Nava Atlas's Blog, page 52

“Patterns” by Amy Lowell — from Men, Women and Ghosts (1919)

“Patterns,” a poem by American imagist poet Amy Lowell (1874 – 1925, was published in Men, Women and Ghosts (1919). It exemplifies the imagery-dense free verse for which she was known.

Though Men, Women and Ghosts  is a book of poems, Lowell begins her preface by writing that “This is a book of stories.” She goes on to say:

“For that reason I have excluded all purely lyrical poems. But the word ‘stories’ has been stretched to its fullest application. It includes both narrative poems, properly so called; tales divided into scenes; and a few pieces of less obvious storytelling import in which one might say that the dramatis personae are air, clouds, trees, houses, streets, and such like things.

It has long been a favorite idea of mine that the rhythms of vers libre have not been sufficiently plumbed, that there is in them a power of variation which has never yet been brought to the light of experiment.”

Read more of what Amy Lowell had to say about her vers libre poetry.

More about Amy Lowell

 

Patterns by Amy Lowell

I walk down the garden paths,

And all the daffodils

Are blowing, and the bright blue squills.

I walk down the patterned garden paths

In my stiff, brocaded gown.

With my powdered hair and jewelled fan,

I too am a rare

Pattern. As I wander down

The garden paths.

My dress is richly figured,

And the train

Makes a pink and silver stain

On the gravel, and the thrift

Of the borders.

Just a plate of current fashion,

Tripping by in high-heeled, ribboned shoes.

Not a softness anywhere about me,

Only whale-bone and brocade.

And I sink on a seat in the shade

Of a lime tree. For my passion

Wars against the stiff brocade.

The daffodils and squills

Flutter in the breeze

As they please.

And I weep;

For the lime tree is in blossom

And one small flower has dropped upon my bosom.

And the plashing of waterdrops

In the marble fountain

Comes down the garden paths.

The dripping never stops.

Underneath my stiffened gown

Is the softness of a woman bathing in a marble basin,

A basin in the midst of hedges grown

So thick, she cannot see her lover hiding,

But she guesses he is near,

And the sliding of the water

Seems the stroking of a dear

Hand upon her.

What is Summer in a fine brocaded gown!

I should like to see it lying in a heap upon the ground.

All the pink and silver crumpled up on the ground.

I would be the pink and silver as I ran along the paths,

And he would stumble after

Bewildered by my laughter.

I should see the sun flashing from his sword hilt and the buckles on his shoes.

I would choose

To lead him in a maze along the patterned paths,

A bright and laughing maze for my heavy-booted lover,

Till he caught me in the shade,

And the buttons of his waistcoat bruised my body as he clasped me,

Aching, melting, unafraid.

With the shadows of the leaves and the sundrops,

And the plopping of the waterdrops,

All about us in the open afternoon—

I am very like to swoon

With the weight of this brocade,

For the sun sifts through the shade.

Underneath the fallen blossom

In my bosom,

Is a letter I have hid.

It was brought to me this morning by a rider from the Duke.

“Madam, we regret to inform you that Lord Hartwell

Died in action Thursday sen’night.”

As I read it in the white, morning sunlight,

The letters squirmed like snakes.

“Any answer, Madam,” said my footman.

“No,” I told him.

“See that the messenger takes some refreshment.

No, no answer.”

And I walked into the garden,

Up and down the patterned paths,

In my stiff, correct brocade.

The blue and yellow flowers stood up proudly in the sun,

Each one.

I stood upright too,

Held rigid to the pattern

By the stiffness of my gown.

Up and down I walked,

Up and down.

In a month he would have been my husband.

In a month, here, underneath this lime,

We would have broke the pattern.

He for me, and I for him,

He as Colonel, I as Lady,

On this shady seat.

He had a whim

That sunlight carried blessing.

And I answered, “It shall be as you have said.”

Now he is dead.

In Summer and in Winter I shall walk

Up and down

The patterned garden paths

In my stiff, brocaded gown.

The squills and daffodils

Will give place to pillared roses, and to asters, and to snow.

I shall go

Up and down,

In my gown.

Gorgeously arrayed,

Boned and stayed.

And the softness of my body will be guarded from embrace

By each button, hook, and lace.

For the man who should loose me is dead,

Fighting with the Duke in Flanders,

In a pattern called a war.

Christ! What are patterns for?

. . . . . . . . . .

More poems (full texts) by Amy Lowell

The Cremona Violin
A Roxbury Garden
Lilacs

The post “Patterns” by Amy Lowell — from Men, Women and Ghosts (1919) appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.

“A Haunted House” by Virginia Woolf (full text)

“A Haunted House” by Virginia Woolf was published in her first collection of short fiction, Monday or Tuesday (1921). It later appeared as the lead story another collection of the authors stories, A Haunted House and Other Short Stories (1944), after Woolf’s death. Here we present the text in full. 

First, here are a pair of analyses of this classic short story.

Interesting Literature: “‘A Haunted House’ by Virginia Woolf both is and is not a ghost story. In less than two pages of prose, Woolf explores, summons, and subverts the conventions of the ghost story, offering a modernist take on the genre … In summary, the narrator describes the house where she and her partner live. Whenever you wake in the house, you hear noises: a door shutting, and the sound of a ‘ghostly couple’ wandering from room to room in the house.” 

Sitting Bee: “In ‘A Haunted House’ we have the themes of struggle, loss, commitment, connection, love, and acceptance … The story is narrated in the first person by an unnamed female narrator and after reading the story the reader realises that Woolf may be exploring the theme of struggle. Both the deceased man and woman are searching for something (love) yet they cannot find what they are looking for at the beginning of the story.”

From the Foreword by Leonard Woolf in A Haunted House and Other Short Stories:

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.

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.

. . . . . . . . . .

You might also like reading the full texts of:

“Kew Gardens” 

“Monday or Tuesday”

. . . . . . . . . .

A Haunted House by Virginia Woolf (1921)

Whatever hour you woke there was a door shutting. From room to room they went, hand in hand, lifting here, opening there, making sure—a ghostly couple.

“Here we left it,” she said. And he added, “Oh, but here too!” “It’s upstairs,” she murmured. “And in the garden,” he whispered “Quietly,” they said, “or we shall wake them.”

But it wasn’t that you woke us. Oh, no. “They’re looking for it; they’re drawing the curtain,” one might say, and so read on a page or two.

“Now they’ve found it,” one would be certain, stopping the pencil on the margin. And then, tired of reading, one might rise and see for oneself, the house all empty, the doors standing open, only the wood pigeons bubbling with content and the hum of the threshing machine sounding from the farm.

“What did I come in here for? What did I want to find?” My hands were empty. “Perhaps it’s upstairs then?” The apples were in the loft. And so down again, the garden still as ever, only the book had slipped into the grass.

But they had found it in the drawing room. Not that one could ever see them. The window panes reflected apples, reflected roses; all the leaves were green in the glass. If they moved in the drawing room, the apple only turned its yellow side.

Yet, the moment after, if the door was opened, spread about the floor, hung upon the walls, pendant from the ceiling—what? My hands were empty. The shadow of a thrush crossed the carpet; from the deepest wells of silence the wood pigeon drew its bubble of sound.

“Safe, safe, safe,” the pulse of the house beat softly. “The treasure buried; the room…” the pulse stopped short. Oh, was that the buried treasure?

A moment later the light had faded. Out in the garden then? But the trees spun darkness for a wandering beam of sun. So fine, so rare, coolly sunk beneath the surface the beam I sought always burnt behind the glass.

Death was the glass; death was between us; coming to the woman first, hundreds of years ago, leaving the house, sealing all the windows; the rooms were darkened. He left it, left her, went North, went East, saw the stars turned in the Southern sky; sought the house, found it dropped beneath the Downs. “Safe, safe, safe,” the pulse of the house beat gladly. “The Treasure yours.”

The wind roars up the avenue. Trees stoop and bend this way and that. Moonbeams splash and spill wildly in the rain. But the beam of the lamp falls straight from the window.

The candle burns stiff and still. Wandering through the house, opening the windows, whispering not to wake us, the ghostly couple seek their joy.

“Here we slept,” she says. And he adds, “Kisses without number.” “Waking in the morning—” “Silver between the trees —” “Upstairs—” “In the garden—” “When summer came—” “In winter snowtime—” The doors go shutting far in the distance, gently knocking like the pulse of a heart.

