Nava Atlas's Blog, page 53

Quotes from Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe

Harriet Beecher Stowe’s impactful novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), was the first ever to be an international best-seller. More than 1.5 million copies of the anti-slavery novel were sold worldwide during its first year of release in 1852. Following is a selection of quotes from Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which isn’t always considered great literature, but is credited for helping to turn public opinion against slavery.

The novel helped fuel the anti-slavery movement, and is thought to have changed the course of history as well the publication business. No other book sold as many copies in the 19th century, other than the Bible.

Stowe’s astounding success with novel affected the fight for the abolition of slavery and displayed her fearlessness by writing on this subject in a white-dominated world.

Ever modest, Stowe barely took credit for her work. “I did not write it. God wrote it. I merely did his dictation,” she wrote in the introduction to the 1879 edition of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Further, she explained in the Author’s Preface:

“The object of these sketches is to awaken sympathy and feeling for the African race, as they exist among us; to show their wrongs and sorrows, under a system so necessarily cruel and unjust as to defeat and do away the good effects of all that can be attempted for them, by their best friends, under it.”

. . . . . . . . . . .

How Harriet Beecher Stowe was Inspired to Write Uncle Tom’s Cabin

. . . . . . . . . . .

“Any mind that is capable of real sorrow is capable of good.”

. . . . . . . . . . .

“The longest way must have its close —  the gloomiest night will wear on to a morning.” 

. . . . . . . . . . .

“…the heart has no tears to give, — it drops only blood, bleeding itself away in silence.” 

. . . . . . . . . . .

“Scenes of blood and cruelty are shocking to our ear and heart. What man has nerve to do, man has not nerve to hear.”

. . . . . . . . . . .

“There are in this world blessed souls, whose sorrows all spring up into joys for others; whose earthly hopes, laid in the grave with many tears, are the seed from which spring healing flowers and balm for the desolate and the distressed.”

. . . . . . . . . . .

“Death! Strange that there should be such a word, and such a thing, and we ever forget it; that one should be living, warm and beautiful, full of hopes, desires and wants, one day, and the next be gone, utterly gone, and forever!”

. . . . . . . . . . .

“Treat ’em like dogs, and you’ll have dogs’ works and dogs’ actions. Treat ’em like men, and you’ll have men’s works.”

. . . . . . . . . . .

“I am braver than I was because I have lost all; and he who has nothing to lose can afford all risks.”

. . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . .

“So much has been said and sung of beautiful young girls, why don’t somebody wake up to the beauty of old women?”

. . . . . . . . . . .

“Perhaps it is impossible for a person who does no good not to do harm.”

. . . . . . . . . . .

“Talk of the abuses of slavery! Humbug! The thing itself is the essence of all abuse!”

. . . . . . . . . . .

“I make no manner of doubt that you threw a very diamond of truth at me, though you see it hit me so directly in the face that it wasn’t exactly appreciated, at first.”

. . . . . . . . . . .

“No one is so thoroughly superstitious as the godless man.”

. . . . . . . . . . .

“Could I ever have loved you, had I not known you better than you know yourself?”

. . . . . . . . . . .

“All men are free and equal, in the grave,”

. . . . . . . . . . .

“It is with the oppressed, enslaved, African race that I cast in my lot; and if I wished anything, I would wish myself two shades darker, rather than one lighter.”

. . . . . . . . . . .

“Everything your money can buy, given with a cold, averted face, is not worth one honest tear shed in real sympathy?”

. . . . . . . . . . .

“My country again! Mr. Wilson, you have a country; but what country have I, or anyone like me, born of slave mothers? What laws are there for us? We don’t make them,—we don’t consent to them,—we have nothing to do with them; all they do for us is to crush us, and keep us down.”

. . . . . . . . . . .

“Sir, 1 haven’t any country, any more than I have any father. But I’m going to have one. I don’t want anything of your country, except to let me alone—to go peaceably out of it; and when I get to Canada, where the laws will own me and protect me, that shall be my country, and its laws I will obey. But if any man tries to stop me, let him take care, for I am desperate. I’ll fight for my liberty to the last breath I breathe. You say your fathers did it; if it was right for them, it is right for me!”

. . . . . . . . . . .

“Deeds of heroism are wrought here more than those of romance, when, defying torture, and braving death itself, the fugitive voluntarily threads his way back to the terrors and perils of that dark land, that he may bring out his sister, or mother, or wife.”

. . . . . . . . . . .

Learn more about Harriet Beecher Stowe

. . . . . . . . . .

“Every nation that carries in its bosom great and unredressed injustice has in it the elements of this last convulsion.”

. . . . . . . . . . .

“I’ve lost everything in this world, and it’s clean gone, forever– and now I can’t lose heaven, too; no, I can’t get to be wicked, besides all.”

. . . . . . . . . . .

“What poor, mean trash this whole business of human virtue is! A mere matter, for the most part, of latitude and longitude, and geographical position, acting with natural temperament. The greater part is nothing but an accident.”

. . . . . . . . . . .

“When a heavy weight presses the soul to the lowest level at which endurance is possible, there is an instant and desperate effort of every physical and moral nerve to throw off the weight; and hence the heaviest anguish often precedes a return tide of joy and courage.”

. . . . . . . . . . .

“There have been times when I have thought, if the whole country would sink, and hide all this injustice and misery from the light, I would willingly sink with it.”

. . . . . . . . . . .

“in a novel, people’s hearts break, and they die, and that is the end of it; and in a story this is very convenient. But in real life we do not die when all that makes life bright dies to us.”

. . . . . . . . . . .

“We ought to be free to meet and mingle, –to rise by our individual worth, without any consideration of caste or color; and they who deny us this right are false to their own professed principals of human equality.”

. . . . . . . . . . .

More about Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe

Wikipedia
The First Great American Novel
The Pervading Influence of Uncle Tom’s Cabin on Pop Culture
Listen to a free audio recording on Librivox

The post Quotes from Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.

Sylvia Townsend Warner

Sylvia Townsend Warner (December 6, 1893 – May 1, 1978) was an English novelist, poet, and musicologist. Best known for her novels Lolly Willowes and The Corner That Held Them, she was also a prolific writer of short stories and contributed to The New Yorker for over forty years.

Despite a revival of her work in the 1970s, led by feminist publisher Virago Press, she is still an under-appreciated figure in literature and is probably just as well known for her long-term lesbian relationship with Valentine Ackland.

. . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . .

Early years

Sylvia was the only child of Harrow schoolmaster George Townsend Warner and his wife, Nora Mary Hudleston. She was a strong-willed and curious child, who loved learning but was withdrawn from kindergarten after a single term.

According to her school report, she distracted the other children with too many questions and mimicked the teachers to the point of insolence. The only positive comment was that she was a musical child who always sang in tune.

After this, Sylvia was taught at home by Nora. The Bible, history, geography, Shakespeare, languages, and music were all taught with flair, alongside vivid stories from Nora’s own childhood in India.

Her father instilled in Sylvia the same passion for history that he himself had. A talented teacher, he was beloved by his pupils and by Sylvia, who adored him though his teaching and housemaster responsibilities often kept him too busy for family. 

Sylvia’s relationship with her mother was more difficult and complex. Nora’s affection for her daughter tailed off as Sylvia grew into a tall, lanky, shortsighted girl who showed no interest in any of the social necessities and niceties that Nora herself held so dear.

When, in 1911, Sylvia was of an age to “come out” in society, she drove Nora to distraction by showing very little interest in the proceedings. Later, Sylvia would write that “nothing compensated for my sex,” and felt that Nora resented her for not being a boy.

Generally, though, Sylvia’s upbringing was a comfortable one. Term times at Harrow were interspersed with family holidays, to Switzerland during the winter and to Scotland in the summer. Early in 1914, George bought a piece of land in South Devon intending to build a house for holidays and eventual retirement.

The house, known as Little Zeal, became a permanent home for George and Nora but never for Sylvia. Her relationship with her mother was strained enough: by 1914 she was more than ready to start making her own way.

 

Outbreak of war and dedication to music

Music had always been important to Sylvia. She was a talented pianist and composer, and when she was 16 began to study formally with the music master at Harrow, Percy Buck. He supported and encouraged her, teaching her the piano and the organ, the history and theory of music, and composition. He was also her first real lover; they began an affair when Sylvia was 19. which lasted for 17 years.

At the outbreak of war in 1914, Sylvia had been due to travel to Europe to study composition with Arnold Schoenberg. Instead, she stayed in England, continuing to study under Buck’s tutelage and the supervision of the Royal College of Music.

She also worked the night shift at a munitions factory in South London. Her father encouraged her to write about her experiences there, and the result was an 8,000-word essay, ‘Behind the Firing Line’, which was published under the name of “A Lady Worker” in Blackwood’s in February 1916. It was Sylvia’s first published piece.

In September of that year, George died, likely from a burst ulcer. His death affected Sylvia badly: she would later write, “My father died when I was twenty-two, and I was mutilated.”

Moving back to Little Zeal to take care of her mother was an ordeal. Their relationship had not improved, and grief made it worse for both of them.

In 1917 she was offered, possibly through Buck’s intervention, a position as editor for a new musicology project: the collecting, editing, and publication of a wealth of Elizabethan church music, which until then had existed only in handwritten form in cathedral books.

The Tudor Church Music project, financed by the Carnegie (UK) Trust, gave her a salary of £3 per week, which was not much to live on but gave her enough to move back to London and away from Nora. Sylvia enjoyed the work and threw herself into it, gaining a reputation as a talented editor who knew her subject.

. . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . .

Life in London and the first novel

Sylvia settled quickly into a relatively quiet life in London. Although she knew many of the people who would become part of the Bloomsbury set, she preferred fewer friendships to large gatherings, and her affair with Percy Buck continued.

Her relationship with her mother also began to improve after Ronald Eiloart, a former pupil of her father’s and a close friend of the family, returned from the war and asked for Nora’s hand in marriage. Sylvia was delighted and the Eiloarts appalled, but the match seemed to suit Nora and so relieved Sylvia of some worry and stress.

Writing was also becoming a large part of Sylvia’s life, taking the place of composing. She was beginning to write poetry, using left-over pieces of the smooth, heavy manuscript paper that she brought home with her from the Carnegie project.

