Nava Atlas's Blog, page 54

8 Fascinating Facts About Lorraine Hansberry

Lorraine Hansberry (1930 – 1965) was an American playwright and author best known for A Raisin in the Sun, a 1959 play that was influenced by her background and upbringing in Chicago. The fascinating facts about Lorraine Hansberry that follow illustrate her growth as an African American woman, activist, and writer.

Though A Raisin in the Sun is the crown jewel in Hansberry’s legacy, she was also known for the plays The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window and Les Blancs. 

To Be Young, Gifted and Black was a posthumously produced play and  collection of writings that capped a brief and brilliant career. When she died of pancreatic cancer in 1965, she was only 34 years old.

 

The first Black woman to have a play staged on Broadway

A Raisin in the Sun was the first play written by an African American woman to be produced on Broadway. When she was only 29 years old, Hansberry became the youngest American and the first African-American playwright to win the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award for Best Play.

Hansberry commented on her play:

“It is a play that tells the truth about people, Negroes [in the parlance of the time], and life. The thing I tried to show was the many gradations in even one Negro family, the clash of the old and the new, but most of all the unbelievable courage of the Negro people.”

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Learn more about Lorraine Hansberry

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Her father was a plaintiff in a Supreme Court housing case

Lorraine Hansberry’s father, Carl Augustus Hansberry, was involved in the Supreme Court case. It was previously ruled that African Americans were not allowed to purchase property in the Washington Park subdivision in Chicago, Illinois. 

In 1938, after her father bought a house in the south side of Chicago, the family was subject to the wrath of their white neighbors, resulting in U.S. Supreme Court’s Hansberry v. Lee case. 

This experience is reflected in Raisin in how unwelcoming the white community was to the Younger family in Clybourne Park. Hansberry’s father died in 1946 when she was only fifteen years old. She was later quoted as saying that “American racism helped kill him.”

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Learn more about Lorraine Hansberry

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She came from an accomplished circle of family and friends

The Hansberry family had many friends and relatives that were involved in the arts. W.E.B. Du Bois, the Civil Rights activist, author, sociologist, and historian, and Paul Robeson, the musician and actor, were friends of the Hansberry family.

Hansberry’s uncle, William Leo Hansberry, founded the Howard University African Civilization section of the history department, her cousin Shauneille Perry is an actress and playwright, and her younger relatives, Taye Hansberry is an actress and Aldridge Hansberry is a composer and flutist.

Later, Hansberry would maintain her own close bonds with Du Bois, Robeson, Langston Hughes, and James Baldwin. All mourned her premature death.

 

The title, A Raisin in the Sun, came from a Langston Hughes poem

The title of Hansberry’s now-iconic play A Raisin In the Sun was inspired by Hughes’ poem “Harlem.” One could argue that the play illustrated the poem’s sentiment:

What happens to a dream deferred?
 
      Does it dry up
      like a raisin in the sun?
      Or fester like a sore—
      And then run?
      Does it stink like rotten meat?
      Or crust and sugar over—
      like a syrupy sweet?
 
      Maybe it just sags
      like a heavy load.
 
      Or does it explode?

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Quotes from A Raisin in the Sun

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Nina Simone dedicated a song to her

In 1969, four years after Lorainne Hansberry’s death, Nina Simone wrote a song titled “Young, Gifted, and Black” after being inspired by a talk that Hansberry delivered to college students. Since that time, other artists including Aretha Franklin have covered the song, which begins:

To be young, gifted and black

Oh, what a lovely precious dream

To be young, gifted and black

Open your heart to what I mean

In the whole world you know

There are a million boys and girls

Who are young, gifted and black

And that’s a fact!

Hansberry and Simone had been friends and shared a bond over their interests in social justice and radical politics. also named Lorraine Hansberry the Godmother of her daughter, Lisa Simone.

 
Hansberry was an advocate for gay rights

Hansberry was a contributor to The Ladder, a predominantly lesbian publication, where she wrote about homophobia and feminism. She even wrote anonymous letters to the publication alluding to her own lesbian relationships.

Princeton Professor Imani Perry, author of Looking for Lorraine, wrote that “she was a feminist before the feminist movement. She identified as a lesbian and thought about LGBT organizing before there was a gay rights movement. She was an anti-colonialist before independence had been won in Africa and the Caribbean.”

Hansberry kept a low profile of her identity as a lesbian.

 

Hansberry addressed social issues in her writings

Not only did Hansberry address social and racial issues in her novels and plays, but she also wrote articles true to her voice and beliefs for a progressive black journal, Freedom, concerning governmental issues. She explored the issues of colonialism and imperialism through her own lens as well as the female perspective.



Hansberry was invited to meet Robert F. Kennedy (then U.S. Attorney General) in May, 1963 due to the work she had done as a Civil Rights activist, but declined the invitation. She admonished the Kennedy administration to be more active in addressing the problem of segregation in the community.

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To Be Young, Gifted and Black

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James Baldwin was Lorraine Hansberry’s close friend and confidant

Lorraine Hansberry was 28 when she met James Baldwin, 34 at the time. Lorraine believed that the artist’s voice in whatever medium was to be as an agent for social change. That was what formed their bond at the time when Lorraine was developing her own black, feminist, and queer politics.

Both of these talented writers wanted to incorporate themes of race and sexual identity into their stage work, something that was considered quite radical at the time.

James Baldwin wrote the introduction to Hansberry’s biography, To Be Young, Gifted, and Black with an endearing letter to Hansberry titled “Sweet Lorraine.”

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Norma Brickner is a Journalism and Digital Media major at SUNY-New Paltz.

The post 8 Fascinating Facts About Lorraine Hansberry appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.

How Alice Walker Rediscovered Zora Neale Hurston

After discovering, reading, and rereading Zora Neale Hurston’s works, Alice Walker felt as if she knew Hurston personally. By the time of Hurston’s death, most of her considerable body of work was out of print, rarely read or studied. Here we’ll explore how Alice Walker rediscovered Zora Neale Hurston and revived her literary legacy.