Nearer they come; cease at the doorway. The wind falls, the rain slides silver down the glass. Our eyes darken; we hear no steps beside us; we see no lady spread her ghostly cloak. His hands shield the lantern. “Look,” he breathes. “Sound asleep. Love upon their lips.”

Stooping, holding their silver lamp above us, long they look and deeply. Long they pause. The wind drives straightly; the flame stoops slightly. Wild beams of moonlight cross both floor and wall, and, meeting, stain the faces bent; the faces pondering; the faces that search the sleepers and seek their hidden joy.

“Safe, safe, safe,” the heart of the house beats proudly. “Long years—” he sighs. “Again you found me.” “Here,” she murmurs, “sleeping; in the garden reading; laughing, rolling apples in the loft. Here we left our treasure—”

Stooping, their light lifts the lids upon my eyes. “Safe! safe! safe!” the pulse of the house beats wildly. Waking, I cry “Oh, is this your buried treasure? The light in the heart.”

. . . . . . . . .

A Haunted House and Other Short Stories by Virginia Woolf on Amazon*

. . . . . . . . . . 

More about Monday or Tuesday by Virginia Woolf

Listen online at Librivox
Monday or Tuesday at the British Library
Read the entire collection of Monday or Tuesday on Project Gutenberg

. . . . . . . . .

*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 “A Haunted House” by Virginia Woolf (full text) appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.

“Kew Gardens” — a short story by Virginia Woolf

“Kew Gardens” is one of Virginia Woolf’s earliest short stories, written around 1917 and published in her first collection of stories, Monday or Tuesday (1921). It later appeared in another collection of the authors stories, A Haunted House and Other Short Stories (1944), after Woolf’s death.

“Kew Gardens” is titled after the famous gardens of London and takes place on a July day. It’s considered modernist, as it favors the capture of moments rather than revolving around a tight plot. Though it’s one of Woolf’s best known stories, and one of the most anthologized, it’s also one of her most elusive.

Here are a couple of excellent analyses of the story:

Sitting Bee: “In Kew Gardens by Virginia Woolf we have the theme of passion, desire, love, regret, paralysis, letting go, uncertainty, connection and humanity … there are sections that have the feel of stream of consciousness and after reading the story the reader realizes just how important the setting of the story is. The story is set in its entirety in the Royal Botanic Gardens situated in London.” Read more of this summary and analysis.

R.S. Martin: “In what may be the greatest of her short stories, Virginia Woolf creates a structured, encompassing view of existence, one which includes people’s thoughts and emotions, nature and human society, and even the movement of a random snail in a flower bed.” Read more of this summary and analysis.

. . . . . . . .

See also: “Monday or Tuesday” — a 1921 short story

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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.

 

Kew Gardens (a short story by Virginia Woolf)

From the oval-shaped flower-bed there rose perhaps a hundred stalks spreading into heart-shaped or tongue-shaped leaves half way up and unfurling at the tip red or blue or yellow petals marked with spots of colour raised upon the surface; and from the red, blue or yellow gloom of the throat emerged a straight bar, rough with gold dust and slightly clubbed at the end.

The petals were voluminous enough to be stirred by the summer breeze, and when they moved, the red, blue and yellow lights passed one over the other, staining an inch of the brown earth beneath with a spot of the most intricate colour.

The light fell either upon the smooth, grey back of a pebble, or, the shell of a snail with its brown, circular veins, or falling into a raindrop, it expanded with such intensity of red, blue and yellow the thin walls of water that one expected them to burst and disappear.

Instead, the drop was left in a second silver grey once more, and the light now settled upon the flesh of a leaf, revealing the branching thread of fibre beneath the surface, and again it moved on and spread its illumination in the vast green spaces beneath the dome of the heart-shaped and tongue-shaped leaves.

Then the breeze stirred rather more briskly overhead and the colour was flashed into the air above, into the eyes of the men and women who walk in Kew Gardens in July.

The figures of these men and women straggled past the flower-bed with a curiously irregular movement not unlike that of the white and blue butterflies who crossed the turf in zig-zag flights from bed to bed.

The man was about six inches in front of the woman, strolling carelessly, while she bore on with greater purpose, only turning her head now and then to see that the children were not too far behind. The man kept this distance in front of the woman purposely, though perhaps unconsciously, for he wished to go on with his thoughts.

“Fifteen years ago I came here with Lily,” he thought. “We sat somewhere over there by a lake and I begged her to marry me all through the hot afternoon. How the dragonfly kept circling round us: how clearly I see the dragonfly and her shoe with the square silver buckle at the toe. All the time I spoke I saw her shoe and when it moved impatiently I knew without looking up what she was going to say: the whole of her seemed to be in her shoe. And my love, my desire, were in the dragonfly; for some reason I thought that if it settled there, on that leaf, the broad one with the red flower in the middle of it, if the dragonfly settled on the leaf she would say “Yes” at once. But the dragonfly went round and round: it never settled anywhere—of course not, happily not, or I shouldn’t be walking here with Eleanor and the children—Tell me, Eleanor. D’you ever think of the past?”

“Why do you ask, Simon?”

“Because I’ve been thinking of the past. I’ve been thinking of Lily, the woman I might have married…Well, why are you silent? Do you mind my thinking of the past?”

“Why should I mind, Simon? Doesn’t one always think of the past, in a garden with men and women lying under the trees? Aren’t they one’s past, all that remains of it, those men and women, those ghosts lying under the trees…one’s happiness, one’s reality?”

“For me, a square silver shoe buckle and a dragonfly—”

“For me, a kiss. Imagine six little girls sitting before their easels twenty years ago, down by the side of a lake, painting the water-lilies, the first red water-lilies I’d ever seen. And suddenly a kiss, there on the back of my neck. And my hand shook all the afternoon so that I couldn’t paint. I took out my watch and marked the hour when I would allow myself to think of the kiss for five minutes only—it was so precious—the kiss of an old grey-haired woman with a wart on her nose, the mother of all my kisses all my life. Come, Caroline, come, Hubert.”

They walked on the past the flower-bed, now walking four abreast, and soon diminished in size among the trees and looked half transparent as the sunlight and shade swam over their backs in large trembling irregular patches.

In the oval flower bed the snail, whose shelled had been stained red, blue, and yellow for the space of two minutes or so, now appeared to be moving very slightly in its shell, and next began to labour over the crumbs of loose earth which broke away and rolled down as it passed over them.

It appeared to have a definite goal in front of it, differing in this respect from the singular high stepping angular green insect who attempted to cross in front of it, and waited for a second with its antenna trembling as if in deliberation, and then stepped off as rapidly and strangely in the opposite direction.

Brown cliffs with deep green lakes in the hollows, flat, blade-like trees that waved from root to tip, round boulders of grey stone, vast crumpled surfaces of a thin crackling texture—all these objects lay across the snail’s progress between one stalk and another to his goal.

Before he had decided whether to circumvent the arched tent of a dead leaf or to breast it there came past the bed the feet of other human beings.

This time they were both men. The younger of the two wore an expression of perhaps unnatural calm; he raised his eyes and fixed them very steadily in front of him while his companion spoke, and directly his companion had done speaking he looked on the ground again and sometimes opened his lips only after a long pause and sometimes did not open them at all.

The elder man had a curiously uneven and shaky method of walking, jerking his hand forward and throwing up his head abruptly, rather in the manner of an impatient carriage horse tired of waiting outside a house; but in the man these gestures were irresolute and pointless.

He talked almost incessantly; he smiled to himself and again began to talk, as if the smile had been an answer. He was talking about spirits—the spirits of the dead, who, according to him, were even now telling him all sorts of odd things about their experiences in Heaven.

“Heaven was known to the ancients as Thessaly, William, and now, with this war, the spirit matter is rolling between the hills like thunder.” He paused, seemed to listen, smiled, jerked his head and continued:——

“You have a small electric battery and a piece of rubber to insulate the wire—isolate?—insulate?—well, we’ll skip the details, no good going into details that wouldn’t be understood—and in short the little machine stands in any convenient position by the head of the bed, we will say, on a neat mahogany stand. All arrangements being properly fixed by workmen under my direction, the widow applies her ear and summons the spirit by sign as agreed. Women! Widows! Women in black——”

Here he seemed to have caught sight of a woman’s dress in the distance, which in the shade looked a purple black. He took off his hat, placed his hand upon his heart, and hurried towards her muttering and gesticulating feverishly.