She also attempted a novel, The Quick and the Dead, which was quickly discarded in favor of a new story about a contemporary witch. This novel, which became Lolly Willowes, was far easier for Sylvia to write: “One line led me to another, one smooth page to the next.”

Sylvia was also corresponding with the writer, philosopher, and Dorset recluse Theodore Powys, and her determination to find a publisher for his work brought her into contact with both David Garnett of Nonesuch Press and with Chatto & Windus.

It was Garnett who, in 1923, encouraged her to send her poems for publication, and Chatto that accepted them. The collection was published as The Espalier, followed by Lolly Willowes in 1926.

Both met with great success and Sylvia handled the inevitable questions about black magic and witchcraft with humor and candor, suggesting that modern-day witches might use vacuum cleaners instead of broomsticks for flying.

. . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . .

Dorset and Valentine Ackland

After finishing her second novel, Mr. Fortune’s Maggot, Sylvia’s next project was ambitious: a study of Theodore Powys. She never completed it and only seventy-six drafted pages survive, but the project took her to Dorset and to the village of Chaldon where Powys lived.

There, one summer evening, she met a Mrs. Molly Turpin, also known as Valentine Ackland. Valentine had been renting a cottage in the village since 1925 as an escape from her unhappy marriage to Richard Turpin, and often visited the Powys’s.

This first encounter was not a success. Sylvia felt overawed by Valentine’s poise and beauty (she was almost six feet tall, elegant with a boyish haircut and slim figure) and felt as if she, the “famous novelist,” was a disappointment. She compensated by being dismissive and rude, and Valentine subsequently avoided her in the village.

In October 1927, Sylvia began writing the diary that she would keep for the next fifty years. It shows the busyness and diversity of her London life — often meeting friends (although still avoiding parties), attending concerts and recitals, continuing with her work at the Carnegie project, and publishing her second collection of poetry, Time Importuned, in spring 1928.

By 1929, however, the affair with Buck was fading. Sylvia was beginning to feel old and dowdy: her face annoyed her (“what was wrong with my face was that the orders had been mixed”), and her hair displeased her (“like Disraeli in middle-age, so oily and curly”).

She was also having trouble writing. Her latest novel, Early One Morning, went unfinished and was followed by several false starts. The Tudor Church Music project was wound up, with the final trustees meeting taking place in October. The only thing that she found gave her joy was poetry.

Amid emotion with Buck and worry over Powys’s son Francis, who was said to have consumption, Sylvia traveled down to Dorset in spring 1930. This time she purchased a cottage and, after meeting Valentine again and realizing that she had nowhere of her own in the village, offered her the option of sharing.

The idea was that both women would use the cottage for a month or so at a time, separate and apart, in between London commitments. By the end of the year, however, they had become lovers. Sylvia ended the affair with Buck and left London for Chaldon. 

The honeymoon years

Sylvia wrote of those first months, “…life rising up again in me cajoles with unscrupulous power and I will yield to it gladly, if it leads me away from this death I have sat so snugly in for so long…”

Deeply in love, as the months went by their lives “joined up imperceptibly, along all their lengths”. Their worst row was over the housekeeping: Sylvia was accustomed to thrift and to having to be ingenious, whereas Valentine viewed such behavior as unnecessarily alarming and demeaning.

Music, too, was a source of difference, and the concerts and recitals that had been so much a part of Sylvia’s life became rare occurrences. She preferred not to go without Valentine, and Valentine preferred not to go. They both accepted these differences, which gave a little breathing space and privacy between them.

Happy though they were, Valentine was not entirely at ease and often had moments of depression and private drinking — an ongoing problem of which Sylvia remained unaware.

The differences in their writing also caused Valentine some distress. Her reverence for poetry matched her love for Sylvia, and she found her inability to write during the first flush of their relationship a real problem. Sylvia had originally viewed Valentine’s poetry as “pleasing minor verse.”

Now, as Valentine’s lover, she came to see it as superior to her own: lyrical, difficult, with layers that deepened the more she read. However, she also recognized that the short, flowing form would not sell.

Knowing that her own work would be published but that Valentine’s would struggle, Sylvia came up with a plan of sending out their poems together for publication in a single volume, with only their initials on the title page. Valentine agreed, somewhat dubiously. The collection was later published as Whether a Dove or a Seagull, with their full names on the title page of the American edition but no attribution to individual poems. In the English edition, however, a key was included in the back to say who had written what.

Reviews were mixed, with most reviewers becoming too caught up in trying to guess who each poem belonged to rather than to actually review the poems themselves. Valentine was embarrassed and upset.

 

The shift to Communism and the Spanish Civil War

In the winter of 1933, Valentine began to read political pamphlets. Most of them focused on atrocities in Nazi Germany and the colonial situation in Africa and troubled her enormously, but she was wary of the left-wing alternatives.

By 1934, however, the scale of Nazi brutality in Germany had changed her mind, and even Sylvia — who previously had been generally uninterested in politics — was persuaded that the Communist cause was a just one.

In the spring of 1935, they both became members of the Communist Party of Great Britain, and Communism became almost like a blessing on their relationship, which they had come to think of as marriage.

By 1936, the emerging situation in Spain appalled both of them, and Valentine longed to join the miliciana, the female Republican fighters. This never happened, but in September both she and Sylvia were “called up” to work in a Red Cross unit in Barcelona. Their work there only lasted three weeks, but it was enough for Sylvia to develop a passion for Spain that matched her passion for politics.

Through it all, she continued to write. In January 1936 she finished her novel Summer Will Show, and in the spring she also submitted the first of 150 short stories to The New Yorker. After having made a bet that it would be rejected, she had to forfeit her £5. On the whole, though, it was a good bargain; the regular income that followed was to make her financially secure for the rest of her life.

 

A dangerous affair: Elizabeth Wade White

During 1937 Sylvia became a whirlwind of activity for the Party, undertaking several public speaking engagements. The flurry was in part due to the lingering enthusiasm from Spain, but also as a distraction from one of Valentine’s affairs.

Sylvia always remained faithful to Valentine, but Valentine often had “dalliances” which Sylvia did not mind; indeed, she encouraged them, not wanting Valentine’s desire for her to be tainted by longing for others.

She was always convinced of their love for each other and told Valentine as much, noting that if ever a woman came along who caused Sylvia damage, then her feelings would be very different. Until 1938, she never had cause to test those feelings.

Elizabeth Wade White was a young, rich American who Sylvia had met in 1929 on a short trip to New York. Also a Communist, in 1938 she was on her way to Spain and, after getting back in touch with Sylvia, stayed in Dorset for a few days en route. The worsening situation in Spain made it impossible for her to get there, and she turned back to Paris. Sylvia and Valentine offered her a place to stay, and by November of that year, Valentine and Elizabeth were lovers.

By February 1939, Sylvia was sufficiently unhappy that she considered moving out of the shared house. Valentine begged her to stay, but a joint trip to America for a Writer’s Congress was a disaster. Elizabeth, tagging along, was unwilling to share Valentine and became increasingly possessive and jealous.

Sylvia attempted to conceal how hurt and upset she was, while Valentine was torn between the two of them. After a difficult summer, the news of war made Valentine’s mind up for her. She returned to England with Sylvia, but things remained strained.

Both Sylvia and Valentine volunteered with the local branch of the Women’s Voluntary Service during the war, while Valentine also took on extra clerking duties.

Sylvia continued to write, publishing a volume of short stories in America, But the war years were difficult for both of them, and in 1944 Valentine fell into an almost suicidal depression. She felt she could not write, was worried about money, and felt guilty over their relationship, which had never really recovered from the disastrous trip to America.

. . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . .

After the war, and another affair

Sylvia continued to write throughout the war, publishing The Cat’s Cradle Book in America and beginning work on a new novel The Corner That Held Them. Both she and Valentine volunteered in the Women’s Voluntary Service. Valentine hated the rigidity of the roles she was given, and by 1944 had fallen into a suicidal depression.

After the war, their lives continued to diverge. Sylvia had more success with her writing, signing a lucrative First Reading Agreement with the New Yorker, finishing The Corner That Held Them, contributing articles to magazines such as The New Statesman and The Countryman, and accepting a commission to write a book about Somerset.

Valentine, meanwhile, was experiencing the private transformation of spirituality and religion, something which Sylvia did not understand or easily accept.

In April 1949, this new preoccupation with God was interrupted when Elizabeth Wade White came to visit again. This time both Valentine and Sylvia realized that Elizabeth would not simply “blow over” and Valentine found herself torn once more.

She was genuinely in love with two people at the same time, but her eventual solution pleased nobody: in an echo of their arrangement before the war, she proposed that they should all three live together, Valentine and Elizabeth as lovers and Sylvia as a companion.

Sylvia, horrified, rejected this idea completely, and began to think of the practicalities of moving out. She continued to live with Valentine while Elizabeth returned to America to make preparations for moving, but, as she said in a letter to her friend Alyse Gregory, “the attrition of waiting is as dangerous as a wound that may turn to gangrene.”

Elizabeth’s arrival date was set for September 2, 1949, for one month. During this time, Sylvia would live in a hotel rather than find another place to live permanently. But while Sylvia found life in the hotel dreary and dull, Valentine struggled to adjust to living with Elizabeth and missed Sylvia desperately.

By spring 1950, when Elizabeth had returned to America, the affair — which had been so much more than an affair — was over, but Valentine and Sylvia’s relationship never fully recovered.

. . . . . . . . .

Sylvia Townsend Warner page on Amazon*

. . . . . . . . .

The last years

The mood of the 1950s was uncertain, with the threat of another war looming. Both Sylvia and Valentine continued to support Communism, but with far less zeal than before. In 1953 Valentine formally resigned from the Communist Party and turned to Roman Catholicism.

Sylvia did not share Valentine’s enthusiasm for religion. Their conversation around the church was wary at best, and in private Sylvia found that flippancy was the best way for her to deal with the situation.

The church at Weymouth attended by Valentine became “Our Lady of Winkles,” the prayer sheets “Holy Crumbs,” the devotional candles by Valentine’s bed “blue nightlights”. But the gap opening between her and Valentine disturbed Sylvia a great deal.

She even felt herself to blame, writing to a friend that, “she would not, she could not, have turned back into that church if loneliness, unhappiness, sense of frustration, disappointment, disillusionment, had not driven her.”