Zora Neale Hurston (1891 – 1960) had a dual career as an anthropologist and author, incorporating regional and cultural realism in her short stories, folklore collections, and novels.

Alice Walker (1944 – ) is an activist, novelist, short story writer, and poet best known for the 1982 novel The Color Purple. Works by Walker and Hurston were included in a 1967 anthology of stories. Yet Alice Walker wasn’t very familiar with Zora Neale Hurston at the time.

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More about Zora Neale Hurston

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Making her mark in the Harlem Renaissance

Hurston was a major name in the Harlem Renaissance movement of the 1920s. In 1937, what would become her best-known novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, was published. Though it was controversial in its time, later generations of readers, especially women, would find its message empowering.

Although the Harlem Renaissance embraced and promoted Black artists and writers, bringing fame to many who participated in it, Zora’s reputation had completely declined by the time of her death in 1960. 

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Alice Walker

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In search of Zora Neale Hurston

It was a few years after Zora’s death that Walker read Their Eyes Were Watching God, which set her on the path of researching Zora Neale Hurston’s life and work.

Walker admired how Hurston embraced Black culture through her literature. Something the two authors share in their writing style is that Their Eyes Were Watching God (and other works) and The Color Purple both use the Black southern vernacular in their characters’ dialogue.

In the essay “In Search of Zora Neale Hurston” (first published in Ms. magazine in 1975, later titled “Looking for Zora”) Alice Walker explored Hurston’s hometown of Eatonville, Florida, and came to understand that it was immensely influential to her works. 

 
The influence of Eatonville

Hurston’s father was born into slavery; her mother was born to freed slaves. Having lineage branching towards both slavery and freedom is an intriguing background, and perhaps influenced Zora Neale Hurston’s attitude toward the world’s restricting hierarchy. 

Growing up in Eatonville, Florida, a small town with such an intentional Afro-American community, might have caused Hurston to experience culture shock once she realized that in the wider world, she was considered a minority, and “less-than.” 

Walker discovered that some characters in Hurston’s works were based on the people in her life. One of them was Jody Stark, who was inspired by Joe Clarke, the first mayor of Eatonville, and one of Hurston’s uncles. 

 

Searching for Zora’s grave

Farther along in her quest, Walker felt drawn to travel to the cemetery where Zora Neale Hurston was buried, the Garden of Heavenly Rest in Fort Pierce, Florida.

Walker wanted to honor the writer who had been such an inspiration, only to discover that Hurston’s unmarked grave had caved in and had been overrun by weeds and snakes. Once Walker was as certain as possible that she’d found the right spot, she purchased a headstone and had it engraved. She observed:

“There are times — and finding Zora’s grave was one of them — when normal responses of grief, horror, and so on, do not make sense because they bear no relation to the depth of emotion that one feels. 

It was impossible for me to cry when I saw the field full of weeds where Zora is. Partly this is because I have come to know Zora through her books and she was not a teary person herself; but partly, too, it is because there is a point at which even grief feels absurd.”

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Their Eyes Were Watching God

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Ripe for rediscovery

In Their Eyes Were Watching God, the main character, Janie Crawford, gains her freedom and gains her power after the death of her most-loved husband, Tea-Cake.

This novel challenges societal patriarchy through one African-American woman’s journey of self-discovery. Walker found these ideals and values in Hurston’s literature worthy of being presented to a new generation of readers.

Hurston’s writings seemed ripe for rediscovery in the 1970s, a time when social movements were re-envisioning the relationship between gender and race, and searching for a feminine identity not defined by a patriarchal society. 

Her writings, especially Their Eyes Were Watching God, were controversial in their time, partly due to the use of Black southern vernacular. Some critics felt that this served only to ridicule the black community and provide a source of entertainment for white readers. But in reality, Hurston was expressing affection for the people she grew up with.

In Walker’s collection of essays, In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens (1983), she writes as if she is the metaphorical daughter of Hurston and other great African American female writers before her.

Through their struggles of slavery, oppression, and sexually exploitation, they paved the way for authors and poets who came after them. Certainly, many of today’s African American women authors stand on the shoulders of Zora Neale Hurston.

“Zora Neale Hurston: A Genius of the South” — The inscription that Alice Walker provided for the gravestone she erected says it all.

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In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens by Alice Walker on Amazon*

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Further reading and sources

“In Search of Zora Neale Hurston” by Alice Walker
Crafting a Voice for Black Culture (NPR)
“Black Matrilineage: The case of Alice Walker and Zora Neale Hurston” by Dianne F. Sadoff, University of Chicago Press Journals
Zora Neale Hurston … “A Genius of the South”

Norma Brickner is a Journalism and Digital Media major at SUNY-New Paltz.

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

The post How Alice Walker Rediscovered Zora Neale Hurston appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.

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

Elizabeth Taylor (1912 – 1975) knew from a young age that she wanted to be a novelist — to be clear, this isn’t  in reference to the renowned actress, but to the prolific British author. In the following selection of quotes from Elizabeth Taylor’s fiction, we get a glimpse of her literary gifts. 

Her first novel, At Mrs Lippincote’s, was published in 1945. Here, Roddy, an RAF officer has been stationed in a small town in southern England and, now, his wife and son and cousin have joined him in what used to be Mrs Lippincote’s house. Mr and Mrs Lippincote have died, but the Davenant family is building a life together.

Her last novel, Blaming, was published posthumously in 1976.  Here, Amy is unexpectedly widowed in Istanbul and Martha helps her travel home to England. Sharing this intense experience suggests a solid foundation for a friendship, but when the women return to England, maintaining that tie is a challenge.

These are everyday events in ordinary people’s lives: throughout her twelve novels and sixty-five short stories, Elizabeth Taylor has been inspired and fueled by such events.

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Learn more about Elizabeth Taylor

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Character

Taylor’s female characters are often at the heart of her stories, and they remain distinct and memorable creations. Consider how different readers’ impressions are of the following three women in her stories: Julia’s observations of the Wing Commander’s wife, Angel, and Camilla.