But William caught him by the sleeve and touched a flower with the tip of his walking-stick in order to divert the old man’s attention. After looking at it for a moment in some confusion the old man bent his ear to it and seemed to answer a voice speaking from it, for he began talking about the forests of Uruguay which he had visited hundreds of years ago in company with the most beautiful young woman in Europe.

He could be heard murmuring about forests of Uruguay blanketed with the wax petals of tropical roses, nightingales, sea beaches, mermaids, and women drowned at sea, as he suffered himself to be moved on by William, upon whose face the look of stoical patience grew slowly deeper and deeper.

Following his steps so closely as to be slightly puzzled by his gestures came two elderly women of the lower middle class, one stout and ponderous, the other rosy cheeked and nimble.

Like most people of their station they were frankly fascinated by any signs of eccentricity betokening a disordered brain, especially in the well-to-do; but they were too far off to be certain whether the gestures were merely eccentric or genuinely mad.

After they had scrutinised the old man’s back in silence for a moment and given each other a queer, sly look, they went on energetically piecing together their very complicated dialogue:

“Nell, Bert, Lot, Cess, Phil, Pa, he says, I says, she says, I says, I says, I says——”

“My Bert, Sis, Bill, Grandad, the old man, sugar, Sugar, flour, kippers, greens, Sugar, sugar, sugar.”

The ponderous woman looked through the pattern of falling words at the flowers standing cool, firm, and upright in the earth, with a curious expression.

She saw them as a sleeper waking from a heavy sleep sees a brass candlestick reflecting the light in an unfamiliar way, and closes his eyes and opens them, and seeing the brass candlestick again, finally starts broad awake and stares at the candlestick with all his powers. So the heavy woman came to a standstill opposite the oval-shaped flower bed, and ceased even to pretend to listen to what the other woman was saying.

She stood there letting the words fall over her, swaying the top part of her body slowly backwards and forwards, looking at the flowers. Then she suggested that they should find a seat and have their tea.

The snail had now considered every possible method of reaching his goal without going round the dead leaf or climbing over it. Let alone the effort needed for climbing a leaf, he was doubtful whether the thin texture which vibrated with such an alarming crackle when touched even by the tip of his horns would bear his weight; and this determined him finally to creep beneath it, for there was a point where the leaf curved high enough from the ground to admit him.

He had just inserted his head in the opening and was taking stock of the high brown roof and was getting used to the cool brown light when two other people came past outside on the turf. This time they were both young, a young man and a young woman.

They were both in the prime of youth, or even in that season which precedes the prime of youth, the season before the smooth pink folds of the flower have burst their gummy case, when the wings of the butterfly, though fully grown, are motionless in the sun.

“Lucky it isn’t Friday,” he observed.

“Why? D’you believe in luck?”

“They make you pay sixpence on Friday.”

“What’s sixpence anyway? Isn’t it worth sixpence?”

“What’s ‘it’—what do you mean by ‘it’?”

“O, anything—I mean—you know what I mean.”

Long pauses came between each of these remarks; they were uttered in toneless and monotonous voices. The couple stood still on the edge of the flower bed, and together pressed the end of her parasol deep down into the soft earth.

The action and the fact that his hand rested on the top of hers expressed their feelings in a strange way, as these short insignificant words also expressed something, words with short wings for their heavy body of meaning, inadequate to carry them far and thus alighting awkwardly upon the very common objects that surrounded them, and were to their inexperienced touch so massive; but who knows (so they thought as they pressed the parasol into the earth) what precipices aren’t concealed in them, or what slopes of ice don’t shine in the sun on the other side?

Who knows? Who has ever seen this before? Even when she wondered what sort of tea they gave you at Kew, he felt that something loomed up behind her words, and stood vast and solid behind them; and the mist very slowly rose and uncovered—O, Heavens, what were those shapes?—little white tables, and waitresses who looked first at her and then at him; and there was a bill that he would pay with a real two shilling piece, and it was real, all real, he assured himself, fingering the coin in his pocket, real to everyone except to him and to her; even to him it began to seem real; and then—but it was too exciting to stand and think any longer, and he pulled the parasol out of the earth with a jerk and was impatient to find the place where one had tea with other people, like other people.

“Come along, Trissie; it’s time we had our tea.”

“Wherever does one have one’s tea?” she asked with the oddest thrill of excitement in her voice, looking vaguely round and letting herself be drawn on down the grass path, trailing her parasol, turning her head this way and that way, forgetting her tea, wishing to go down there and then down there, remembering orchids and cranes among wild flowers, a Chinese pagoda and a crimson crested bird; but he bore her on.

Thus one couple after another with much the same irregular and aimless movement passed the flower-bed and were enveloped in layer after layer of green blue vapour, in which at first their bodies had substance and a dash of colour, but later both substance and colour dissolved in the green-blue atmosphere.

How hot it was! So hot that even the thrush chose to hop, like a mechanical bird, in the shadow of the flowers, with long pauses between one movement and the next; instead of rambling vaguely the white butterflies danced one above another, making with their white shifting flakes the outline of a shattered marble column above the tallest flowers the glass roofs of the palm house shone as if a whole market full of shiny green umbrellas had opened in the sun; and in the drone of the aeroplane the voice of the summer sky murmured its fierce soul.

Yellow and black, pink and snow white, shapes of all these colours, men, women, and children were spotted for a second upon the horizon, and then, seeing the breadth of yellow that lay upon the grass, they wavered and sought shade beneath the trees, dissolving like drops of water in the yellow and green atmosphere, staining it faintly with red and blue.

It seemed as if all gross and heavy bodies had sunk down in the heat motionless and lay huddled upon the ground, but their voices went wavering from them as if they were flames lolling from the thick waxen bodies of candles.

Voices. Yes, voices. Wordless voices, breaking the silence suddenly with such depth of contentment, such passion of desire, or, in the voices of children, such freshness of surprise; breaking the silence?

But there was no silence; all the time the motor omnibuses were turning their wheels and changing their gear; like a vast nest of Chinese boxes all of wrought steel turning ceaselessly one within another the city murmured; on the top of which the voices cried aloud and the petals of myriads of flowers flashed their colours into the air.

 

More about Monday or Tuesday by Virginia Woolf

Listen online at Librivox
Monday or Tuesday at the British Library
Read the entire collection of Monday or Tuesday on Project Gutenberg

The post “Kew Gardens” — a short story by Virginia Woolf appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes by Anita Loos (1925) — A Jazz Age Classic

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes by Anita Loos, subtitled The Intimate Diary or a Professional Lady, published in 1925, popularized the unfortunate tropes of “dumb blonde” and ruthless gold-digger in the character of Lorelei Lee.

We accompany the unflappable flapper around New York and Europe, where she dallies with the affections of hapless men. Maybe she’s not so dumb after all.

Anita Loos (1889 – 1991, who was by the time of the book’s publication already a successful screenwriter, claimed that the book’s inspiration came from a real-life incident.

On a train, her efforts to haul around her large luggage were ignored by her male fellow passengers (Loos was a tiny brunette). Yet when a blonde dropped her book, the men around her fell all over themselves in a competition to retrieve it for her.

She used the incident as the jumping-off point for a series of sketches about a gold-digging blonde flapper from Little Rock who came to be called Lorelei Lee. These were published in Harper’s Bazaar magazine as “The Lorelei stories.”

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More about Anita Loos

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The satiric stories that subtly skewered sex tropes were such a hit that the magazine’s circulation quadrupled within a short time. The stories were soon collected into the novel Gentleman Prefer Blondes, published in 1925, and which is arguably the most enduring work by Anita Loos. It was the second bestselling novel of 1926, having captured the carefree spirit of the Jazz Age.

Was Lorelei Lee a feel-good flapper exemplifying the roaring twenties, or a scheming “professional lady,” as the subtitle implies? Likely, a bit of both. The rank of “professional” refers to the gold-digging, and not, as the term has often been used, to refer to prostitution per se.

Despite the light tone of the book, it was well-received by critics and devoured by the public. Edith Wharton deemed it “The Great American Novel,” though that distinction hasn’t endured. While Gentlemen Prefer Blondes can be deemed a classic, its stature as a great work of literature would be questioned today.