Sylvia focused instead on taking joy from other things — the garden, her cats, her writing, the time she spent with Valentine where the Church was not a topic of conversation, music.

In 1954 her latest novel, The Flint Anchor, was published with rave reviews, and later that year she was offered the chance to translate Proust’s Contre Sainte-Beuve. This was published in 1958 to great critical acclaim and was followed in 1964 by a biography of the novelist T. H. White (published in 1967).

However, Valentine was suffering from serious health problems. During the 1960s she underwent an operation for temporal arteritis and then treatment for breast cancer. After two operations and radiotherapy, it was found that the cancer had spread to her lungs. She died, with Sylvia at her bedside, on November 9, 1969.

In the months afterward, everyday life ceased to have much meaning for Sylvia. Her writing slowed down, and although she kept up correspondences with friends, she felt that nothing could fill the gap Valentine left. Some joy in life was only restored when, in 1972, she befriended the young widow of an Austrian count, Gräfin Antonia Trauttmansdorff.

What started as a superficial social acquaintance grew to a deep friendship that sustained Sylvia through her last years. It was during this time that she wrote Elfindom, saying that her new friendship allowed her to leave behind the intricacies of the human heart and write something entirely different.

Soon Sylvia’s health began to deteriorate due to old age. Having always been strong and robust, she began falling, and by the beginning of 1978 could not walk more than a few steps without support. She died, at home, at the beginning of May, surrounded by the blooming flowers in her garden.

. . . . . . . . . . .

Contributed by Elodie Barnes. Elodie is an author, poet and artist with a serious case of wanderlust. She is originally from the UK, but has spent time abroad in Europe, the United States and the Bahamas.

When not traveling or working on her current projects — a chapbook of poetry, “The Cabinet of Lost Things,” and a novel based on the life of modernist writer and illustrator Djuna Barnes — she can be found with her nose in a book, daydreaming her way back to 1920s Paris. Visit her on the web at Elodie Rose Barnes.

More about Sylvia Townsend Warner

Major works

Novels

Lolly Willowes (1926)
Mr Fortune’s Maggot (1927)
The True Heart (1929)
Summer Will Show (1936)
After the Death of Don Juan (1938)
The Corner That Held Them (1948)
The Flint Anchor (1954)
The Music at Long Verney: Twenty Stories (2001; posthumous)

Poetry collections

The Espalier (1925)
Time Importuned (1928)
Opus 7 (1931)
Whether a Dove or Seagull (1933; jointly written with Valentine Ackland)
Boxwood (1957)
Collected Poems (1982)

More information

Wikipedia
Reader discussion on Goodreads
Sylvia Townsend Warner Society
Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Lolly Willowes is ‘a great shout of life’
Colm Toibin Reads Sylvia Townsend Warner
Sylvia Townsend Warner Reading Week 2020

Biographies and letters

Sylvia Townsend Warner: A Biography by Claire Harman (1989)
I’ll Stand By You: Selected Letters of Sylvia Townsend Warner and Valentine Ackland, edited by Susanna Pinney (1998)
This Narrow Place: Sylvia Townsend Warner and Valentine Ackland 1930-1951, by Wendy Mulford (1988)
The Akeing Heart: Letters Between Sylvia Townsend Warner, Valentine Ackland and Elizabeth Wade White, edited by Peter Haring Judd (Handheld Press, 2018)

. . . . . . . . . .

*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 Sylvia Townsend Warner appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.

Discovering Françoise d’Eaubonne, Pioneering Ecofeminist

At the age of eleven, Françoise d’Eaubonne (March 12, 1920 – August 3, 2005) wrote on a convent wall, “Vive le féminisme!”

This was just the start of what would be a radical life as a member of the French Communist Party, writing more than fifty novels and essays and, most importantly, coining her defining theory: ecofeminism.

One of the best-known leaders of the French feminist movement, d’Eaubonne’s most famous work was her essay “Le Féminisme ou Le Mort” (Feminism or Death), published in 1974.

Up until last year, I had never heard the name Françoise d’Eaubonne. Perusing the various muddled titles in a French second-hand book market I happened upon a book with a rather interesting cover, and still more interesting blurb:

“Pour la première fois peut-être dans l’histoire de la science-fiction, le héros: le pilote de l’astronef, est une femme!”

Using my rather amateurish French, I translate: “for perhaps the first time in the history of science fiction, the hero, the pilot of the spacecraft is a woman!” I was intrigued. Why have I never heard of this? If I am to believe the blurb, isn’t this revolutionary?

. . . . . . . . . . 

. . . . . . . . . . 

Les Sept Fils de l’Etoile

Three euros poorer, clutching Les Sept Fils de l’Étoile, written in 1962 by the mysterious Françoise d’Eaubonne, I was on the quest to discover this forgotten heroine. A barely existent Wikipedia page, most of her books to be found on no site, let alone an English-language one, I felt in possession of a secret treasure: I had to turn to discovering her through the book itself.

Reading the first few pages, it is not hard to see that d’Eaubonne was ahead of her time, her work seething with feminist and colonialist criticism (phrases such as “it’s rare for a woman to get to my job level” and “a result of earthly racism”), but in a foreign landscape: space. D’Eaubonne seemed to be especially concerned with the environment.

 

Ecofeminism as seminal theory

From there I could finally find information on this enigma. Later branded “apolitical and ahistorical,” ecofeminism was d’Eaubonne’s seminal theory. She asserted that the patriarchy views both women and nature as wild and unruly, and that in a utopian world, there would be equality under the harmony of nature, with all organic functions respected.

A contemporary and friend of Simone de Beauvoir, d’Eaubonne wrote to her in a letter: “nous sommes toutes vengées.” This means “we are all avenged.” She is right; it is therefore time for d’Eaubonne to have a resurgence.

Contributed by Beatrice Ricketts.

. . . . . . . . . .

Françoise d’Eaubonne page on Amazon

. . . . . . . . . . .

More about Françoise d’Eaubonne and ecofeminism

Britannica’s article on ecofeminism
Françoise d’Eaubonne, pionnière de l’écoféminisme

Françoise d’Eaubonne et l’Ecoféminisme by Caroline Goldblum

Selected  works – Fiction

Le cœur de Watteau, 1944
Comme un vol de gerfauts, prix des lecteurs 1947
Belle Humeur ou la Véridique Histoire de Mandrin,1957
J’irai cracher sur vos tombes, 1959
Les Tricheurs,
Jusqu’à la gauche, 1963
Les Bergères de l’Apocalypse, 1978
On vous appelait terroristes, 1979
Je ne suis pas née pour mourir, 1982
Terrorist’s blues, 1987
Floralies du désert, 1995

Selected essays

“Le complexe de Diane, érotisme ou féminisme”  1951
Y a-t-il encore des hommes?  1964
Eros minoritaire, 1970
Le féminisme ou la mort, 1974
Les femmes avant le patriarcat, 1976
Contre violence ou résistance à l’état, 1978
Écologie, féminisme : révolution ou mutation ?, 1978
La liseuse et la lyre, 1997

. . . . . . . . . . .

*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 Discovering Françoise d’Eaubonne, Pioneering Ecofeminist appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.

11 Essential Classic Novels and Memoirs by Black Women Authors

Literary Ladies Guide celebrates classic women authors, and as part of our mission, we honor the rich tradition of African-American women authors. If you’d like to read more classic novels and memoirs by Black women writers, there’s much to explore. This list is a good  place to start.

Historically, it was challenge enough for women to become published authors; this was especially true for African-American women facing the dual struggle of race and gender bias. Fortunately, there are more women of all backgrounds writing today. That’s why this site limits its scope to women who have passed on, and those are the authors you’ll find in this list.

From the slave narratives of the 19th century, to the identity-seeking stories of the Harlem Renaissance, to the unique voices of recently departed authors like Toni Morrison and Ntozake Shange, these foundational classics have stood the test of time, and are still incredibly good reads.

. . . . . . . . . . 

Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Ann Jacobs (1861)

In 1857, Harriet Ann Jacobs (1813 –1897) was completing a manuscript for a barely fictionalized account of her life as a slave, and of her struggle to free herself and her children. After all she’d been through and how compellingly she presented her narrative, though, not a single publisher was willing to take the book on.

After repeated rejections, Harriet decided to publish the book herself, an impressive feat for any woman of that era, let alone one that had spent years as a fugitive slave. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself, an autobiography that reads like a novel, was published in 1861.

More about Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Ann Jacobs.

. . . . . . . . . . .

Plum Bun by Jessie Redmon Fauset (1928)

Jessie Redmon Fauset (1882 – 1961) was an American editor, poet, essayist, and novelist associated with the Harlem Renaissance. Plum Bun, the second of her four novels, was an important addition to the small but persistent canon of “passing” novels of the era produced by both male and female authors.

Plum Bun: A Novel Without a Moral is the story of Angela Murray, a young mixed-race woman who moves to New York City after her parents’ death. Angela decides to try to live as a white woman, only to discover that life on the other side of what was then called “the color line” also had its share of pitfalls. Creativity ultimately becomes the greatest source of satisfaction for her.

More about Plum Bun by Jessie Redmon Fauset.

. . . . . . . . . . .

Passing by Nella Larsen (1929)

Passing by Nella Larsen (1891 – 1964) is one of the most iconic novels of the Harlem Renaissance era of the 1920s. Within its spare prose lies deep ideas and much to ponder. The 2001 Griot Edition describes it succinctly:

“Passing’ is not only a direct reference to Clare’s decision to live as a white woman but also the suppression of her sexuality. It also calls attention to the other kinds of ‘passing’ women do in relationships romantic and otherwise, and the adoption by the black middle class of the actions and values of the dominant culture.”

More about Passing by Nella Larsen.

. . . . . . . . .

Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston (1937)

Zora Neale Hurston made a name for herself during the Harlem Renaissance as an author and ethnographer. Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), her third published book and second novel, is certainly her best-known work and something of a feminist classic.

Janie, the story’s heroine, searches for independence, identity, love, and happiness over the course of twenty-five years and several relationships. This story is actually not unlike Zora’s own, though it could be argued that she never found true happiness.

Here’s more about Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston.

. . . . . . . . . .