Twittering, gazing and supplanting: Taylor’s observations are succinct and evocative. We feel like we know these characters, sometimes more intimately than they know themselves:

“She twitters. Like all the wives of somber men, she froths and seethes and bubbles, keeps herself at boiling-point ready for emergencies.”  (At Mrs Lippincote’s)

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“Angel, at first shocked, soon grew used, from constant looking, to seeing only what she chose, especially the narrowness of her bare hand with its emerald ring. She would gaze at this detail for a long time each day.” (Angel)

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“She made the mistake always of thinking people would like what she herself liked; she put herself too much in other people’s places, instead of allowing them to stay there themselves.” (A Wreath of Roses)

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Here are even more quotes by Elizabeth Taylor, British novelist

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The senses

Another way that Taylor involves readers in her stories about ordinary lives is to evoke simple sensory details. Our noses and our fingertips are engaged—we feel the prickling and the slicing. Elizabeth Taylor’s use of detail is specific and astute:

“The smell was suffocating. Cats had wetted the carpets for centuries, Camilla decided. Bushels of onions had been fried. No one had washed, or opened a window.” (A Wreath of Roses)

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“The sandwiches they had ordered were now put in front of them, and Nell lifted a corner of one of hers and peered short-sightedly inside – hard-boiled egg, sliced, with dark rings round the yolk, a scattering of cress, black seeds as well.” (The Wedding Group)

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“He thought of Emily lying under the spell of her alien beauty and Rose’s devotion enclosing her like a thicket of briars.” (The Sleeping Beauty)

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“The train ripped through the sullen landscape like scissors through calico….” (Palladian)

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Relationships, with ourselves and one another

Even when she evokes more universal experiences, she has a way of illuminating the darker corners of human experiences. Richard’s observation is true:

“We are all like icebergs; underneath where the greater parts are hidden it is dark and unreachable.” (A Wreath of Roses)

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Consider how unconventional and varied are two of her representations of mothering:

“Some sons may have a picture of their mother knitting by the fireside — but David’s was of Midge with glass in hand, railing against something. The railing was hardly ever seriously meant. It was intended to interest, or amuse, or fill in a gap in the conversation, which was something Midge deplored.” (The Wedding Group)

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“Flora sat down in the old rocking-chair – her mother’s – and began to unbutton her blouse. Alice pushed her tear-wet face against her and her crying ceased; but, even with her mouth fastened furiously to her mother’s breast, she still made little hiccupping noises, the echoes of sobs, as if resentment lingered.” (The Soul of Kindness)

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Taylor’s characters can be loving and enchanting, as well as railing and resentful (although when one character observes another and assumes an understanding of them, this often says more about the observer than the observed). Darkness complements the light in her storytelling.

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Darkness

“Back along the suburban streets with the admired privet hedges, the houses with their bowed and bayed windows, the skeleton laburnums which in spring would give such pleasure. Gardens were all in darkness now, but television lit up rooms, or shadows passed behind drawn curtains. Sometimes light sprang up in bedrooms.” (Blaming)

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“… she dreamed through the lonely evenings, closing her eyes to create [as a novelist] the darkness where Paradise House could take shape, embellished and enlarged day after day — with colonnades and cupolas, archways and flights of steps….” (Angel)

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“Whereas in the centre of the earth, in the heart of life in the core of even everyday things is there not violence, with flames wheeling, turmoil, pain, chaos?” (A Wreath of Roses)

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“She thought of the river and the prison and then of the Abbey ruins, imagining a dark, Gothic, ivy-covered place in which, under some crumbling archway, she might meet [the Wing Commander], with the bats swinging at shoulder height and a white owl hooting above.” (At Mrs Lippincote’s)

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Fans of the Brontë sisters — Anne, Charlotte, and Emily —will find many allusions to their work throughout Elizabeth Taylor’s writing. These references contribute to these stories’ timeless feel, their enduring relevance across the decades.

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Time

How Elizabeth Taylor’s characters experience time passing is often revealing of the state of their minds and hearts:

“At other tables sat a few other elderly ladies looking, to Mrs Palfrey, as if they had been sitting there for years. They were waiting patiently for the celery soup, hands folded in laps and eyes dreamy.”  (Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont)

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“After their walk in the woods, Harriet faced the day’s page uncertainly. There was either far too much space or only one-hundredth part enough. Time had expanded and contracted abnormally. That morning and all her childhood seemed the same distance away.” (A Game of Hide and Seek)

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“Those games, to outwit time and distance, all lovers play – the rose that the hand touched, the kisses on paper: so that the earth is spun about by invisible threads, a tangle of enchantment.” (The Sleeping Beauty)

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As astutely as Taylor represents her characters broader understanding of time (and mortality and other related themes), she is just as talented in representing the present. She manages the mechanics of scenes and dialogue in them so deftly that it appears effortless.

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Characters’ conversations

Dialogue can be used to build characterization, as with this conversation between Vinny and Emily:

“’I cannot think why you love me,’ he said, as all lovers say; but with more anxiety in his voice than is usual.

         ‘Oh, I am nothing without you,’ she said. ‘I should not know what to be. I feel as if you had invented me. I watch you inventing me, week after week.’” (The Sleeping Beauty)

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Sometimes, however, the dialogue is simply part of constructing a scene. And, when it comes to children, Elizabeth Taylor’s depictions are tender and cruel — in short, realistic.  Consider this passage, from a novel preoccupied with the theme of loss and bereavement, both blatantly and delicately exploring the matter at hand, through a discussion between two children:

“’Not everyone goes to heaven,’ Dora, who was older said, ‘Egyptian mummies didn’t go. Or stuffed fishes.’

      ‘No fishes never go,’ Isobel agreed ‘sometimes I eat them. Chickens can’t go, nor.’

      ‘I don’t really know about heaven,’ Dora said in her considered way. ‘We haven’t done that at school yet. But I know they must go somewhere, or we’d be full up here. People coming and going all the time.’” (Blaming)

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Evidently, in the face of darkness, Elizabeth Taylor’s storytelling has a light touch. There are many humorous moments in her work, as with Patrick’s suggestion to Flora, in The Soul of Kindness: “One can’t make much of a career out of having tea with married women.” They are numerous, but usually most effective in the context of the story.