In 1927, hot on the heels of the book’s success, a sequel was published, titled But Gentlemen Marry Brunettes. Take that, Blondes!

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Gentlemen Prefer Blondes was first made into a 1928 silent film, for which Loos co-wrote the screenplay. However, there are no copies in existence, and it is considered a lost film. The 1949 Broadway adaptation of the novel became a musical starring Carol Channing. The story has continued to return to the stage in several renamed versions for decades to come.

The best-known adaptation of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes is the 1953 film starring Jane Russell and Marilyn Monroe as two best friends who work as American showgirls. Based on the 1949 stage play, Monroe, as Lorelei Lee, made the song “Diamonds are a Girl’s Best Friend” an iconic standard. The story and premise depart fairly substantially from the original 1925 novel, but this film is considered a movie musical classic.

 

A contemporary edition

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes continues to stay in print. From the 2014 Liveright edition:

“This delirious 1925 Jazz Age classic introduced readers to Lorelei Lee, the small-town girl from Little Rock, who has become one of the most timeless characters in American fiction. Outrageous and charming, this not-so-dumb blonde has been portrayed on stage and screen by Carol Channing and Marilyn Monroe and has become the archetype of the footloose, good-hearted gold digger (not that she sees herself that way).

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes follows Lorelei as she entertains suitors across Europe before returning home to marry a millionaire. In this delightfully droll and witty book, Lorelei’s glamorous pragmatism shines, as does Anita Loos’s mastery of irony and dialect. A craze in its day and with ageless appeal, this new Liveright edition puts Lorelei back where she belongs: front and center.”

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Gentlemen Prefer Blondes by Anita Loos on Amazon*

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A 1925 review: Introducing the professional gold digger

From The Davenport Daily Times, December 1925: The beautiful and successful gold digger is not a new type in fiction but Anita Loos is the first one to our knowledge to write the diary of a professional lady of this sort.

Her heroine may never have heard of Plato or middle distance or Chopin or the Nobel awards or the Locarno treaty, but she knew her oil, as the slang phrase has it, when it came to the pleasant art of extorting gifts of jewelry or money from wealthy men.

In one chapter she gets herself engaged with the mental reservation that if she can’t really stick it out, she will go on such an orgy of extravagance fit her fiancé’s expense that the only decent thing for him to do will be to break the match. Then her way will be clear to a profitable breach of promise suit.

But a gentleman gold digger of whom she is enamored persuades her to go through with the marriage so that friend husband will finance the production of some scenario he has written, and our little heroine serenely closes her diary with the reflection that everything is as right as can be in the rightest of possible worlds.

She has a convenient husband who is hardly astute enough to be suspicious, she has ample money to buy all the jewelry she wants, and she has in the gentleman gold digger a friend who can satisfy her craving for mental stimulation.

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The original cover of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes

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Another 1925 review: “A Topsy of literature”

From the Salt Lake Telegram, November 15, 1925:  Anita Loos already famous in her way. but even so, we hardly expected a book of subtle humor from her pen such as is found in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.

Characterized as The Intimate Diary of a Professional Lady, it resolves itself into a book that is crammed full of chuckles. You may object to the methods of a charming gold-digger, or you may marvel at the void of the dumbbell. And you may object to some scattered risqué remarks.

But in spite of it all, you’re bound to be amused, for her leading character the author has created an intriguing gold digger, dumb and beautiful. What a smooth worker she is. Here we have her in all her glory, in a sidesplitting, astonishingly frank diary that takes her from New York to London, Paris, Vienna, and Munich in quest of art education In the foreign colleges known as the Ritz hotels.

Diplomats, princes, society, big business, and men—sho plays them all, especially men, men, men. Tiaras. state secrets, titles, and Poirlett models all fall into her pretty little net.

With the intimate drawings by Ralph Barton, this book, its characters, and its sardonic insight will become part of our tradition of humor alongside the Benchleys. Stewarts and Lardners of our period.

A precocious pen

Perhaps it’s heredity. Anita Loos’s father was humorist—and a theatrical producer. At age five she was on the stage. At thirteen she was an authoress. and at the same time was writing scenarios for David Griffith.

When Griffith, two years later, saw the child in pigtails and sailor suit who was writing his roughest comedies for him, he nearly collapsed. Since then she has outlined the moods and motions for many an eminent screen star; and she has come to know far more about “professionals” than it is wise perhaps for anyone to know.

On her last trip to California, to while away the dull passages of a four-day train journey she wrote the first chapter of this book. Harper’s Bazaar, which took the first, called for more.

And so the book “growed up,” a Topsy of literature which is certain to make a definite mark in American Literature.

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The Land of Little Rain by Mary Hunter Austin (1903)

Mary Hunter Austin (1868 – 1934) is no longer widely read, but during her lifetime, she traveled in vaunted literary circles. The Land of Little Rain (1903), a nonfiction compilation of connected essays, is her best-remembered work. From the publisher:

“The enduring appeal of the desert is strikingly portrayed in this poetic study, which has become a classic of the American Southwest. First published in 1903, it is the work of Mary Austin, a prolific novelist, poet, critic, and playwright, who was also an ardent early feminist and champion of Indians and Spanish-Americans.

She is best known today for this enchanting paean to the vast, arid, yet remarkably beautiful lands that lie east of the Sierra Nevadas, stretching south from Yosemite through Death Valley to the Mojave Desert.

Comprising fourteen sketches, the book describes plants, animals, mountains, birds, skies, Indians, prospectors, towns, and other aspects of the desert in serene, beautifully modulated prose that conveys the timeless cycles of life and death in a harsh land.

Readers will never again think of the desert as a lifeless, barren environment but rather as a place of rare, austere beauty, rich in plant and animal life, weaving a lasting spell over its human inhabitants.”

As a novelist and essayist, Austin focused her writing on cultural and social problems within the Native American community. In addition to spending seventeen years making a special study of Indian life in the Mojave Desert, Austin was defended the rights of Native Americans and Spanish Americans. 

For many years, she and her husband lived in various towns in California’s Owens Valley, where Austin’s love for the desert and the Native Americans who lived there began to grow. This led to the creation of her first published book, The Land of Little Rain (1903), a tribute to California’s deserts. 

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More about Mary Hunter Austin

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It’s always fascinating to discover original reviews of somewhat forgotten books, and it appears that The Land of Little Rain received its share of praise when first published. Here is one such review from 1903:

 

A 1903 review of Land of Little Rain

From the original review in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle,  November 7, 1903: On the eastern side of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, where the slopes drop steeply to the desert stretches, beyond independence, and reaching eastward and southward, ever the eastern borders of that portion of California, is the country which Mary Hunter Austin describes so graphically in her book, The Land of Little Rain.

Wonderfully appropriate to the country is that name. Indeed, it is a land of “little rain.” Desert is the name which the tourist, accustomed to moister areas, gives to it, and when it’s remembered that the stark Death Valley, with its wastes of sand and alkali lies within its borders, its seems well named.

A vivid descriptions of “the country of three seasons”

“Desert is the name it wears upon the maps,” says Austin, “but the Indian’s is the better name.” Another term is the “Country of Lost Borders,” for the land and not the law sets its limits.  Note Austin’s description:

“This is the nature of that country. There are hills, rounded, blunt, burned, squeezed up out of chaos, chrome, and vermillion painted, aspiring to the snow line. Between the hills lie high, level-looking plains full of intolerable sun glare, or narrow valleys drowned in a blue haze. The hill surface is streaked with ash drift and the black, unweathered lava flows.

After rains, water accumulates in the hollows of the closed valleys, and, evaporating, leaves hard, dry levels of pure desertness that get the local name of dry lakes. Where the mountains are steep and the rains heavy the pool is never quite dry, but dark and bitter, rimmed about with the efflorescence of alkaline deposits.

A thin crust of it lies along the marsh over the vegetating area, which has neither beauty nor freshness. In the broad wastes, open to the wind, the sand drifts its hummocks about he stubby shrubs and between them the soil shows saline traces. The sculpture of the hills here is more wind than water work, though the quick storms do sometimes scar them past many a year’s redeeming.

Since this is a hill country, one expects to find springs, but not to depend on them, for when found they are often brackish and unwholesome, or maddening slow dribbles in a thirsty soil. Here you find the hot sink of the Death Valley, or high rolling districts were the air has always a tang of frost.