The Street by Ann Petry (1946)

The Street by Ann Petry was published in 1946 and became the first novel by an African-American woman to sell more than a million copies — all told, it sold more than 1.5 million. The story centers on Lutie Johnson, a young black single mother coping with racism, sexual harassment, violence, and class divisions in World War II-era New York City.

In Ann Petry (1996), a concise biography and analysis of the author’s literary canon, Hilary Holladay observed: “The urban black characters’ suffering is especially acute once they come to believe that there is no better life ahead, that the American dream of success is not theirs to strive for, let alone achieve.”

Here’s more about The Street by Ann Petry.

. . . . . . . . . .

Jubilee by Margaret Walker (1966)

Jubilee by Margaret Walker (1966), the only novel by this esteemed American author, poet, and educator, was the culmination of some twenty-five years of research and writing.

The story of Vyry, a mixed-race slave, is based on the real-life experiences of Walker’s great-grandmother. Walker received the Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship for this book, and its completion served as her Ph.D. from the University of Iowa.

Covering the antebellum years, Civil War, and Reconstruction periods, the narrative moves from a Georgia plantation to Alabama, following Vyry’s life and loves.

Here’s more about Jubilee by Margaret Walker.

. . . . . . . . . . . 

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou (1969)

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou (1928–2014) is a 1969 autobiography by the beloved writer and poet covering her upbringing and youth. The book is the first in a seven-volume series. It delves into Angelou’s journey, one in which she experiences and overcomes racism and trauma and develops the strength of character and a love of literature.

The book starts with her as a three-year-old being sent to Stamos, Arkansas, to live with their grandmother along with her older brother. By the end of the book, Angelou is sixteen years old and becomes a mother.

More about I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou.

. . . . . . . . . .

The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison (1970)

So many of Toni Morrison’s novels have entered the American canon as classics, perhaps none more so than Beloved (1987). But for those just starting to read Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, I think it’s best to work your way up to Beloved to fully appreciate the way she constructs and tells a story. And what place to better start than with her first novel, The Bluest Eye.

Centering on Pecola, a Black girl who dreams of having blue eyes to fit into Western standards of beauty, the book is a meditation on race, class, and gender. At first, the book didn’t sell well at first and received mixed reviews. But it made its way onto the book lists of black studies college courses, which helped boost its visibility. One of Morrison’s most accessible works, The Bluest Eye is a good way to ease into her brilliant oeuvre.

More about The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison.

. . . . . . . . . .

Kindred by Octavia E. Butler (1979)

For Octavia E. Butler, writing science fiction wasn’t merely a vehicle for escaping into fantasy, but a means to explore universal issues. This is certainly true of Kindred. Whereas most of Butler’s work, before and after this novel, fits squarely into the sci-fi realm, Kindred falls more into the category of speculative fiction.

It tells of a contemporary African-American woman who travels back in time to save an ancestor who happens to be a white slave owner. By saving him in his time, she ensures her own survival in the future. With her knowledge of what lies in the future, the choices Dana must make are often agonizing.

Here’s more about Kindred by Octavia E. Butler.

. . . . . . . . . .

Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo by Ntozake Shange (1982)

Ntozake Shange (1948 –2018), best known for her staged “choreopoem” For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow is Enuf, was also the author of a number of novels. Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo perfectly captures the author’s gift for weaving social observation with magical language to form a compelling story.

Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo is the story of three sisters and their mother from Charleston, South Carolina, all of whom are striving to live their creative dreams. The New York Times wrote that “Shange’s rich and wondrous story of womanhood, art, and passionately-lived lives is written with such exquisite care and beauty that anybody can relate to her message.”

More about Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo by Ntozake Shange.

. . . . . . . . . . .

The Wedding by Dorothy West (1995)

Dorothy West (1907 – 1998) was the last surviving member of the Harlem Renaissance movement. In her early career, she became known for short stories. Her first novel, The Living is Easy, didn’t appear until 1948; then there was a gap of some forty-seven years until The Wedding, was published in 1995, when West was in her late 80s.

The novel centers on the wedding day of Shelby, the daughter of a prominent, affluent African-American (and mixed-race) family, and Meade, a white jazz musician. It takes place on Martha’s Vineyard, long an exclusive enclave of upper-middle-class Black families. From there, the story of five generations of an American family unfolds.

More about The Wedding by Dorothy West.

. . . . . . . . . . .

You may also enjoy:

Fascinating African-American Women Writers of the 19th Century

The post 11 Essential Classic Novels and Memoirs by Black Women Authors appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.

Jubilee by Margaret Walker (1966)

Jubilee by Margaret Walker (1966), the only novel by this esteemed American author, poet, and educator, was the culmination of some twenty-five years of research and writing.

The story of Vyry, a mixed-race slave, is based on the real-life experiences of Walker’s great-grandmother. Walker received the Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship for this book, and its completion served as her Ph.D. from the University of Iowa.

Covering the antebellum years, Civil War, and Reconstruction periods, the narrative moves from a Georgia plantation to Alabama, following Vyry’s life and loves. Jubilee received praised for its realistic depictions of daily life in the time of slavery and its aftermath.

Each of the fifty-eight chapters begins with a proverb or an excerpt from a spiritual. Crispin Y. Campbell, a Washington Post contributor, hailed the work as “the first truly historical black American novel.” 

. . . . . . . . . . .

Learn more about Margaret Walker

. . . . . . . . . . .

A 1966 review of Jubilee by Margaret Walker

From the original review of Jubilee by Margaret Walker in the Albuquerque Journal, Sept. 12, 1966:

“Freedom is a secret word I dare not say.”

This chapter heading from Jubilee by Margaret Walker sums up both Vyry Brown’s story and the the novel itself.

The novel is based on true story of her great-grandmother’s life before, during, and after the Civil War reads like the best of the novels of this period. The desire of Vyry for freedom is so vibrant and so alive, the audience can feel it pulsing from the pages.

Vyry, the daughter of plantation owner John Dutton and a slave, Sis Hetta, takes the reader on a journey through the intimacies of plantation life, the life of a slave, life in the “Big House,” and the secret life of a black slave who yearned for a close family society and freedom. She risked many beatings for a breath of it.

Vyry did not fight the laws of nature that gave her a life of slavery, nor the laws which forbade her the right to vote, to own property, or to receive and education — nor did she fight the feelings of Southerners who didn’t want the Brown family in their town.

She withstood the pain of freedom without its rights — and won. Vyry finally found a town where people of her race were accepted by its residents. She eventually felt that all her suffering earned her the right to work and pursue happiness.

Aside from being based on the story of a real person, it depicts the antebellum, Civil War and reconstruction periods from an African-American perspective.

. . . . . . . . . . . 

Jubilee by Margaret Walker on Amazon*

. . . . . . . . . . .

How Margaret Walker came to write and publish Jubilee

From the original article in the Mason City, Iowa, Globe-Gazette, July 30, 1966: Jubilee Author is Jubilated

Release of Margaret Walker’s novel, Jubilee, in September by Houghton Mifflin Co. will mark the climax of more than twenty-five years of work.

The novel, which won the 1966 Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship Award, was started when Miss Walker was 19 and was finally completed last year while she was a graduate student in the University of Iowa Writer’s Workshop.

Based on the true story of Miss Walker’s great-grandmother, a mixed-race slave named Margaret (Vyry) Duggans Ware Brown, the book is something the author “has lived with most of my life.”

Many of the incidents in the book are based on stories Miss Walker heard when she was a child from her grandmother, who “always expected the story to be written.”

At the time she wrote the first 300 pages, Miss Walker was working on a B.A. degree at Northwestern University and “had no idea how to write a novel. The story was very unformed.”

She put the story aside for a few years until she came to the University in 1939 (?) to work for an M.A. in English.

“I took the uncompleted manuscript with me to Iowa,” she said, “hoping to do some work on it.” The Writers’ Workshop was just beginning then, Miss Walker said.

“I read an article in Life Magazine about the workshop,” she explained. “A number of my friends had attended Iowa and they also encouraged me to go there.”

It probably was some of the best advice friends ever gave, for Miss Walker produced a volume of poetry, For My People, as her Master’s thesis, which won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award and was published by Yale in 1943.

Miss Walker went to Jackson State College, Mississippi to teach, married Firnist James Alexander, and had four children. She began a ten-year period of research, part of which was financed by a Ford Foundation grant. Another ten years went by before she was able to return to Iowa to work on her Ph.D. and get help in putting the novel together, much of that happening in early 1965.

“A former teacher of mine at Northwestern, Professor Edward Hungerford, had met the senior editor of Houghton Mifflin in Chicago the previous fall and told her about my book. The editor wrote to me at once and when the book was finished, received the manuscript.

Less than a month later, the publishers had accepted the novel and in January of this year, the book won the fellowship.

More about Jubilee by Margaret Walker

Wikipedia
Reader discussion on Goodreads
Jubilee review on Herstory Novels

. . . . . . . . . .

*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 Jubilee by Margaret Walker (1966) appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.

11 Poems by Margaret Walker

Margaret Walker (1915 – 1998) is best known for her acclaimed novel, Jubilee (1966) as well as her richly evocative poetry. Here we’ll explore a sampling of poems by Margaret Walker, works that speak powerfully to the African-American experience.

Born in Birmingham, Alabama, Walker grew up in New Orleans and eventually settled in Chicago, where she earned a Bachelor’s degree in 1935. Growing up, she was particularly taken with the poetry of Langston Hughes.

In 1936, Walker joined the Federal Writers’ Project and the South Side Writers Group, where she became friends with fellow writer and poet, Richard Wright. In 1940, she earned a master’s degree in creative writing from the University of Iowa. She and Wright both participated in the movement called The Chicago Black Renaissance.

In 1942, Walker received the Yale Younger Poets Prize for her debut collection of poetry, For My People. She was the first African-American person to be awarded this prize. She went on to publish two more collections of poetry, and worked on her only novel, Jubilee, based on the true story of her enslaved great-grandmother.

. . . . . . . . . .

Learn more about Margaret Walker

. . . . . . . . . .

 

Occasionally, you may see Walker referred to as “Dr. Alexander,” reflecting the doctorate degree she earned coupled with her married name. Her books were all published under the name Margaret Walker.