Often readers who select just one Elizabeth Taylor novel, on the advice of another reader, return for more. Her writing is of a consistently high-quality. It’s easy to imagine that she viewed the world around her with the kind of attention and dedication that Mrs Secretan describes in this scene:

“Mrs Secretan had spent some happy hours renovating Flora’s old dolls’ house for her future grandchild. She had made new curtains and bed-clothes and had cleaned the plaster food, which was set out on the table – a lobster, a pink ham, a dish of peas and a charlotte russe. A woolly cat lay in front of the painted fire. Dolls sat stiffly in chairs: those that could not bend at all had been put to bed in their clothes or were propped against furniture.” (The Soul of Kindness)

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Just as the Davenant family moves into Mrs Lippincote’s home, just as Mrs Secretan creates a dolls’ house for her daughter and her granddaughter, Elizabeth Taylor prepares the scenes in her novels meticulously. Her characters move as needs must, whether comfortable in front of the fire or propped awkwardly in a corner, and then she makes us care about them through the small ceremonies of their daily lives.

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Elizabeth Taylor page on Amazon*

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

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

The post Quotes from Elizabeth Taylor’s Fiction: Glimpsing the British Novelist’s Gifts appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.

Quotes by British Novelist Elizabeth Taylor on Love and Loneliness, Beauty and Marriage

A unique voice comes through in the following selection of quotes by British author Elizabeth Taylor (not to be confused with the actress of the same name) on love, loneliness, beauty, and marriage from her novels and short stories.

Elizabeth Taylor (1912 – 1975) knew from a young age that she wanted to be a novelist. She received high marks in English as a student and, after graduation, borrowed books through the Boots Library system which informed her natural storytelling abilities: works by of Jane Austen, Anton Chekhov, Henry Fielding, E.M. Forster, Samuel Richardson, Ivan Turgenev and Virginia Woolf.

She found inspiration for twelve novels and sixty-five short stories in the everyday lives of ordinary people. She described it like this to her American publisher:

“People are my only adventures and I hope never to have any others … to be ‘ordinary’ and live among ‘ordinary’ people (though no one is really that) is the only way that I can write, and I expect that this limits my range; but I have no gift for anything else.”

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Learn more about Elizabeth Taylor

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Relationships are at the heart of her fiction, long- and short-form. Some of her characters come together, while others fall apart, and others observe dramatic changes from the margins. Various themes resurface, in and between works, and Elizabeth Taylor devotees vicariously explore human contradictions as they explore her stories.

Not surprisingly, love is a common theme. Many of her more remarkable observations consider the aspects of love which are overlooked (or denied) in formulaic stories. Which is to say that they are occasionally celebratory but, more often, complicated—sometimes even melancholy.

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Love

Although willing to acknowledge, even inhabit, the darker recesses of human experience, her novels and stories do not dwell in these environs. Many of her characters, however, as in the novels of Barbara Pym, do feel markedly alone. (Pym was an admirer of Taylor’s fiction too.)

“Don’t fuss, dear girl. At your age one has to be in love with someone, and Robert does very well for the time being. Perhaps at every age one has to be in love with someone, but when one is young it is difficult to decide whom. Later one becomes more stable. I fell in love with all sorts of unsuitable people—very worrying for one’s mother.” (“Hester Lilly”)

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“Seeing one face continually in crowds is one of the minor annoyances of being in love.” (A Game of Hide and Seek)

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“The story he could not have distinguished from many others so much the same – the humbling by love of a too rebellious young woman – and it was drawing towards its reassuring conclusion that, even if she triumphs over the rigours of the jungle, no woman escapes the doom of her sexuality: a satisfactory conclusion; no surprise to anyone.” (The Sleeping Beauty)

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Loneliness

“When she saw the light swinging over the water she felt terror and desolation, the approach of the long evening through which she must coax herself with cups of tea, a letter to her brother in Canada or this piece of knitting she had dropped to the floor as she leant to the pane to watch Bertram, the harsh lace curtain against her cheek, the cottony, dusty smell of it setting her teeth on edge.”  (A View of the Harbour)

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“She could see then, with Etta’s eyes, their own dark, narrow house, and she thought of the lonely hours she spent there reading on days of imprisoning rain.”  (“Girl Reading”)

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“He imagined home having the same time as England. He would have felt quite lost to his loved ones if when he woke in the night, he could not be sure that they were lying in darkness too and, when his own London morning came, theirs also came, the sun streamed through the cracks of their hut in shanty-town, and the little girls began to chirp and skip about.” (“Tall Boy”)

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“When it was dark she pinned the curtains together again and sat down at the table, simply staring in front of her; at the back of her mind, listening. In the warm living-room of her sister’s house, the children in dressing-gowns would be eating their supper by the fire; Roy, home from a football match, would be lying back in his chair. Their faces would be turned intently to the blue-white shifting screen of a television.” (“The Thames Spread Out”)

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“’You’ll have the company of others like you,’ his neighbours had told him. This was not so. He found himself in a society, whose existence he had never, in his old egotism, contemplated and whose ways soon lowered his vitality. He had nothing in common with these faded seamstresses; the prophet-like lay-preacher; an old piano-tuner who believed he was the reincarnation of Beethoven; elderly people who had lived more than half a dim life-time in dark drapers’ shops in country towns.” (“Spry Old Character”)

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“Once he saw a large cactus-plant in a flower-shop window. From one unpromising, barbed shoot had sprung a huge, glowering bloom. It looked solitary and incongruous, a freakish accident; and he was reminded of Angel.” (Angel)

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“It is seldom safe to confide in lonely people. Their very loneliness requires the importance of making known the confidence, at hinting at its existence and source, if not actually divulging it; better to trust in busy, popular people, who have no time for betraying one and no personal need to do so.” (At Mrs. Lippincote’s)

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Beauty

Even while describing or musing on the idea of beauty, Elizabeth Taylor often considers relationships between concepts, as though they are relationships between people.