Here are the long, heavy winds and breathless calms on the tilted mesas where the dust devils dance, whirling up into a wide, pale sky. Here you have no rain when all the earth cried for it, or quick downpours, called cloudbursts for violence. A land of local rivers, with little in it to love; yet a land that, once visited, must be come back to inevitably. If it were not so there would be little told of it.

This is the country of three seasons. From June on to November it lies hot, still and unbearable, sick with violent unbelieving storms, then on until April — chill, quiescent, drinking its scant rain and scantier snows; from April to the hot season again, blossoming, radiant, and seductive. These months are only approximate: later of earlier the rain-laden wind may drift up the water gate of the Colorado from the Gulf, and the land sets its seasons by the rain.”

Mary Hunter Austin has lived in this country for some years, her home being in Independence, on the railway, which penetrates the eastern sides of the Sierras, southward from Reno and Carson city, through the valley lying between the main ridges of the Sierras on the west, and the White and Inyo ranges on the east.

The road runs south to Owen’s Lake, where the valley opens out into the broad desert-like stretches outward and southward. Ill health sent Austin into this country when she was a young woman and now her home is on the desert edges. She has poked and pried along its plain and canyons, up the mountains and out over the rolling deserts, until she knows it from one end to the other and her soul has become filled with its fascination and charm.

The author’s love of the land and its people

She began writing for the Atlantic and other leading magazines some years ago, and her work was quick to attract attention. She writes of this “Land of Little Rain” from he viewpoint of the artist who has felt its inspiration, and as one who loves it.

All of her writings deal with outdoor places and folk — for this is a land where one can live outdoors if so minded, pretty much the whole year round. She knows the denizens of the hills and mountain valleys; she is accustomed to nights under the pines, and long hours of watching by the water-holes “to see the wild things drink.”

She has broken mountain trails up new slopes and has penetrated into mountain canyons. She knows the Indians, Shoshones and Paintes — as she spells the name — and one of the effective chapters in the book is about an old Indian woman, her basket-making and her outlook upon life.

The Land of Little Rain is made up of a series of sketches and pen pictures, taking its title from the opening chapter, wherein the land is portrayed. the desert Indians she finds as interesting folk and it is evident that she has studied them closely.

Canyons: “The Streets of the Mountains”

It is when Austin gets into “The Streets of the Mountains,” as she terms the canyons, that she is especially charming. “All the streets of the mountains lead to the citadel,” she says: “steep or slow, they go up to the core of the hills.”

“All the mountain streets have streams to thread them, or deep grooves where a stream might run. You would do well to avoid that range, uncomforted by floods. You will find it forsaken of most things but beauty and madness and death and God. Many such lie east and north away from the mid-Sierras, and quicken the imagination with the sends of purpose not revealed, but the ordinary traveler brings nothing away from them but an intolerable beauty.”

She describes vividly the beauty of the mountain parks, the little peak-enclosed valleys, with pines climbing about the edges, the floor lush with grasses and mountain flora, and the pools of the stream alive with trout.

An original writer describes the mysteries of nature

Austin has a crisp, rather original style, expressing her meaning clearly and with an unusual verbal felicity. One feels that she is in thorough sympathy with the world she describes. What John Muir has done for the western slopes of the Sierras, with their solemn forests and their mysterious silences, Austin does in a more tender and intimate fashion for the eastern slopes.

To the lover of nature her book is simply fascinating from cover to cover. The illustrations for the most part are pencil sketches which ramble over the broad margins of the pages, suggetive, always and apparently caught from life.

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The Land of Little Rain on Amazon*

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More about The Land of Little Rain

Read the full text on Project Gutenberg
Reader discussion on Goodreads

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The Complete Poems of Marianne Moore (1967 edition)

In 1967, The Complete Poems of Marianne Moore was published to great acclaim, being the most thorough collection of this distinguished American poet up to that time.

For Marianne Moore, heartfelt and precise expression was the most important aspect of the written word. Most of her poems were written in syllabic verse.

About her own work, she commented “I tend to write in a patterned arrangement, with rhymes … to secure an effect of flowing continuity … there is a great amount of poetry in unconscious/fastidiousness.”

Moore’s note on the texts of The Complete Poems  is nearly as inscrutable as some of her poetry. She wrote in a brief introduction preceding the section of the book that offers some explanations of the poems and/or the language and allusions contained in them:

“A willingness to satisfy contradictory objections to one’s manner of writing might turn one’s work into the donkey that finally found itself being carried by its masters, since some readers suggest that quotation marks of pleasant progress; others, that notes to what should be complete are a pedantry or evidence of an insufficiently realized task. 

But since in anything I have written, there have been lines in which the chief interest is borrowed, and I have not yet been able to outgrow this hybrid method of composition, acknowledgements seem only honest. 

Perhaps those annoyed by my provisos, detainments, and postscripts could be persuaded to take probity on faith and disregard the notes.”

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Learn more about Marianne Moore

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Bear in mind that when this volume came out in 1967, Moore was still alive, and in the year of her eightieth birthday. The following text is from the edition published by The MacMillan company/Viking Press:

 

America’s favorite and foremost poet

America’s favorite and foremost living poet celebrates her eightieth birthday on November 15, 1967. Marianne Moore — St. Louis-born, long a resident of Brooklyn, and now Manhattan’s beloved laureate has a range of interests as modern and American as instant apple pie, but the poetry she creates is timeless and universal.

She has been writing it for sixty of her years, and is still observing people, animals, flowers, music, objets d’art, and sports pages with undiminished gusto: her collection Tell Me, Tell Me in 1966 displayed the same excellence and verve that marked her work from the start.

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12 Poems by Marianne Moore

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All the poems she wishes to preserve

All the poems she is willing to preserve — 120 of them—are assembled in this book: it includes the 1951 Collected Poems (which gathered together Selected Poems, 1955; What Are Years, 1941; Nevertheless, 1944; and newer poetry) as well as Like a Bulwark, 1956; O to Be a Dragon, 1959; Tell Me, Tell Me, 1966; and four poems hitherto uncollected, along with her delightful notes.

For this volume Miss Moore has made several changes, omitting only one poem and restoring one that was not in Collected Poems. The saints and baseball players are here, the buffaloes and basilisks, moral triumphs and mechanical marvels charmed into art by Miss Moore’s sagacity, wit, and affection.

Along with her translation of The Fables of La Fontaine (of which a few are included here as samples), Complete Poems represents the achievement of a unique figure in American letters.

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“Marriage” — a Modernist Poem by Marianne Moore (1923)

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A summation of Marianne Moore’s accomplishments

Marianne Moore, born in St. Louis in 1887, graduated from Bryn Mawr in 1909. Her first American publication of verse was in the May 1915 issue of Poetry magazine.

In 1921, H. D. and the novelist Bryher brought out, without Miss Moore’s knowledge, a small collection of her verse, Poems, and three years later Observations appeared, for which she was given the Dial Award. Collected Poems, published in 1951, won the year’s most esteemed poetry honors: the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the Bollingen Prize.

Then came Miss Moore’s translation of The Fables of La Fontaine; Predilections, a collection of essays; and three more volumes of poetry—Like a Bulwark, O to Be a Dragon, and Tell Me, Tell Me.

Miss Moore’s other awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, the National Institute of Arts and Letters Gold Medal, and the Poetry Society of America’s Gold Medal for Distinguished Achievement.

A member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Miss Moore was Poet of Honor in 1061 at the Poetry Day Celebration of Poetry magazine and in the summer of 1967 was awarded the MacDowell Medal presented by the MacDowell Colony for Creative Artists in a ceremony marking its diamond jubilee. She holds honorary degrees from many colleges including Mount Holyoke. Smith, and Washington University.

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A 1994 updated edition of this collection was published by Penguin Books as Marianne Moore: Complete Poems  (available on Amazon*).

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Monday or Tuesday by Virginia Woolf — a 1921 short story (full text)

“Monday or Tuesday,” a 1921 short story by Virginia Woolf, appeared in the only collection of stories she published during her lifetime. The title of the collection was also Monday or Tuesday. It  was later anthologized in A Haunted House and Other Short Stories (1944), which contained six of the eight original stories. 

First published by Hogarth Press, the small publishing company run by Virginia and Leonard Woolf, Mr. Woolf deemed it the worst book ever printed due to a plethora of typographical errors. They were corrected in later editions.