Walker enjoyed a distinguished career as a university professor from the 1940s through the 1970s. She received six honorary degrees and was inducted into the African American Literary Hall of Fame in October 1998.

An analysis of Margaret Walker’s body of poetic work observes that:

“Walker spoke for all African Americans, the real heroes and the legendary ones, winners and losers, men and women, adults and children.

As a poet, Walker cast herself as a prophet or an oracle, connecting with her audience not by logic but through their emotions. She often relied on the techniques used so effectively by African American preachers, including ritualistic repetition or the call-and-response format.

Sometimes she used the kind of elevated language one would expect to hear in a sermon; at other times, however, she adopted the slangy, succinct vernacular.”

In a thought-provoking analysis of Margaret Walker’s poetry, “For My People” as the Fulfillment of Margaret Walker’s Literary Manifesto, observes:

[Her] poetic act of framing black people’s dreams into words and framing their souls into notes is an act of making them human by showing African people as critical and creative beings with desires to transcend the arresting of their natural human development and fulfill their human potential. 

Margaret Walker’s published poetry collections include:

For My People (1942)
Prophets for a New Day (1970)
October Journey (1973)
This Is My Century: New and Collected Poems (1989)

. . . . . . . . . .

 
For My People

For my people everywhere singing their slave songs

    repeatedly: their dirges and their ditties and their blues

    and jubilees, praying their prayers nightly to an

    unknown god, bending their knees humbly to an

    unseen power;

For my people lending their strength to the years, to the

    gone years and the now years and the maybe years,

    washing ironing cooking scrubbing sewing mending

    hoeing plowing digging planting pruning patching

    dragging along never gaining never reaping never

    knowing and never understanding;

For my playmates in the clay and dust and sand of Alabama

    backyards playing baptizing and preaching and doctor

    and jail and soldier and school and mama and cooking

    and playhouse and concert and store and hair and

    Miss Choomby and company;

For the cramped bewildered years we went to school to learn

    to know the reasons why and the answers to and the

    people who and the places where and the days when, in

    memory of the bitter hours when we discovered we

    were black and poor and small and different and nobody

    cared and nobody wondered and nobody understood;

For the boys and girls who grew in spite of these things to

    be man and woman, to laugh and dance and sing and

    play and drink their wine and religion and success, to

    marry their playmates and bear children and then die

    of consumption and anemia and lynching;

For my people thronging 47th Street in Chicago and Lenox

    Avenue in New York and Rampart Street in New

    Orleans, lost disinherited dispossessed and happy

    people filling the cabarets and taverns and other

    people’s pockets and needing bread and shoes and milk and

    land and money and something—something all our own;

For my people walking blindly spreading joy, losing time

    being lazy, sleeping when hungry, shouting when

    burdened, drinking when hopeless, tied, and shackled

    and tangled among ourselves by the unseen creatures

    who tower over us omnisciently and laugh;

For my people blundering and groping and floundering in

    the dark of churches and schools and clubs

    and societies, associations and councils and committees and

    conventions, distressed and disturbed and deceived and

    devoured by money-hungry glory-craving leeches,

    preyed on by facile force of state and fad and novelty, by

    false prophet and holy believer;

For my people standing staring trying to fashion a better way

    from confusion, from hypocrisy and misunderstanding,

    trying to fashion a world that will hold all the people,

    all the faces, all the adams and eves and their countless generations;

Let a new earth rise. Let another world be born. Let a

    bloody peace be written in the sky. Let a second

    generation full of courage issue forth; let a people

    loving freedom come to growth. Let a beauty full of

    healing and a strength of final clenching be the pulsing

    in our spirits and our blood. Let the martial songs

    be written, let the dirges disappear. Let a race of men now

    rise and take control.

(from For My People, 1942)

. . . . . . . . . .

 
Sorrow Home

My roots are deep in southern life; deeper than John Brown or Nat Turner or Robert Lee. I was sired

    and weaned in a tropic world. The palm tree and banana leaf, mango and coconut,

    breadfruit and rubber trees know me.

Warm skies and gulf blue streams are in my blood. I belong with the smell of fresh pine, with the

    trail of coon, and the spring growth of wild onion.

I am no hothouse bulb to be reared in steam-heated flats with the music of El and subway in my

    ears, walled in by steel and wood and brick far from the sky.

I want the cotton fields, tobacco and the cane. I want to walk along with sacks of seed to drop in

fallow ground. Restless music is in my heart and I am eager to be gone.

O Southland, sorrow home, melody beating in my bone and blood! How long will the Klan of

hate, the hounds and the chain gangs keep me from my own?

(from For My People, 1942)

. . . . . . . . . .

Southern Song

I want my body bathed again by southern suns, my soul

    reclaimed again from southern land. I want to rest

    again in southern fields, in grass and hay and clover

    bloom; to lay my hand again upon the clay baked by a

    southern sun, to touch the rain-soaked earth and smell

    the smell of soil.

I want my rest unbroken in the fields of southern earth;

    freedom to watch the corn wave silver in the sun and

    mark the splashing of a brook, a pond with ducks and

    frogs and count the clouds.

I want no mobs to wrench me from my southern rest; no

    forms to take me in the night and burn my shack and

    make for me a nightmare full of oil and flame.

I want my careless song to strike no minor key; no fiend to

    stand between my body’s southern song— the fusion of

    the South, my body’s song and me.

(from For My People, 1942)

. . . . . . . . . .

 
Dark Blood

There were bizarre beginnings in old lands for the making

    of me. There were sugar sands and islands of fern and

    pearl, palm jungles and stretches of a never-ending sea.

There were the wooing nights of tropical lands and the cool

    discretion of flowering plains between two stalwart

    hills. They nurtured my coming with wanderlust. I

    sucked fevers of adventure through my veins with my

    mother’s milk.

Someday I shall go to the tropical lands of my birth, to the

    coasts of continents and the tiny wharves of island

    shores. I shall roam the Balkans and the hot lanes of

    Africa and Asia. I shall stand on mountain tops and

    gaze on fertile homes below.

And when I return to Mobile I shall go by the way of

    Panama and Bocas del Toro to the littered streets and

    the one-room shacks of my old poverty, and blazing suns

    of other lands may struggle then to reconcile the pride

    and pain in me.

(from For My People, 1942)

. . . . . . . . . .

Love Song for Alex, 1979

My monkey-wrench man is my sweet patootie;

the lover of my life, my youth and age.

My heart belongs to him and to him only;

the children of my flesh are his and bear his rage

Now grown to years advancing through the dozens

the honeyed kiss, the lips of wine and fire

fade blissfully into the distant years of yonder

but all my days of Happiness and wonder

are cradled in his arms and eyes entire.

They carry us under the waters of the world

out past the starposts of a distant planet

And creeping through the seaweed of the ocean

they tangle us with ropes and yarn of memories

where we have been together, you and I.

(from This is My Century: New and Collected Poems, 1989)

. . . . . . . . . .

 
Lineage

My grandmothers were strong.

They followed plows and bent to toil.

They moved through fields sowing seed.

They touched earth and grain grew.

They were full of sturdiness and singing.

My grandmothers were strong.

My grandmothers are full of memories

Smelling of soap and onions and wet clay

With veins rolling roughly over quick hands

They have many clean words to say.

My grandmothers were strong.

Why am I not as they?

(from This is My Century: New and Collected Poems, 1989)

. . . . . . . . . .

For Malcolm X

All you violated ones with gentle hearts;

You violent dreamers whose cries shout heartbreak;

Whose voices echo clamors of our cool capers,

And whose black faces have hollowed pits for eyes.

All you gambling sons and hooked children and bowery bums

Hating white devils and black bourgeoisie,

Thumbing your noses at your burning red suns,

Gather round this coffin and mourn your dying swan.

Snow-white moslem head-dress around a dead black face!

Beautiful were your sand-papering words against our skins!

Our blood and water pour from your flowing wounds.

You have cut open our breasts and dug scalpels in our brains.

When and Where will another come to take your holy place?

Old man mumbling in his dotage, crying child, unborn?

(from This is My Century: New and Collected Poems, 1989)

. . . . . . . . . .

 
Childhood

When I was a child I knew red miners

dressed raggedly and wearing carbide lamps.

I saw them come down red hills to their camps

dyed with red dust from old Ishkooda mines.

Night after night I met them on the roads,

or on the streets in town I caught their glance;

the swing of dinner buckets in their hands,

and grumbling undermining all their words.

I also lived in low cotton country

where moonlight hovered over ripe haystacks,

or stumps of trees, and croppers’ rotting shacks

with famine, terror, flood, and plague near by;

where sentiment and hatred still held sway

and only bitter land was washed away.

(from This is My Century: New and Collected Poems, 1989)

. . . . . . . . . .

The Struggle Staggers Us

Our birth and death are easy hours, like sleep

and food and drink. The struggle staggers us

for bread, for pride, for simple dignity.

And this is more than fighting to exist;

more than revolt and war and human odds.

There is a journey from the me to you.

There is a journey from the you to me.

A union of the two strange worlds must be.

Ours is a struggle from a too-warm bed;

too cluttered with a patience full of sleep.

Out of this blackness we must struggle forth;

from want of bread, of pride, of dignity.

Struggle between the morning and the night.

This marks our years; this settles, too, our plight.

(Originally published in Poetry Magazine, 1938)

. . . . . . . . . .

 
I Want to Write

I want to write

I want to write the songs of my people.

I want to hear them singing melodies in the dark.

I want to catch the last floating strains from their sob-torn

throats.

I want to frame their dreams into words; their souls into

notes.

I want to catch their sunshine laughter in a bowl;

fling dark hands to a darker sky

and fill them full of stars

then crush and mix such lights till they become

a mirrored pool of brilliance in the dawn.

. . . . . . . . . .

October Journey

Traveller take heed for journeys undertaken in the dark of

the year.

Go in the bright blaze of Autumn’s equinox.

Carry protection against ravages of a sun-robber, a vandal,

a thief.

Cross no bright expanse of water in the full of the

moon.

Choose no dangerous summer nights;

no heavy tempting hours of spring;

October journeys are safest, brightest, and best.

I want to tell you what hills are like in October

when colors gush down mountainsides

and little streams are freighted with a caravan of leaves,

I want to tell you how they blush and turn in fiery shame

and joy,

how their love burns with flames consuming and terrible

until we wake one morning and woods are like a smoldering

plain-—

a glowing caldron full of jewelled fire;

the emerald earth a dragon’s eye

the poplars drenched with yellow light

and dogwoods blazing bloody red.