Beauty is an illusion, a boon, a risk: a complex way of examining the concept. Some characters reap benefits from their beauty, others struggle to reorient themselves with their beauty having worked into an equation that they hadn’t recognized as part of an exchange system.

“Ugliness has the extra power of making beauty seem unreal, a service beauty seems rarely able to return.” (A Wreath of Roses)

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“She would know then that she was in her own setting and had no reason for ever finding herself elsewhere; know moreover that she was bereft of the power to rescue herself, the brains or the beauty by which other young women made their escape.” (Angel)

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Marriage

As another system of exchange, marriage is a key element of many characters’ lives in Elizabeth Taylor’s fiction. Whether the bond between wife and husband is a desirable or undesirable state, be it cinched or slack, marriage is under the microscope in her long and short tales.

This sequence of quotations about marriage illustrates the kind of gradient that readers can expect from Elizabeth Taylor’s fiction. In some cases, marriage is a source of joy; in other instances, marriage is a destructive force.

To complicate matters further, her characters’ experience of marriage alters depending on access to varying levels of privilege and how realistic their expectations are. In every instance, however, there is an element of risk.

Take Vinny, in The Sleeping Beauty, for instance: “We can afford to be undignified only when we are young,” he thought, waiting in the street, staring at his dusty shoes. “And, love, alas, has so much indignity attached to it.”

Elizabeth Taylor’s characters are often undignified, either in their own eyes or another’s: that’s what makes them relatable. That’s what makes these grand overarching themes—of love and loneliness, beauty and marriage—so accessible in her fiction.

“It makes very little difference to me. I am a parasite. I follow my man around like a piece of luggage or part of a traveling harem. He is under contract to provide for me, but where he does so is for him to decide.” (At Mrs. Lippincote’s)

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“And marriage changes us quite. How can we enter marriage and remain the same? The circles of our existences become concentric.” (A Wreath of Roses)

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“They became more and more to one another and, in the end, the perfect marriage they had created was like a work of art. People are sorry for brides who lose their husbands early, from some accident or war. And they should be sorry, Mrs Palfrey thought. But the other thing is worse.” (Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont)

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“Without discussing where they should sit, they [the married couple] moved apart from the others and spread towels out on the sand. Bunny removed his hat and shirt, and went trotting down to the sea, his crooked arms jerking back and forth like a long-distance runner’s.” (“In the Sun”)

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“He was a man utterly, bewilderedly at sea. His married life had been too much for him, with so much in it that he could not understand.” (“The Blush”)

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“‘Marriage does not solve mysteries,’ she thought. ‘It creates and deepens them.’ The two of them being shut up physically in this dark space, yet locked away for ever from one another, was oppressive. Both were edgy.”  (A Game of Hide and Seek)

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“Just imagine, as a child, being told that some day one will have to belong to some other person, so finally that only death could put an end to it. You couldn’t blame the child for bursting into tears at the idea. To be under the same roof till kingdom come.” (The Soul of Kindness)

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Elizabeth Taylor page on Amazon*

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

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“Désirée’s Baby” by Kate Chopin: Motherhood and Miscegenation in 19th-Century America

This analysis of “Désirée’s Baby,” an 1893 short story by Kate Chopin, explores the narrative of miscegenation and motherhood in the antebellum American South. Chopin is best known for the groundbreaking classic novella The Awakening (1899).

Désirée, a young woman adopted as a child, is married to a plantation owner named Armaud. She is startled when she suddenly realizes that their baby is of a darker complexion than her own and her husband’s.

Chopin uses the setting of Louisiana to create a delicate yet hostile environment for a disillusioned young mother. Motherhood in this era can be deemed sensitive and complicated, since Désirée lives in a time when its treatment is based on ethnicity and social stratification.

The setting not only provides an environment for the characters in the story, but also advances each to their individual downfalls.

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Read the full text of “Désirée’s Baby”

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A complicated maternal history 

Désirée unknowingly has a complicated history and relationship with motherhood through her own two mothers. Désirée is a child of adoption; the history and relationship between her biological mother is intangible to her, and the readers.

Without or with intention, Chopin makes no clear note of Désirée’s mother. In fact, when Désirée is found as a baby by Monsieur Valmode, she says she utters the words, “Dada.” On the other hand, Désirée’s adoptive parents seem to be more than grateful for her spontaneous arrival.

Conflictingly, her adoptive mother, Madame Valmode, spoils Désirée and sees her as a gift from God: “In time Madame Valmode abandoned every speculation but the one that Désirée had been sent to her by a beneficent Providence.”

Although Désirée is portrayed as having a functional and happy childhood, her ideas surrounding motherhood are misconstrued from a young age, due to her biological mother’s abandonment.

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Learn more about Kate Chopin

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La Blanche: A complicating factor

These factors cause Désirée to be confused as to what the maternal role should be, especially since in the era of slavery, Southern white women often delegated the responsibilities of motherhood to their female house slaves.

One could think of female house slaves as precursors to nannies and maids, but they had a greater amount of responsibilities imposed on them.

In this story, for example, La Blanche is a house slave who takes care of her three young boys along with Désirée’s baby. While the slave’s children are hinted as being Armaud’s, that doesn’t ease the struggles of tending to four young children.

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You might also like: Full text of The Awakening by Kate Chopin

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A shocking revelation

The tenderness with which Désirée goes about raising her own child takes a turn when she realizes her child is the same skin color as La Blanche’s children: “When the baby was about three months old, Désirée awoke one day to the conviction that there was something in the air menacing her peace.”

Chopin foreshadows the trepidation Désirée will soon encounter when she realizes her child’s origins.

Furthermore, once Désirée has come to the realization that her child is a product of miscegenation, she becomes maniacal, and her husband Armaud begins to feel animosity towards her and his child. The question arises in the reader’s mind as to why Armaud is resentful towards his wife but does not have the same feelings towards La Blanche.