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Learn more about Virginia Woolf

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Here are a duo of excellent analyses of this very short, very perplexing story:

 A Short Analysis of Virginia Woolf’s Monday or Tuesday begins helpfully: If you found reading ‘Monday or Tuesday’ a disorienting experience, don’t worry: you’re meant to. One of the things Woolf is exploring through this short story is disorientation, distraction, the difficult and perhaps foolish quest for truthful and honest representation of the world through one’s writing. Even the title hints at this confusion and uncertainty: to the narrator, and perhaps to Woolf herself, today could be either Monday or Tuesday.

ENotes has a helpful critical analysis as well: In “Monday or Tuesday,” a series of contrasts between up and down, spatially free timelessness (a lazily flying heron) and restrictive timeliness (a clock striking), day and night, inside and outside, present experience and later recollection of it conveys the ordinary cycle of life suggested by the title and helps capture its experiential reality, the concern expressed by the refrain question that closes the second, fourth, and fifth paragraphs: “and truth?”

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A Haunted House and Other Short Stories by Virginia Woolf on Amazon

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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.

 

Monday or Tuesday by Virginia Woolf

Lazy and indifferent, shaking space easily from his wings, knowing his way, the heron passes over the church beneath the sky. White and distant, absorbed in itself, endlessly the sky covers and uncovers, moves and remains. A lake? Blot the shores of it out! A mountain? Oh, perfect—the sun gold on its slopes. Down that falls. Ferns then, or white feathers, for ever and ever——

Desiring truth, awaiting it, laboriously distilling a few words, for ever desiring—(a cry starts to the left, another to the right. Wheels strike divergently.

Omnibuses conglomerate in conflict)—for ever desiring—(the clock asseverates with twelve distinct strokes that it is midday; light sheds gold scales; children swarm)—for ever desiring truth. Red is the dome; coins hang on the trees; smoke trails from the chimneys; bark, shout, cry “Iron for sale”—and truth?

Radiating to a point men’s feet and women’s feet, black or gold-encrusted—(This foggy weather—Sugar? No, thank you—The commonwealth of the future)—the firelight darting and making the room red, save for the black figures and their bright eyes, while outside a van discharges, Miss Thingummy drinks tea at her desk, and plate-glass preserves fur coats——

Flaunted, leaf—light, drifting at corners, blown across the wheels, silver-splashed, home or not home, gathered, scattered, squandered in separate scales, swept up, down, torn, sunk, assembled—and truth?

Now to recollect by the fireside on the white square of marble. From ivory depths words rising shed their blackness, blossom and penetrate. Fallen the book; in the flame, in the smoke, in the momentary sparks—or now voyaging, the marble square pendant, minarets beneath and the Indian seas, while space rushes blue and stars glint—truth? content with closeness? Lazy and indifferent the heron returns; the sky veils her stars; then bares them.

More about Monday or Tuesday by Virginia Woolf

Listen online at Librivox
Monday or Tuesday at the British Library
Read the entire collection of Monday or Tuesday on Project Gutenberg

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Elizabeth Taylor’s Novels: Where to Begin, Which to Reread?

English author (not the actress) Elizabeth Taylor (1912 – 1975) published seventeen books: four collections of stories, one children’s book, and twelve novels. If you’re just discovering this under-appreciated author and wondering where to begin or considering a reread, here is a glimpse of Elizabeth Taylor’s novels.

She’s “not like most novelists,” Elizabeth Jane Howard observes; she’s “one in a thousand: how deeply I envy any reader coming to her for the first time.”

In Contemporary Novelists, Elizabeth explained her process: “I write in scenes, rather than in narrative, which I find boring. I am pleased if the look of a page is interesting, broken by paragraphs or dialogue, not just one dense slab of print.”

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Learn more about Elizabeth Taylor

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At Mrs Lippincote’s (1945)

It was Mr Lippincote’s house too, but Elizabeth Taylor is keenly interested in women’s lives. Here we have the Davenant family—Roddy and Julia, with their son, Oliver—moving into this house with “every comfort,” near the RAF base where Roddy works.

With them is Eleanor, Roddy’s cousin and an unmarried school-teacher, who tries “not to behave like a spinster in a book.” Julia, unsatisfied with married life and with conversations “about butchers and laundries” with other wives, prefers to discuss the Brontës with the Wing Commander.

Paragraphs of dialogue outnumber expository passages, and the novel is a pleasure to read but poses a bolder question: what can this intelligent and ambitious woman expect from this world, beyond a Mrs Davenant’s house?

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Palladian (1946)

Cassandra arrives at Cropthorne Manor to be a governess, but she has “nothing to recommend her to such a profession,” beyond a “proper willingness to fall in love, the more despairingly the better with her employer.”

Bookish readers will relate to Cassandra’s struggle to reconcile her bookish expectations with her reality. Taylor’s Palladian, compared to her body of work, is like Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey to Austen’s better-known novels, all-of-a-piece but with a sharpness and witty, peculiar darkness.

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A View of the Harbour (1947)

Just as artwork plays a key role in Palladian, the central character in Taylor’s third novel is a painter. Bertram Hemingway is a retired naval officer, who anticipates hours spent painting the Newby harbor. It should make a “fine picture,” and indeed, Bertram’s narrative showcases the author’s appreciation of light and color.

But even more absorbing are the layers of relationships in this fishing community, where “everyone looks out for—and in on—each other.”

Her longest work yet, The View of the Harbour shifts perspectives between residents. Each character is developed meticulously and engagingly (though they’re not always likeable) and readers feel both intimately involved and isolated, as do many villagers.

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A Wreath of Roses (1949)

This could have been an idyllic novel about three women vacationing in summer, but something happens when Camilla is traveling to meet her friend Liz (at Frances’ house, Frances having been Liz’s governess).

A tragedy at the railway station situates Camilla’s holiday in an unsettled state, but Taylor’s humor soothes the sinister elements.

One might say that the book is about the little things, like a hot summer in an English town, the elements of everyday that inspire Frances’ paintings: “But not little. That is life. Its loving kindness and simplicity, and it lay there all the time in [her] pictures, implicit in every petal and every jug [she] ever painted.”

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A Game of Hide and Seek (1951)

When they were children, Harriet and Vesey entertained the younger children with hide-and-seek, always hiding together, in the hayloft. To have hidden independently would have seemed a betrayal: they committed to each other in the simplest terms. All of the children in Taylor’s fiction are remarkably credible.

When they are separated while Vesey attends Oxford, Harriet takes a position in a gown shop to distract herself from his absence; perhaps in search of a more permanent distraction, she marries another man.

When Harriet and Vesey reconnect—accidentally and enthusiastically—in middle-age, dynamics shift. This is quintessential Taylor territory: commitment and compromise, disappointment and desire, what we hide and what we seek.

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The Sleeping Beauty (1953)

In her introduction to Virago’s 1983 reprint of Taylor’s sixth novel, Susannah Clapp extolls the author’s “careful and unreverent documentation of middle-class life.”

Taylor, Clapp says, writes about “people who are comfortably off and who feel uncomfortable.” Isabella is the epitome of uncomfortable, when Vinny arrives to comfort her, in the wake of her husband’s death.

When Vinny meets Emily, this new relationship takes precedence: Clapp writes that “he is within a smile of being a cad.” Isabelle occupies her time with Evalie and something-like-normal resumes, so their talk “skimmed along, chocolates were chosen from the box, tea drunk, sherry sipped.”

Grief plays a role, but more important is what Clapp describes as the “daily piling-up of small losses or small lies.”

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Angel (1957)

A particular delight for readers with an interest in writing and publishing, Angelica Deverell is a prolific and successful romance writer. Inspired by two biographies about popular English novelist Marie Corelli (one by Eileen Bigland published in 1953 and the other by Amanda McKittrick Ros published in 1954), Taylor considers the relationship between invention and desperation.

The worlds that Angelica Deverell’s characters inhabit are lush and extravagant; in one way, the world she inhabits as authoress is also like that, but, in another, her world is barren and lonely.

What and how we create, how we retreat into fantasy, the dreams we harbor about romance: Angel could be viewed as a cautionary tale, but Taylor’s characterization of Angelica makes it more complicated than that. Film buffs take note: Angel was filmed in 2007, directed by François Ozon and starring Romola Garai.