Travelling southward earth changes from gray rock to green

velvet.

Earth changes to red clay

with green grass growing brightly

with saffron skies of evening setting dully

with muddy rivers moving sluggishly.

In the early spring when the peach tree blooms

wearing a veil like a lavender haze

and the pear and plum in their bridal hair

gently snow their petals on earth’s grassy bosom below

then the soughing breeze is soothing

and the world seems bathed in tenderness,

but in October

blossoms have long since fallen.

A few red apples hang on leafless boughs;

wind whips bushes briskly

And where a blue stream sings cautiously

a barren land feeds hungrily.

An evil moon bleeds drops of death.

The earth burns brown.

Grass shrivels and dries to a yellowish mass.

Earth wears a dun-colored dress

like an old woman wooing the sun to be her lover,

be her sweetheart and her husband bound in one.

Farmers heap hay in stacks and bind corn in shocks

against the biting breath of frost.

The train wheels hum, ‘I am going home, I am going home,

I am moving toward the South.’

Soon cypress swamps and muskrat marshes

and black fields touched with cotton will appear.

I dream again of my childhood land

of a neighbor’s yard with a red-bud tree

the smell of pine for turpentine

an Easter dress, a Christmas eve

and winding roads from the top of a hill.

A music sings within my flesh

I feel the pulse within my throat

my heart fills up with hungry fear

while hills and flat lands stark and staring

before my dark eyes sad and haunting

appear and disappear.

Then when I touch this land again

the promise of a sun-lit hour dies.

The greenness of an apple seems

to dry and rot before my eyes.

The sullen winter rains

are tears of grief I cannot shed.

The windless days are static lives.

The clock runs down

timeless and still.

The days and nights turn hours to years

and water in a gutter marks the circle of another world

hating, resentful, and afraid,

stagnant, and green, and full of slimy things.

(October Journey, 1973)

. . . . . . . . . .

Margaret Walker page on Amazon*

. . . . . . . . . .

More about Margaret Walker

Poetry Foundation
Poets.org
Biography
Wikipedia
Reader discussion on Goodreads

. . . . . . . . . . .

*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 11 Poems by Margaret Walker appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.

10 Poems by Lucille Clifton, Chronicler of African-American Experience

Lucille Clifton (1936 – 2010) was a poet, teacher, and children’s book author whose life and career began in western New York. Her poetry is recognizable because of its purposeful lack of punctuation and capitalization. Here is a selection of 10 poems by Lucille Clifton, a small sampling of her prolific output.

Clifton’s widely respected poetry focuses on social issues, the African-American experience, and the female identity. Her poetry has been praised for its wise use of strong imagery, and lines that have even given the spacing of words meaning.

Poet Elizabeth Alexander praises Clifton’s use of strong language in her poetry, which was often spare and brief. Robin Becker of The American Poetry Review states that Clifton emphasizes the human element and morality of her poetry that’s amplified by the use of improper grammar.

Clifton was devoted to expressing the painful history of African-Americans. Yet she also expressed ideas of beauty and courage, addressing themes of women’s issues, everyday family struggles, and health. Read more about Lucille Clifton and her poetry at Poetry Foundation.

. . . . . . . . . .

 

Learn more about Lucille Clifton

. . . . . . . . . .

 
homage to my hips (1987)

these hips are big hips

they need space to

move around in.

they don’t fit into little

petty places. these hips

are free hips.

they don’t like to be held back.

these hips have never been enslaved,   

they go where they want to go

they do what they want to do.

these hips are mighty hips.

these hips are magic hips.

i have known them

to put a spell on a man and

spin him like a top!

. . . . . . . . . 

. . . . . . . . . .

 
the lost baby poem (1987)

the time i dropped your almost body down

down to meet the waters under the city

and run one with the sewage to the sea

what did i know about waters rushing back

what did i know about drowning

or being drowned

you would have been born into winter

in the year of the disconnected gas

and no car       we would have made the thin

walk over genesee hill into the canada wind

to watch you slip like ice into strangers’ hands

you would have fallen naked as snow into winter

if you were here i could tell you these

and some other things

if i am ever less than a mountain

for your definite brothers and sisters

let the rivers pour over my head

let the sea take me for a spiller

of seas        let black men call me stranger

always        for your never named sake

. . . . . . . . . .

1994 (1996)

i was leaving my fifty-eighth year

when a thumb of ice

stamped itself hard near my heart

you have your own story

you know about the fears the tears

the scar of disbelief

you know that the saddest lies

are the ones we tell ourselves

you know how dangerous it is

to be born with breasts

you know how dangerous it is

to wear dark skin

i was leaving my fifty-eighth year

when i woke into the winter

of a cold and mortal body

thin icicles hanging off

the one mad nipple weeping

have we not been good children

did we not inherit the earth

but you must know all about this

from your own shivering life

. . . . . . . . . .

 
adam thinking

she

stolen from my bone

is it any wonder

i hunger to tunnel back

inside desperate

to reconnect the rib and clay

and to be whole again

some need is in me

struggling to roar through my

mouth into a name

this creation is so fierce

i would rather have been born

. . . . . . . . . .

eve thinking

it is wild country here

brothers and sisters coupling

claw and wing

groping one another

 

i wait

while the clay two-foot

rumbles in his chest

searching for language to

 

call me

but he is slow

tonight as he sleeps

i will whisper into his mouth

our names

. . . . . . . . . .

 
my dream about being white (1987)

hey music and

me

only white,

hair a flutter of

fall leaves

circling my perfect

line of a nose,

no lips,

no behind, hey

white me

and i’m wearing

white history

but there’s no future

in those clothes

so i take them off and

wake up

dancing.

. . . . . . . . . .

sorrow song (1987)

for the eyes of the children,

the last to melt,

the last to vaporize,

for the lingering

eyes of the children, staring,

the eyes of the children of

buchenwald,

of viet nam and johannesburg,

for the eyes of the children

of nagasaki,

for the eyes of the children

of middle passage,

for cherokee eyes, ethiopian eyes,

russian eyes, american eyes,

for all that remains of the children,

their eyes,

staring at us, amazed to see

the extraordinary evil in

ordinary men.

. . . . . . . . . .

 
wishes for sons (1987)

i wish them cramps.

i wish them a strange town

and the last tampon.

i wish them no 7-11.

 

i wish them one week early

and wearing a white skirt.

i wish them one week late.

 

later i wish them hot flashes

and clots like you

wouldn’t believe. let the

flashes come when they

meet someone special.

let the clots come

when they want to.

 

let them think they have accepted

arrogance in the universe,

then bring them to gynecologists

not unlike themselves.

. . . . . . . . . .

the garden of delight (1991)

for some

it is stone

bare smooth

as a buttock

rounding

into the crevasse

of the world

for some

it is extravagant

water   mouths wide

washing together

forever   for some

it is fire

for some air

and for some

certain only of the syllables

it is the element they

search their lives for

eden

for them

it is a test

. . . . . . . . . .

 
blessing the boats (2000)

                                                                   (at St. Mary’s)

may the tide

that is entering even now

the lip of our understanding

carry you out

beyond the face of fear

may you kiss

the wind then turn from it

certain that it will

love your back     may you

open your eyes to water

water waving forever

and may you in your innocence

sail through this to that 

. . . . . . . . . . .

Lucille Clifton page on Amazon*

. . . . . . . . . . 

Lucille Clifton’s poetry collections

Good Times (1969)
Good News About the Earth (1972)
An Ordinary Woman (1974)
Two-Headed Woman (1980)
Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir: 1969–1980 (1987)
Next: New Poems (1987)
Quilting: Poems 1987–1990 (1991)
The Book of Light (1993)
The Terrible Stories  (1996)
Blessing The Boats: New and Collected Poems 1988–2000  (2000)
Mercy  (2004)
Voices (2008)
The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton (2012)

 

. . . . . . . . . . . 

*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 10 Poems by Lucille Clifton, Chronicler of African-American Experience appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.

10 Poems by Lucille Clifton, Chronicler of the African-American Experience

Lucille Clifton (1936 – 2010) was a poet, teacher, and children’s book author whose life and career began in western New York. Her poetry is recognizable because of its purposeful lack of punctuation and capitalization. Here is a selection of 10 poems by Lucille Clifton, a small sampling of her prolific output.

Clifton’s widely respected poetry focuses on social issues, the African American experience, and the female identity. Her poetry has been praised for its wise use of strong imagery, and lines that have even given the spacing of words meaning.

Poet Elizabeth Alexander praises Clifton’s use of strong language in her poetry, which was often spare and brief. Robin Becker of The American Poetry Review states that Clifton emphasizes the human element and morality of her poetry that’s amplified by the use of improper grammar.

Clifton was devoted to expressing the painful history of African-Americans. Yet she also expressed ideas of beauty and courage, addressing themes of women’s issues, everyday family struggles, and health. Read more about Lucille Clifton and her poetry at Poetry Foundation.

. . . . . . . . . .

Learn more about Lucille Clifton

. . . . . . . . . .

 
homage to my hips (1987)

these hips are big hips

they need space to

move around in.

they don’t fit into little

petty places. these hips

are free hips.

they don’t like to be held back.

these hips have never been enslaved,   

they go where they want to go

they do what they want to do.

these hips are mighty hips.

these hips are magic hips.

i have known them

to put a spell on a man and

spin him like a top!

. . . . . . . . . 

. . . . . . . . . .

 
the lost baby poem (1987)

the time i dropped your almost body down

down to meet the waters under the city

and run one with the sewage to the sea

what did i know about waters rushing back

what did i know about drowning

or being drowned

you would have been born into winter

in the year of the disconnected gas

and no car       we would have made the thin

walk over genesee hill into the canada wind

to watch you slip like ice into strangers’ hands

you would have fallen naked as snow into winter

if you were here i could tell you these

and some other things

if i am ever less than a mountain

for your definite brothers and sisters

let the rivers pour over my head

let the sea take me for a spiller

of seas        let black men call me stranger

always        for your never named sake

. . . . . . . . . .