The differences between the two are their social status and racial makeup. Also, Désirée hasn’t been held to the same standard of motherhood as La Blanche has. La Blanche is not just a mother in Armaud’s eyes but also a worker, objectified for profit and use.

When she turns to her husband for empathy, she is unexpectedly greeted with rage: “Armaud,” she panted once more, clutching his arm, “look at our child. What does it mean? Tell me,” she begs of him.

In response he tells her, “[T]hat the child is not white; it means that you are not white.” Armaud immediately assumes and blames Désirée for the child’s African descent.

 

A devastating decision

This accusation proves overwhelming for Désirée (the confusion of her child and now her own origins), and leads to what appears to be a demise; she took the child and “disappeared among the reeds and willows that grew thick along the banks of the deep, sluggish bayou; and she did not come back again.”

Désirée’s final act as a mother to her child can be seen as selfish and destructive, but it’s also a gesture of protection against the racism of the antebellum era.

The mendacity of Armaud and the naïveté in which Désirée was raised produced devastating consequences on the experience of motherhood in the antebellum South, where strict social and racial strictures reigned, and endured long past the end of slavery.

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Contributed by Oona Uishama Narvaez. Oona is an ardent writer from El Paso, Texas. She is a passionate reader currently pursuing a degree in creative writing.

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Lilacs by Amy Lowell (1922) — the poet’s own favorite

Amy Lowell (1874 –  1925), an influential yet undervalued American poet, was an energetic evangelist of the art of poetry for all her adult life. Here is presented “Lilacs,” said to be the one of the poet’s own favorites, and among the poems she recited most often in her many public readings.

First published first published in the New York Evening Post on September 18, 1920, “Lilacs” went on to be included in a 1922 modernist poetry anthology.

Finally, “Lilacs” became part of Lowell’s 1925 collection What’s O’ Clock, which received the Pulitzer Prize the following year. Unfortunately, the poet died before receiving this honor. She was only 51, having suffered from poor health for some time.

Prior to the publication of What’s O’Clock, Lowell had published  the collections A Dome of Many-Coloured Glass (1912) Sword Blades and Poppy Seed (1914),  Men, Women and Ghosts (1916), Can Grande’s Castle (1918), Pictures of the Floating World (1919), and more.

Lowell’s poetry was in the genre of “imagism,” which is pretty much what it sounds like, and of which “Lilacs” is a good illustration. According to her own definition, imagism is defined as the “concentration is of the very essence of poetry” and aimed to “produce poetry that is hard and clear, never blurred nor indefinite.”

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Learn more about Amy Lowell

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Who better to present Lowell’s philosophy on the creation of poetry than the poet herself; she wrote in the introduction to Can Grande’s Castle:

“I wish to state my firm belief that poetry should not try to teach, that it should exist simply because it is a created beauty, even if sometimes the beauty of a gothic grotesque.

We do not ask the trees to teach us moral lessons … We distrust a beauty we only half understand, and rush in with our impertinent suggestions. How far we are from “admitting the Universe”!

Lowell’s poetry also demonstrated the art of vers libre, or free verse, of which she wrote:

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

I prefer to call them poems in “unrhymed cadence”, for that conveys their exact meaning to an English ear. They are built upon “organic rhythm”, or the rhythm of the speaking voice with its necessity for breathing, rather than upon a strict metrical system.

They differ from ordinary prose rhythms by being more curved, and containing more stress. The stress, and exceedingly marked curve, of any regular metre is easily perceived.

These poems, built upon cadence, are more subtle, but the laws they follow are not less fixed. Merely chopping prose lines into lengths does not produce cadence, it is constructed upon mathematical and absolute laws of balance and time.”

“Lilacs” is a prime example of vers libre poetry. A Study Guide for Amy Lowell’s Lilacs  states that, “True to the movement’s name, “Lilacs” is a poem overflowing with images, of a wide variety of scenes and settings in which the flowers can be found.”  

For analyses of “Lilacs,” refer to these excellent sources:

Lilacs in depth
The famous poetry of Amy Lowell

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Lilacs (by Amy Lowell)

Lilacs,

False blue,

White,

Purple,

Color of lilac,

Your great puffs of flowers

Are everywhere in this my New England.

Among your heart-shaped leaves

Orange orioles hop like music-box birds and sing

Their little weak soft songs;

In the crooks of your branches

The bright eyes of song sparrows sitting on spotted eggs

Peer restlessly through the light and shadow

Of all Springs.

Lilacs in dooryards

Holding quiet conversations with an early moon;

Lilacs watching a deserted house

Settling sideways into the grass of an old road;

Lilacs, wind-beaten, staggering under a lopsided shock of bloom

Above a cellar dug into a hill.

You are everywhere.

You were everywhere.

You tapped the window when the preacher preached his sermon,

And ran along the road beside the boy going to school.

You stood by pasture-bars to give the cows good milking,

You persuaded the housewife that her dish-pan was of silver

And her husband an image of pure gold.

You flaunted the fragrance of your blossoms

Through the wide doors of Custom Houses—

You, and sandal-wood, and tea,

Charging the noses of quill-driving clerks

When a ship was in from China.

You called to them: “Goose-quill men, goose-quill men,

May is a month for flitting,”

Until they writhed on their high stools

And wrote poetry on their letter-sheets behind the propped-up ledgers.

Paradoxical New England clerks,

Writing inventories in ledgers, reading the Song of Solomon at night,

So many verses before bedtime,

Because it was the Bible.

The dead fed you

Amid the slant stones of graveyards.

Pale ghosts who planted you

Came in the night time

And let their thin hair blow through your clustered stems.

You are of the green sea,

And of the stone hills which reach a long distance.

You are of elm-shaded streets with little shops where they sell kites and marbles,

You are of great parks where every one walks and nobody is at home.

You cover the blind sides of greenhouses

And lean over the top to say a hurry-word through the glass

To your friends, the grapes, inside.

Lilacs,

False blue,

White,

Purple,

Color of lilac,

You have forgotten your Eastern origin,

The veiled women with eyes like panthers,

The swollen, aggressive turbans of jeweled Pashas.

