publisher: Doro knows no higher authority than himself. An ancient spirit with boundless powers, he possesses humans, killing without remorse as he jumps from body to body to sustain his own life. With a lonely eternity ahead of him, Doro breeds supernaturally gifted humans into empires that obey his every desire. He fears no one — until he meets Anyanwu.

Anyanwu is an entity like Doro and yet different. She can heal with a bite and transform her own body, mending injuries and reversing aging. She uses her powers to cure her neighbors and birth entire tribes, surrounding herself with kindred who both fear and respect her. No one poses a true threat to Anyanwu — until she meets Doro.  

The moment Doro meets Anyanwu, he covets her; and from the villages of 17th-century Nigeria to 19th-century United States, their courtship becomes a power struggle that echoes through generations, irrevocably changing what it means to be human.

Fourth book in the Patternist series. Originally published in 1980, Wild Seed was reissued March 17, 2020.

 

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Clay’s Ark

From the publisher: A gripping tale of survival as an alien pandemic irrevocably changes humanity. In a violent near-future, Asa Elias Doyle and her companions encounter an alien life form so heinous and destructive, they exile themselves in the desert so as not to contaminate other humans.

Resisting the compulsion to infect others is mental agony, but succumbing would mean relinquishing their humanity and free will. Desperate, they kidnap a doctor and his two daughters as they cross the wasteland — and, in doing so, endanger the world. The second novel in the Seed to Harvest series

Fifth book in the Patternist series. Originally published in 1984, Clay’s Ark was reissued September 1, 2020.

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Octavia E. Butler’s books are available on Amazon*

and wherever books are sold

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New Octavia E. Butler editions coming soon

Patternmaster (first book in the Patternist series – December 2020

Dawn (first book in the Xenogenesis series) – April 2021

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Learn more about Octavia E. Butler

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*This post contains affiliate links. If the product is purchased by linking through, Literary Ladies Guide receives a modest commission, which helps maintain our site and helps it to continue growing!

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