1994 (1996)

i was leaving my fifty-eighth year

when a thumb of ice

stamped itself hard near my heart

you have your own story

you know about the fears the tears

the scar of disbelief

you know that the saddest lies

are the ones we tell ourselves

you know how dangerous it is

to be born with breasts

you know how dangerous it is

to wear dark skin

i was leaving my fifty-eighth year

when i woke into the winter

of a cold and mortal body

thin icicles hanging off

the one mad nipple weeping

have we not been good children

did we not inherit the earth

but you must know all about this

from your own shivering life

. . . . . . . . . .

 
adam thinking

she

stolen from my bone

is it any wonder

i hunger to tunnel back

inside desperate

to reconnect the rib and clay

and to be whole again

some need is in me

struggling to roar through my

mouth into a name

this creation is so fierce

i would rather have been born

. . . . . . . . . .

eve thinking

it is wild country here

brothers and sisters coupling

claw and wing

groping one another

 

i wait

while the clay two-foot

rumbles in his chest

searching for language to

 

call me

but he is slow

tonight as he sleeps

i will whisper into his mouth

our names

. . . . . . . . . .

 
my dream about being white (1987)

hey music and

me

only white,

hair a flutter of

fall leaves

circling my perfect

line of a nose,

no lips,

no behind, hey

white me

and i’m wearing

white history

but there’s no future

in those clothes

so i take them off and

wake up

dancing.

. . . . . . . . . .

sorrow song (1987)

for the eyes of the children,

the last to melt,

the last to vaporize,

for the lingering

eyes of the children, staring,

the eyes of the children of

buchenwald,

of viet nam and johannesburg,

for the eyes of the children

of nagasaki,

for the eyes of the children

of middle passage,

for cherokee eyes, ethiopian eyes,

russian eyes, american eyes,

for all that remains of the children,

their eyes,

staring at us, amazed to see

the extraordinary evil in

ordinary men.

. . . . . . . . . .

 
wishes for sons (1987)

i wish them cramps.

i wish them a strange town

and the last tampon.

i wish them no 7-11.

 

i wish them one week early

and wearing a white skirt.

i wish them one week late.

 

later i wish them hot flashes

and clots like you

wouldn’t believe. let the

flashes come when they

meet someone special.

let the clots come

when they want to.

 

let them think they have accepted

arrogance in the universe,

then bring them to gynecologists

not unlike themselves.

. . . . . . . . . .

the garden of delight (1991)

for some

it is stone

bare smooth

as a buttock

rounding

into the crevasse

of the world

for some

it is extravagant

water   mouths wide

washing together

forever   for some

it is fire

for some air

and for some

certain only of the syllables

it is the element they

search their lives for

eden

for them

it is a test

. . . . . . . . . .

 
blessing the boats (2000)

                                                                   (at St. Mary’s)

may the tide

that is entering even now

the lip of our understanding

carry you out

beyond the face of fear

may you kiss

the wind then turn from it

certain that it will

love your back     may you

open your eyes to water

water waving forever

and may you in your innocence

sail through this to that 

. . . . . . . . . . .

Lucille Clifton page on Amazon*

. . . . . . . . . . 

Lucille Clifton’s poetry collections

Good Times (1969)
Good News About the Earth (1972)
An Ordinary Woman (1974)
Two-Headed Woman (1980)
Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir: 1969–1980 (1987)
Next: New Poems (1987)
Quilting: Poems 1987–1990 (1991)
The Book of Light (1993)
The Terrible Stories  (1996)
Blessing The Boats: New and Collected Poems 1988–2000  (2000)
Mercy  (2004)
Voices (2008)
The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton (2012)

 

. . . . . . . . . . . 

*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 10 Poems by Lucille Clifton, Chronicler of the African-American Experience appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.

Lucille Clifton

Lucille Clifton (June 26, 1936 – February 13, 2010) was a prolific American poet, teacher, and children’s book author. Clifton’s work focused on issues of race, family affairs, and gender through the lens of the African-American experience.

Clifton’s poetry was first published by Langston Hughes, who included it in his impactful anthology, The Poetry of the Negro (1746-1970). 

 

Poetic style and themes

Clifton’s poetry is easily identified because of the purposeful lack of capitalization and proper punctuation. The central message of her work is the celebration of African-American heritage and the endurance, strength, and beauty of Black women.

Poet Elizabeth Alexander praises Clifton’s use of strong language in her poetry, which was often spare and brief. Robin Becker of The American Poetry Review states that Clifton emphasizes the human element and morality of her poetry that’s amplified by the use of improper grammar.

She devoted to expressing the painful history of African-Americans. Yet she also expressed ideas of beauty and courage. She also created works about women’s issues, everyday family struggles, and health. Her work has been described as feminist.

Clifton sometimes conveyed her messages through the voices of Biblical characters, and paid homage to her personal heroes, including W.E.B. Dubois, Nelson and Winnie Mandela, Huey Newton, and others.

. . . . . . . . . 

. . . . . . . . . .

Education and marriage

Born Thelma Lucille Sayles, Lucille Clifton was born in DePew, New York and raised in Buffalo. She attended Howard University and majored in drama, and left to pursue her passion for poetry. 

Returning to her hometown in 1955, Clifton completed her studies at Fredonia College and met Fred Clifton, a professor of philosophy at the University of Buffalo. They married three years later. The couple moved to Baltimore, Maryland and raised a family of six children — two sons and four daughters.

Clifton completed her residency at Coppin State College in Baltimore, MD, and subsequently obtained a visiting professorship at Columbia University and at George Washington University. She also taught literature and creative writing at the University of California at Santa Cruz and at St. Mary’s College of Maryland, and was Maryland’s Poet Laureate from 1974 to 1985. 

 

Children’s Book Author

In addition to her many poetry collections, Clifton wrote a number of children’s books as well. One of her best-known series featured a young black boy, Everett Anderson, which included: Some of the Days of Everett Anderson (1970), Everett Anderson’s Goodbye (1983), and One of the Problems of Everett Anderson (2001). She also wrote My Friend Jacob, about a disabled child’s friendship.

Comparing Clifton’s poetry to her children’s books, Jocelyn K. Moody wrote in the Oxford Companion to African American Literature, “Like her poetry, Clifton’s short fiction extols the human capacity for love, rejuvenation, and transcendence over weakness and malevolence even as it exposes the myth of the American dream.”

. . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . .

Major poetry collections

Clifton published her first poetry collection, Good Times: Poems in 1969. It was widely praised and was named as one of the top ten best books of 1969 on several lists. Her second collection, Good News about the Earth: New Poems (1972) addressed the societal and political changes of the 1960s and 1970s, and paid tribute to the many African American political leaders.

Her third collection, An Ordinary Woman (1974), focused far less on social issues and more about her experiences as an African-American woman.

Clifton’s widely respected poetry, including the well-known “homage to my hips,” embraces female identity. In what is one of her most famous poems, she made the bold statement that her hips “don’t fit into those petty places” and they will not be held back or “enslaved.” Clifton conveys the message that she won’t conform to the societal definition of female beauty, but instead embraces herself and her body. 

Reynolds Price wrote in The New York Times Book Review that Clifton’s fourth book was a gracefully written eulogy to Clifton’s parents that celebrated them. It was later incorporated into Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir: 1969-1980, and was followed by Quilting and The Book of Light.

Blessing the Boats addressed her battle with breast cancer. Her poem “1994” was about her the lumpectomy she had that year to remove cancerous cells. At the beginning of the poem, she described the pain of cancer as a “thumb of ice” near the heart. Clifton uses cold imagery throughout this poem to convey feel her fear of loss of identity and femininity through the experience of having lost her breasts and hair, and going through the phases of chemotherapy. 

Clifton passed away at the age of 73 in 2010 after a long battle with cancer.

. . . . . . . . . . .

Lucille Clifton page on Amazon*

. . . . . . . . . .

Awards and honors

Clifton is best known as the first author to have had two pieces of literature as finalists for the Pulitzer Prize: Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir, 1969-1980 (1987), and Next: New Poems (1987). 

She also received the National Book Award for Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems (1988-2000), and the highly esteemed Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize for lifetime achievement in poetry in 2007. 

Two-Headed Woman was both a Pulitzer Prize nominee and a University of Massachusetts Jupiter Prize winner.

Clifton’s eight-part Everett Anderson children’s book series, which educated children on African American heritage led Clifton to earn the Coretta Scott King Award in 1984 for Everett Anderson’s Goodbye.

My Friend Jacob also won the Access to Equality Conference Award for Children’s Literature in “Recognition for Outstanding Treatment of Disabled Children.”

. . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . .

Lucille Clifton’s Legacy

In an interview with Antioch Review’s Michael S. Glaser, Clifton states that “writing is a way of continuing to hope … perhaps for me it is a way of remembering I am not alone.” In 1976, she published her memoir, Generations.

Through her writings Clifton hoped “to be seen as a woman whose roots go back to Africa, who tried to honor being human. My inclination is to try to help.”

More about Lucille Clifton

Major works – poetry collections

Good Times (1969)
Good News About the Earth (1972)
An Ordinary Woman (1974)
Two-Headed Woman (1980)
Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir: 1969–1980 (1987)
Next: New Poems (1987)
Quilting: Poems 1987–1990 (1991)
The Book of Light (1993)
The Terrible Stories  (1996)
Blessing The Boats: New and Collected Poems 1988–2000  (2000)
Mercy  (2004)
Voices, Rochester: BOA Editions, 2008, ISBN 978-1-934414-12-5
The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton, Rochester, BOA Editions, (2012) ISBN 978-1-934414-90-3

Major works – children’s books

Three Wishes 
The Boy Who Didn’t Believe In Spring 
The Lucky Stone
The Times They Used To Be 
All Us Come Cross the Water 
My Friend Jacob 
Amifika 
Sonora the Beautiful 
The Black B C’s 

The Everett Anderson children’s book series 

Everett Anderson’s Goodbye 
One of the Problems of Everett Anderson
Everett Anderson’s Friend 
Everett Anderson’s Christmas Coming
Everett Anderson’s 1-2-3 
Everett Anderson’s Year 
Some of the Days of Everett Anderson 
Everett Anderson’s Nine Month Long 

More information

Poetry Foundation
Britannica
Maryland Women’s Hall of Fame
Wikipedia
Reader discussion on Goodreads

. . . . . . . . . . . 