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In a Summer Season (1961)

Kate’s second marriage is to a man ten years her junior; also occupying the Herons’ home are the children from her first marriage (her twenty-two-year-old son and sixteen-year-old daughter), an elderly aunt, and a cook.

Relationships revolving around each household member are of interest, but at the core of the novel is the triangle between Kate and Dermot and Charles—an old family friend whose arrival (with his daughter) disrupts the family home.

Taylor’s eye for detail and ear for dialogue make easy reading of dysfunctional family life: “In the summer, white jasmine made the dark flint walls less gloomy.”

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The Soul of Kindness (1964)

In contrast to Angel, Taylor’s ninth novel focuses on several characters once more; in that sense, it’s more like A View of the Harbour, but with fewer shifts. At the core of the story is the Secretan mother-and-daughter pair, and the novel opens with the daughter’s wedding.

Flora and Richard recall other married couples in Taylor’s fiction, including her debut, whose expectations and reality collide also. But here the focus is on how people build and break key relationships, not only marriages.

One member of the cast who stands out is Miss Folley, the housekeeper (who brings to mind Mrs Parsons, Frances’ charlady in A Wreath of Roses, and Mrs Curzon, Harriet’s hired help in A Game of Hide and Seek).

How we maintain our homes, small comforts and small ceremonies: The Soul of Kindness is rich with character and the thematic reverberations reward a close reading.

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The Wedding Group (1968)

The charwoman in this novel is the “only sign of life” in the communal “world of women” that Cressy inhabits. One of the women there tells Cressy that she has “a wicked little head on those young shoulders” and Cressy hears the echo of her mother’s disapproval there too.

When she ultimately leaves the commune and works in an antique shop, Cressy appears to move toward independence. When she meets and marries David, whose relationship with his mother is tedious and demanding, Cressy trades her fledgling independence for another form of dependence.

Fascinating for its portrayal of power and its complex shifts in agency, this is one of Taylor’s most uncomfortable novels. 

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Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont (1971)

A suitable companion for Cressy’s story, with its theme of independence, this novel features Laura Palfrey as she is taking up residence with other elderly women (and a single man) at the Hotel Claremont. In the dining room, the other residents “look as if they had been sitting there for years” as they anticipate their celery soup.

In this scene, Mrs Palfrey appears to fit outwardly. But readers know that she does not, and soon the evidence—in the form of a handsome, young writer named Ludo—is clear to other residents too.

Delicately and deliberately constructed, this portrait of aging is invigorating and deservedly lauded. This novel has also been a BBC Book at Bedtime, and a film, directed by Dan Ireland in 2005—from a screenplay by Ruth Sacks Caplin written for television in the 1970s—and starring Joan Plowright.

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Blaming (1976)

Written and edited after Taylor’s cancer diagnosis and treatment, it’s unsurprising that this slim novel deals with grief. At the forefront, however, is a complicated friendship that erupts and develops after Anne’s husband dies on holiday.

Martha’s assistance is useful in the immediate aftermath, but the women struggle to maintain a connection after Anne returns to England. Questions of responsibility and disassociation, guilt and denial, feature prominently in the novel.

And despite its heavy themes, Taylor’s use of dialogue (particularly with the children) and her astute social observations make this posthumously published novel a rewarding read.

On the back of the 1995 edition of A View of the Harbour, this blurb appears from Anne Tyler: “Jane Austen, Elizabeth Taylor, Barbara Pym, Elizabeth Bowen—soul sisters all.” If you’re looking for a soul sister to add to your bookshelves, look no further.

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Contributed by Marcie McCauley, a graduate of the University of Western Ontario and the Humber College Creative Writing Program. She writes and reads (mostly women writers!) in Toronto, Canada. And she chats about it on Buried In Print and @buriedinprint. 

 
More about Elizabeth Taylor on this site

Quotes by British Novelist Elizabeth Taylor
Quotes from Elizabeth Taylor’s Fiction: Glimpsing the British Novelist’s Gifts

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Elizabeth Taylor page on Amazon*

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Powerful Quotes from Beloved by Toni Morrison (1987)

Toni Morrison (1931 – 2019), the American novelist, editor, essayist, teacher, and professor is remembered for her powerful novels exploring the African-American experience. Following are quotes from Beloved, her Pulitzer Prize-winning 1987 novel.

Morrison based Beloved on a true incident. In 1856, a female escaped slave crossed the Ohio river from Kentucky into Ohio to seek freedom. Instead, she was captured, and killed her child so she wouldn’t have to be returned to slavery. Similarly, Sethe, the protagonist of the novel, kills her baby, who she calls Beloved, and is ever after haunted by her ghost.

Beloved earned Morrison a Pulitzer Prize, and later won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993 to honor her body of published works. These included The Bluest Eye (1970), Sula (1974), Song of Solomon (1977) and Tar Baby (1981). Morrison went on to publish many other works of fiction and nonfiction. From the publisher:

“Sethe was born a slave and escaped to Ohio, but eighteen years later she is still not free. She has too many memories of Sweet Home, the beautiful farm where so many hideous things happened. And Sethe’s new home is haunted by the ghost of her baby, who died nameless and whose tombstone is engraved with a single word: Beloved. Filled with bitter poetry and suspense as taut as a rope, Beloved is a towering achievement.”

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Learn more about Toni Morrison

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“Freeing yourself was one thing, claiming ownership of that freed self was another.”

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“Sweet, crazy conversations full of half sentences, daydreams and misunderstandings more thrilling than understanding could ever be.”

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“Definitions belong to the definers, not the defined.”

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“There is a loneliness that can be rocked. Arms crossed, knees drawn up, holding, holding on, this motion, unlike a ship’s, smooths and contains the rocker. It’s an inside kind–wrapped tight like skin. Then there is the loneliness that roams. No rocking can hold it down. It is alive. On its own. A dry and spreading thing that makes the sound of one’s own feet going seem to come from a far-off place.”

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“Me and you, we got more yesterday than anybody. We need some kind of tomorrow.”

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“Something that is loved is never lost.”

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“Let me tell you something. A man ain’t a goddamn ax. Chopping, hacking, busting every goddamn minute of the day. Things get to him. Things he can’t chop down because they’re inside.”

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“Love is or it ain’t. Thin love ain’t love at all.”

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“No matter what all your teeth and wet fingers anticipated, there was no accounting for the way that simple joy could shake you.”

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“In Ohio seasons are theatrical. Each one enters like a prima donna, convinced its performance is the reason the world has people in it.”

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“I don’t care what she is. Grown don’t mean a thing to a mother. A child is a child. They get bigger, older, but grown? What’s that supposed to mean? In my heart it don’t mean a thing.”

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“Sifting daylight dissolves the memory, turns it into dust motes floating in light.”

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“Lay my head on the railroad line. Train come along; pacify my mind. ”

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“Unless carefree, mother love was a killer.”

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“Sad as it was that she did not know where her children were buried or what they looked like if alive, fact was she knew more about them than she knew about herself, having never had the map to discover what she was like.”

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“The best thing she was, was her children.”

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“She did not tell them to clean up their lives, or go and sin no more. She did not tell them they were the blessed of the earth, its inheriting meek, or its glory-bound pure. She told them that the only grace they could have is the grace they could imagine. That if they could not see it, they could not have it.”

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“No more running-from nothing. I will never run from another thing on this Earth. I took one journey and I paid for the ticket, but let me tell you something, Paul D. Garner: it cost too much!”

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Beloved by Toni Morrison on Amazon*

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“People who die bad don’t stay in the ground.”

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“It’s not about choosing somebody over her. It’s about making space for somebody along with her.”

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“Outside, snow solidified itself into graceful forms. The peace of winter stars seemed permanent.”

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“What’s fair ain’t necessarily right.”

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“Beloved, she my daughter. She mine. See. She come back to me of her own free will and I don’t have to explain a thing.”

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“Nothing could be counted on in a world where even when you were a solution you were a problem.”

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“Feel how it feels to have a bed to sleep in and somebody there not worrying you to death about what you got to do each day to deserve it. Feel how that feels. And if that don’t get it, feel how it feels to be a colored woman roaming the roads with anything God made liable to jump on you. Feel that.”