Now you are a very decent flower,

A reticent flower,

A curiously clear-cut, candid flower,

Standing beside clean doorways,

Friendly to a house-cat and a pair of spectacles,

Making poetry out of a bit of moonlight

And a hundred or two sharp blossoms.

Maine knows you,

Has for years and years;

New Hampshire knows you,

And Massachusetts

And Vermont.

Cape Cod starts you along the beaches to Rhode Island;

Connecticut takes you from a river to the sea.

You are brighter than apples,

Sweeter than tulips,

You are the great flood of our souls

Bursting above the leaf-shapes of our hearts,

You are the smell of all Summers,

The love of wives and children,

The recollection of the gardens of little children,

You are State Houses and Charters

And the familiar treading of the foot to and fro on a road it knows.

May is lilac here in New England,

May is a thrush singing “Sun up!” on a tip-top ash-tree,

May is white clouds behind pine-trees

Puffed out and marching upon a blue sky.

May is a green as no other,

May is much sun through small leaves,

May is soft earth,

And apple-blossoms,

And windows open to a South wind.

May is a full light wind of lilac

From Canada to Narragansett Bay.

Lilacs,

False blue,

White,

Purple,

Color of lilac,

Heart-leaves of lilac all over New England,

Roots of lilac under all the soil of New England,

Lilac in me because I am New England,

Because my roots are in it,

Because my leaves are of it,

Because my flowers are for it,

Because it is my country

And I speak to it of itself

And sing of it with my own voice

Since certainly it is mine.

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The Complete Poetical Work of Amy Lowell on Amazon*

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A Chronology of the Brief Life of Emily Brontë

Who was Emily Brontë? This is a question not easily answered. This wonderful chronology of her brief life by W. Robertson Nicoll was part of the introduction to the 1908 edition of The Complete Poems of Emily Brontë provides much insight into how she lived and worked.

Emily Brontë (1818 – 1848), the British author known for the novel Wuthering Heights, was also recognized as a brilliant poet. The sister of Charlotte and Anne Brontë, she is arguably the most enigmatic of the trio who produced some of the most widely read classics in English literature.

Emily only lived to age thirty and led a sheltered life at Haworth Parsonage in Yorkshire, rarely encountering anyone outside her immediate family. Yet she Emily one of the most iconic novels of passion and tragedy. Wuthering Heights is rather dark study of desire and obsession, it also touches upon economic, social, and psychological issues and is often cited as the ideal “romantic novel.”

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Anne, Emily, and Charlotte as depicted by their brother, Branwell

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A woman of genius: A Chronology of Emily Brontë’s Life

We now see the extraordinary conditions under which this woman of genius did her work. Outside her own circle she had not a single friend. She never had a lover or any one who came near to be her lover.

She was never outside of Yorkshire save during the Brussels experience, where she paid so dearly for the education which she hoped to turn into money. She had practically no acquaintances.

The only people in Haworth she talked to were the servants and the visitors forced upon the home by the brother. Yet she loved life and shrank from death. Between her sister Anne and herself there was a tie of peculiar tenderness and closeness.

She was passionately loved by Charlotte, who saw, nevertheless, something harsh in her temperament. There is no reason to suppose that she failed in affection to her father and her aunt, or to Branwell, though he may have wearied her out.

She did the work of a servant in the house apparently with the greatest cheerfulness and efficiency. In the exercise of her imagination and in her love of nature she found peace. She refused to complain, and turned a front now calm, now defiant, to the most threatening circumstances.

So very little is known of Emily Brontë, the greatest woman genius of the nineteenth century, that whatever throws light upon her thoughts is of high interest to her lovers. It is only for these that this book has been compiled and printed.

How small our knowledge of Emily Brontë’s life is may be best shown by a brief chronological account of her thirty years:

1818.—Emily Brontë born at Thornton.

1820.—Anne Brontë born at Thornton.

1820.—The family remove to Haworth.

1821 (September).—The mother, Mrs. Brontë, died.

1824.—The little Brontë girls went to school at Cowan’s Bridge. Emily, the prettiest of the sisters, was ‘a darling child, under five years of age, quite the pet nursling of the school.’ As a matter of fact, Emily was in her seventh year.

1826.—The children established their plays, each choosing representatives. Emily chose Sir Walter Scott, Mr. Lockhart, and Johnny Lockhart. Blackwood’s Magazine was the favourite reading of the children, and they had also Southey and Sir Walter Scott left by their Cornish mother, and ‘some mad Methodist magazines full of miracles and apparitions, and preternatural warnings.’

1831.—Charlotte Brontë went to school at Roe Head.

1832.—Charlotte returned to Haworth in order to teach Emily and Anne what she had learned. After lessons they walked on the moors. At home Emily was a quiet girl of fourteen, helping in the housework and learning her lessons regularly.

On the moors she was gay, frolicsome, almost wild. She would set the others laughing with her quaint sallies and genial ways. She is described as ‘a strange figure—tall, slim, angular, with a quantity of dark brown hair, deep, beautiful hazel eyes that could flash with passion, features somewhat strong and stern, the mouth prominent and resolute.’

1833.—Ellen Nussey, Charlotte Brontë’s friend, came to Haworth, and made acquaintance with Emily, then about fifteen. Miss Nussey describes her as not ugly, but with irregular features, and a pallid thick complexion, and ‘kind, kindling, liquid eyes.’

She had no grace or style in dress. She was a great walker, and very fond of animals. Only one dog was allowed to her, though two seemed to have got into the house. Emily was very happy on the moor and talked freely.

1835.—Emily, when close on seventeen, went to school at Roe Head with Charlotte. The change from her own home to a school, and from her secluded but free and simple life to discipline and companionship, she found intolerable. She became miserably ill, threatening consumption, and had to go home. This restored her health almost immediately.

In this year she found her brother Branwell beginning to go wrong, drinking in the public house and doing no work.

1836 (Midsummer).—Miss Nussey and Charlotte went to Haworth, and the girls had a taste of happiness and enjoyment.