*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 Lucille Clifton appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.

The Edwardians by Vita Sackville-West (1930)

The Edwardians by Vita Sackville-West, published in 1930, is a novel that critiques the aristocracy of the early 20th century. The work was very much a reflection of the world that Vita grew up in.

As the only child of the aristocratic Victoria and Lionel Edward Sackville-West, a Baron, she had all the duties of a male heir, yet as a female, she wasn’t able to inherit Knole, the castle in which the small family lived.

In The Edwardians, the country estate of Knole castle becomes the fictional Chevron. Within the fictional framework, Vita reproduces in exquisite detail its physical features. 

Vita possessed a dual nature where gender was concerned, so it’s not surprising that she chose a male character to represent the position she would have inherited had she been born male.

The Edwardians was first published in England by Hogarth Press, the small publishing company owned and operated by Virginia and Leonard Woolf.

. . . . . . . . . . .

Learn more about Vita Sackville-West

. . . . . . . . . . .

A brief plot summary of The Edwardians

The main character of the narrative is 19-year-old Sebastian, Duke of Chevron. Due to his youth and initial inexperience, it could be argued that this novel is in the tradition of the Bildungsroman. Sebastian is in line to inherit the country estate once he turns twenty-one, but until such time, it’s overseen by his mother, the widowed Lucy, Dowager Duchess of Chevron.

Sebastian attends Oxford University and on weekends, returns home, where his mother throws lavish parties awash in drink, food, and affairs. As the story gets underway, one of the guests Sebastian encounters is Leonard Anquetil, an adventurer.

Anquetil engages Sebastian in a conversation in which he attempts to convince the young heir of the hypocrisy and shallowness of the social goings-on at Chevron. But Sebastian is unconvinced, or rather doesn’t want to be convinced, since he has freshly embarked on an affair with a married woman, Sylvia Roehamptan, a friend of his mother’s.

When the two are found out, Lady Roehampton ends the affair, wishing to avoid scandal. Undaunted, Sebastian pursues other affairs, and this goes on until he finally capitulates to the idea of marrying a proper young lady and serving in the court of the newly coronated King George V.

Another chance encounter with Anquietil dissuades him from the momentous decision to settle down. It so happens that Anquietil has been seeing Sebastian’s liberated sister, Viola. Sebastian agrees to join the adventurer on the expedition.

It’s equally the plot, the scrutiny of aristocratic life, and the minute details of a castle estate that has made this one of Vita Sackville-West’s most enduring works.

. . . . . . . . . .

Knole, the model for the fictional Chevron,

is now part of the National Trust in the U.K.

. . . . . . . . . .

“No character in this book is wholly fictitious”

A description of this novel in Vita Sackville-West: Selected Writings (edited by Mary Ann Caws, 2002), makes clear that much in the novel is based on the author’s experiences, and the people closest to her:

“A statement precedes this volume as an author’s note, the contrary of the usual disclaimer about the reality of the depictions in relation to the writer’s imagination:

‘No character in this book is wholly fictitious.’ Beginning on this self-conscious note, the novelist treats herself as a presumably non-generic ‘he.’

‘Among the many problems which beset the novelist, not the least weighty is the choice of the moment at which to begin his novel.’

This hugely successful novel presents a picture of some of the novelist’s own problems. Among them, the protagonist’s attachment to a great house modeled after Knole, a duchess modeled after Vita’s mother, and siblings Sebastian and Viola modeled after Vita herself.

Sebastian’s struggles with life and love, torn between adventure, sin, and conformity to his wealthy upper class expectations and traditions. Most interesting are the descriptions of the house parties and of Sylvia, one of the central female characters, the older woman with whom Sebastian has his first love affair.

On April 19, 1930, The Edwardians was presented as a play at the Richmond Theatre, to great acclaim.”

The Edwardians was well received on both sides of the Atlantic and was a book club selection in both the U.S. and Britain. Here is one such typical review:

 
A 1930 review of The Edwardians by Vita Sackville-West

From the original review in The Fort Worth Star-Telegram, September 21, 1930: Lament for the lost glories of a house: Historic Knole Castle is the real hero of Vita Sackville-West’s book.

Though a slender, dark, handsome youth wanders petulantly in search of truth through the glittering pages of The Edwardians, Vita Sackville-West’s novel, the real hero of the book is a house that is mysterious, friendly, comforting, ancient, and wise.

Knole Castle has been celebrated in history and poetry as well as in fiction. The home of the Sackvilles was the setting of Orlando, Virginia Woolf’s novel, which has been recognized as a composite portrait of Sackville-West and her ancestors.

A portrait of Knole in the guise of Chevron

It was the subject of Knole and the Sackvilles and now in The Edwardians it is again presented, this time as “Chevron.” Chevron is a thinly disguised yet accurate picture of Knole, with its magnificent park and its seven acres of roof, a gift that Queen Elizabeth presented to her Lord Treasurer, Thomas Sackville, from whom Vita Sackville-West descends.

Knole Castle is said to have 365 rooms, one for every day in the year, seven courts, one for each day of the week, and fifty-two staircases, one for each week.

According to Sackville-West, the main block of Knole dates from the end of the fifteenth century, although there are several earlier outbuildings. The walls are of gray stone, in many places ten and twelve feet thick and most of the rooms are rather small and low. The windows are rich with armorial glass.

. . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . .

The portrait galleries at Knole

Many of the floors are made of black oak trees sawed in half. The wood walls are hung with countless pictures, the Sackville portraits of ten generations. Miss Sackville-West explains:

“Let them stand each as the prototype of his age, and at the same time as a link to carry on, not only their tradition but also their heredity, and they immediately acquire a significance, a unity.

You have first the grave Elizabethans, Thomas Sackville, with the  long, rather melancholy face, emerging from the oval frame above the black clothes and the white wand of the office; you perceive all his severe integrity; you understand the intimidation austerity of the contribution he made to English letters, undoubtedly a fine old man.

You come down to his grandson; he is the Cavalier by Vandyck hanging in the hall, hand on hip, his flame-colored doublet slashed across by the blue of the Garter; this is the man who raised a troop of horses off his own estates and vowed never to cross the threshold of his house into an England governed by the murderers of the King.

You have next the florid, magnificent Charles, the fruit of the Restoration, poet, and patron of poets — prodigal, jovial, and licentious; you have him full length by Sir Godfrey Kneller, in his Garter robes and his enormous wig, his foot and fine calf well thrust forward.

You have him less pompous and more intimate wrapped in a dressing gown of figured silk, the wig replaced by a Hogarthian turban; but it is still the same coarse face, with the heavy jowl and the twinkling eyes, the crony of Rochester and Sedley, the patron and host of Pope and Dryden, Prior and Killigrew.

You come down to the 18th century. You have Gainsborough’s canvas of the beautiful sensitive face of the fickle duke, spoilt, feared, and propitiated by the women of London and Paris, the reputed lover of Marie Antoinette.

You have his son, too fair and pretty a boy, the friend of Byron, killed in the hunting field at the age of twenty-one, the last direct male of a race too prodigal, too amorous, too weak, too indolent and too melancholy.”

. . . . . . . . . . 

The Edwardians by Vita Sackville-West on Amazon*

. . . . . . . . . . .

The Edwardians: A portrait of a useless and aristocratic society

Like the novels of Edith Wharton, The Edwardians will appeal to many who may fail to catch its point: the intimate portrait of a useless and aristocratic society. Miss Miss Sackville-West herself, however, sees it with commendable balance. She has killed the thing she loved with neither too much ruthlessness nor too much pity; she has simply told the truth.

She deals with a period and class that possessed a certain glamour and charm, and she has let us feel them; but even more forcefully, she has let us feel the emptiness, the triviality, and the wastefulness that went with them.

The Edwardians relates the splendid dying fall of the privileged classes in England during the aimless years before the war. The old order, which persisted so long under Queen Victoria, had changed. But the new had not quite asserted itself: there was no longer a morality, but there was a great emphasis on appearances.

Questioning traditions

What went on in the neighborhood of Grosvenor Square and in the great country houses was all trivial, and much of it, in the social sense immoral, but these people, who cared about so little else, still took care that no breath of scandal should ever reach the bourgeoisie.

Women did not smoke in public or dine alone with men in restaurants, and husband who surprised their wives with lovers did not divorce them. The old dowagers still ruled society; the great bourgeoisie captains of industry still knocked at its doors in vain.

One questioned one’s traditions as never before, but one seldom broke them. It was definitely an age of transition.

. . . . . . . . . .

You might also enjoy:

Portrait of a Marriage: Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson

. . . . . . . . .

Introducing Sebastian, Duke of Chevron

Into this meaningless era was born Sebastian, the twelfth duke of his line. His home was Chevron, a magnificent country house with centuries of tradition behind it. Chevron, we are told, is the fictional incarnation of Knole, the home of the Sackville family and the mise-en-scene of another book, Virginia Woolf’s Orlando.

It was Sebastian’s fate to be pulled two ways in life: to hate the triviality of upper-class existence and yet to love Chevron with its charm and beauty and sense of being home. His mother and sister knew of no such indecision: his mother conformed and his sister rebelled.

But Sebastian, unable to make up his mind, went from love affair to love affair, from dissent to acquiescence, and finally decided to marry a very plain young woman from his own set. But he ran into Anquetil, an explorer who long ago had tried to show him how meaningless his life was, and this time, Anquietil was successful. Instead of becoming engaged, Sebastian went off to explore.

A study in manners and social history

As a picture, a study in manners, and a record of social history, The Edwardians could hardly be better. Miss Sackville-West knows her people intimately, she understands them perfectly She reproduces them as a group against a background brilliantly.

Her book is a personally conducted tour into a world from which all but a few would have been rigorously excluded. The guide has point out everything from the family portraits to the kind of china on the dinner table to the upholstery inside the family state coach to the crest on the writing paper.

She can describe the coronation of George V and reveal both its grandeur and its comedy. She can make Chevron seem the most delectable spot in the world and at the same time the most stifling. The details in The Edwardians makes an organized satiric approach unnecessary — it conveys so much that the facts speak for themselves.

. . . . . . . . . .

*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 The Edwardians by Vita Sackville-West (1930) appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.