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“In trying to make the slave experience intimate, I hoped the sense of things being both under control and out of control would be persuasive throughout; that the order and quietude of every day life would be violently disrupted by the chaos of the needy dead; that the herculean effort to forget would be threatened by memory desperate to stay alive. To render enslavement as a personal experience, language must first get out of the way.”

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“It was lovely. Not to be stared at, not seen, but being pulled into view by the interested, uncritical eyes of the other.”

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“More it hurt more better it is. Can’t nothing heal without pain, you know.”

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“It was the right thing to do, but she had no right to do it.”

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“Daily life took as much as she had. The future was sunset; the past something to leave behind. And if it didn’t stay behind, well, you might have to stomp it out.”

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“You just can’t mishandle creatures and expect success.”

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Reservoir Year: A Walker’s Book of Days by Nina Shengold

Nina Shengold’s Reservoir Year: A Walker’s Book of Days (Syracuse University Press, 2020) takes its place in the tradition of deeply felt nature writing, the kind that heightens observation of the world while delving into questions of self.

Literary Ladies Guide rarely features books that aren’t by classic (that is, departed) women authors or directly related to them (fictional homages, biographies, etc.). But when I opened Reservoir Year (Syracuse University Press, 2020), I at once imagined it as a descendant of the works of several classic authors whose profound affinity to the natural world became central to their art:

For Emily Brontë, any sojourn away from her Yorkshire home of Northern England, no matter how brief — to attend school or work as a governess — would make her ill. As a veritable recluse, Emily thrived on great long walks on the moors surrounding the Brontë family home, her devoted dog Keeper at her side. It was the only way she could exist in the world.

Tragically, Emily succumbed to consumption (tuberculosis) at age 30, but not before producing her iconic novel, Wuthering Heights (1847), and a body of poetry considered some of the finest in the English language. Here’s a lovely essay on nature in the poetry of Emily Brontë, which affirms that “the image of Emily Brontë roaming the moors is one mythic element about her that is true.”

Mary Hunter Austin is no longer widely read, but in her time, she moved though vaunted American literary circles. Her first and best-known book, The Land of Little Rain (1903), was a loosely connected collection of short stories and essays paying tribute to the lands of American Southwest and its Native American inhabitants, as well as its animal and plant life.

In her essays and stories, Austin offers vivid descriptions of mountains, deserts, trails, and even weather phenomena. Her writings highlight the benefits of harmony between humans and nature, or the dire consequences of its opposite. Keenly observing the natural world in writing confirmed her life’s purpose — fighting for environmental and social justice, especially for the native people who so revered the land.

Gene Stratton-Porter was a hugely successful author in her time, as well as a self-taught naturalist. In A Girl of the Limberlost (1909), her best-known novel, teenaged Elnora Comstock is far more interested in moths than in men. Her rambles through the Limberlost swamp, lovingly detailed, lead to her becoming a teacher of natural history and a collector of scientific specimens — both unusual practices for women of the time.

Stratton-Porter was often called the “bird lady” in her Indiana home town thanks to her intricate, detailed, and passionate writings about the state’s natural habitats. Better yet, she wove not-so-subtle messages of female independence into her enjoyable tales.

A more contemporary cousin to Reservoir Year is Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, a 1974 memoir by Annie Dillard. Dillard records observations of her corner of Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains through a year of journalistic entries, using them as a springboard for contemplations on life itself.

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Illustration by Carol Zaloom

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Nina Shengold arranges Reservoir Year by season and begins at a metaphorical place many of us come to in life: A crossroads. That’s what makes Reservoir Year so lovely and relatable. I can fully understand why Shengold set herself a seemingly impossible challenge as she came to what felt like a turning point in life. This upstate New Yorker begins with the book’s preamble:

I live in the foothills of the Catskills, four miles from the glorious Ashokan Reservoir. For a year, I walked by its side every day, in all kinds of weather, from predawn to starlight.

My usual path is a former roadbed on top of the reservoir’s main dam. There’s a small parking lot near the village of Olivebridge rimmed by wildflowers, hardwoods, and pines. You pass through a row of traffic barrier columns and take a few strides to the edge of the trees, and the world opens up: a panoramic vista of water, mountains, and sky. People stop in their tracks and gasp. I once heard an awestruck child cry out, “Is that the ocean? Mom! What is this place??”

It’s a good question. I spent a year trying to answer it, day after day after day. I was poised to turn sixty, a birthday that can’t help but rattle the ribcage. My daughter Maya was at college in Vermont and I missed her bright energy daily; my parents were dwindling into their nineties. And my dog had died.

Reservoir Year’s publisher, Syracuse University Press, introduces the book:

On the eve of her sixtieth birthday, Nina Shengold embarks on a challenge: to walk the path surrounding the Catskills’ glorious Ashokan Reservoir every day for a year, at all times of day and in all kinds of weather, trying to find something new every time. Armed with lively curiosity, infectious enthusiasm, and renewed stubbornness, she hits the path every day with all five senses wide open, searching for details that glint.

As Shengold explores the secrets of this spectacular place, she rediscovers the glories of solitude and an expanded community, both human and animal. Step by step, her reservoir walks rekindle connections with family, strangers, and friends, with a landscape she grows to revere, and with a new sense of self.

Like the writings of John Burroughs, Annie Dillard, and Barry Lopez, Shengold’s reflections on her personal journey will resonate with outdoor enthusiasts and armchair hikers alike. Quietly transformative, Reservoir Year encourages readers to find their own ways to unplug and slow down, reconnecting with nature, reviving old passions, and sparking some new ones along the path.

How will this yearlong journey to walk and observe the same path each day transform Nina Shengold? That is for the reader to discover. In troubled times, or simply when one is at a proverbial fork in the road, a personal challenge can reignite a passion for life.

Reservoir Year  is a comforting yet thought-provoking meditation on the human relationship with the natural world and how a connection with nature can deepen our awareness and empathy, no matter where we are in life.

Illustrated with beautiful hand-colored linocuts by Carol Zaloom and line drawings by Will Lytle. Cover art by Kate McGloughlin.

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Reservoir Year: A Walker’s Book of Days by Nina Shengold

is available on Amazon* and wherever books are sold

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About the author

Nina Shengold’s books include the novel Clearcut (Anchor Books), River of Words: Portraits of Hudson Valley Writers (SUNY Press, with photographer Jennifer May), and fourteen theatre anthologies for Vintage Books and Viking Penguin, many coedited with Eric Lane. She won the Writers Guild Award for her teleplay Labor of Love and the ABC Playwright Award for Homesteaders. Her plays are published by Playscripts, Broadway Play Publishing, and Samuel French; War at Home: Students Respond to 9/11, written with Nicole Quinn and the Rondout Valley High School Drama Club, has been produced around the world. Shengold has profiled more than 150 writers for Chronogram, Poets & Writers, and Vassar Quarterly. She’s a founding member of the theatre company Actors & Writers, author series Word Café, and Hudson Valley Writers Resist. A graduate of Wesleyan University, Shengold has taught at Manhattanville College and the University of Maine, and currently teaches creative writing at Vassar College. She was born in Brooklyn, grew up in New Jersey, escaped to Alaska, and now lives and works in the foothills of New York’s Catskill Mountains.

 
Praise for Reservoir Year: A Walker’s Book of Days 

“Shengold’s beautifully calibrated rhythm of language conveys all the rhythm of walking—the quiet, graceful stride along with lively, animated steps, the contemplative solitary strolls and those shared with companions. But she offers us as well the rhythm of the infinitesimal and the grand; of the expected and the unexpected; of the abstract and the real.”

—Akiko Busch, author of How to Disappear: Notes on Invisibility in a Time of Transparency

“To walk with Shengold along the banks of the Ashokan Reservoir is to see the Catskills—its ever-changing sky, its magnificent wildlife, and even its ghosts—through the lens of a writer of rare and exquisite sensibility.”

—Leslie T. Sharpe, author of The Quarry Fox: And Other Critters of the Wild Catskills

“Accompanied by her elegant, unpretentious prose, the reader comes upon surprises: a bear, an eagle feather, a crimson forest. Filled to the brim with subtle revelations, of sunwashed illuminations but also the poignant history; a drowned town lies below the shimmering surface. Expect to be moved, and then overcome by the tenderness and variety of Shengold’s emotional literary palette.”

—Laura Shaine Cunningham, author of Sleeping Arrangements and A Place in the Country

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