They were beginning to feel conscious of their powers, they were rich in each other’s companionship; their health was good, their spirits were high, there was often joyousness and mirth; they commented on what they read; analysed articles and their writers also; the perfection of unrestrained talk and intelligence brightened the close of the days which were passing all too swiftly. Charlotte and Emily would dance in exuberant spirits.

1836 (September).—Emily went into a situation as teacher in Miss Patchet’s school at Law Hill, near Halifax, where there were some forty girls. She worked from six in the morning till eleven at night, with only half an hour of exercise between, and soon broke down. At Christmas she came home to Haworth for a brief rest, and then returned to Halifax.

1837 (Spring).—Emily’s health broke down, and she came back to Haworth.

1837–38.—Emily alone at Haworth. Anne, Charlotte, and, for a time, Branwell were away.

1837 (Christmas) found Charlotte, Emily, and Anne at Haworth nursing their old servant, Tabby, who had fallen on the slippery street and broken her leg.

1839.—Charlotte writes: ‘I manage the ironing and keep the rooms clean; Emily does the baking and attends to the kitchen.’

1840.—Emily, Branwell, and Charlotte were all at home together. Charlotte and Branwell had sent their writings to authors, Southey, Coleridge, and Wordsworth, but Emily had not. Her manuscripts were in her locked desk. Emily, Anne, and Charlotte were hoping to enlarge the parsonage at Haworth and keep school.

Things were going fairly well, and Emily was, on the whole, happy. I have been told by Miss Nussey that the one man outside her home in whom Emily ever showed any interest was Mr. Brontë’s first curate, the Rev. William Weightman.

There was nothing like a love affair between them, but she was gracious to him and enjoyed his jests as they all walked together on the moors. But it is on record that Emily was trying to prevent the curate from pressing his attentions on Miss Nussey.

It would seem that in no man’s eyes was Emily passing fair. Emily’s countenance, said Miss Nussey, ‘glimmered,’ as it always did when she enjoyed herself.

1841.—In the early months she was as happy as other country girls in a congenial home. Later on Miss Wooler offered Charlotte the good-will of her school at Dewsbury Moor, but though the girls wished to accept, no arrangement was carried through.

In September Charlotte proposes to go with Emily to Brussels, in order that they might learn French and German, and fit themselves for keeping a school. She calculated that the journey would cost only five pounds for each, and that the living would be half as dear as in England.

‘I feel an absolute conviction that if this advantage could be allowed to us, it would be the making of us for life.’ Arrangements were made to decline the school at Dewsbury Moor. Bridlington was thought of. Emily assented, being anxious that the school should be started.

1842.—Charlotte and Emily went to Brussels to the School of the Hégers. Héger thought that Emily knew no French at all. She was oddly dressed, and wore amazing leg-of-mutton sleeves, her pet whim in and out of fashion. She had a bitter sense of exile, but Charlotte enjoyed the change.

Emily did not like Héger, and was as indomitable and fierce as Charlotte was gentle and obedient. But Héger thought Emily had more genius than her sister. He was deeply impressed with her faculty of imagination and her argumentative powers, and said: ‘She should have been a man: a great navigator!’

But the two were never friends. Emily was ‘wild for home,’ and seldom spoke a word to any one. It was probably at this time that she composed the poem ‘at twilight in the schoolroom,’—’The house is old, the trees are bare.’

In the meantime, Charlotte was almost dangerously happy, but knew that Emily and her teacher did not draw well together. Emily, however, was working very hard, especially at German and music. She became an excellent musician, and her piano playing is described as singularly accurate and expressive.

The two studied French under Héger, whose method was to take an author and investigate his technique. Emily complained against this method, and said that it destroyed all originality of thought and expression. But in spite of this she wrote better exercises than Charlotte did.

All the while she was in revolt. She made no intimate companions, and suffered much, disliking intensely what she though the ‘gentle Jesuitry of the foreign and Romish system.’ Only her desire to be independent kept her in Brussels.

1842.—Madame Héger proposed that Charlotte should teach English, and that Emily should teach music to the younger pupils, so that they might stay on without paying for half a year. They were too poor to go home for their holidays in August and September, and remained in Brussels. But they were called back in the end of October by the death of their aunt.

1842 (Christmas).—They were invited by Héger to go back to Brussels. Emily would not consent. Branwell was at home, but the sisters had not seen him at his worst, and they were happy for three months.

1843 (January).—Charlotte went back to Brussels. Emily was left behind with Branwell for a short time. Branwell went away as tutor, and Emily was left alone with her father and old Tabby helping in the housework. She had Flossie, Anne’s favourite spaniel, and Keeper, the fierce bulldog, cats, and other animals. Charlotte was not happy at Brussels. Branwell was still drinking, and Anne was very anxious about him. Mr Brontë, the father, was in failing health and tempted by stimulants. In the end of this year Emily wrote to Charlotte urging her return.

1844 (January).—Charlotte arrived at Haworth very reluctantly. ‘Haworth seems such a lonely quiet spot.’

1844 (March).—Emily and Charlotte were together thinking over the future. Charlotte wrote: ‘Our poor little cat has been ill two days, and is just dead. It is piteous to see even an animal lying lifeless. Emily is sorry.’

The girls wrote for pupils, but failed to get them. Branwell got worse and worse, drinking heavily to excess. Emily had no friends. They gave up the idea of having pupils.

1844 (July).—Charlotte visited Miss Nussey. When she came back she found Branwell dismissed by his employer. Charlotte, writing of her sister Emily, afterwards said: ‘She had in the course of her life been called upon to contemplate near the end and for a long time the terrible effects of talents misused and faculties abused; hers was naturally a sensitive, reserved, and dejected nature; what she saw went very deeply into her mind: it did her harm.’

Madame Duclaux (Miss A. Mary F. Robinson) in her truly sympathetic book on Emily Brontë, argues that Emily never wearied in her kindness for her unhappy brother, and always hoped to win him back by love when the other sisters had despaired.  In March 1846, Charlotte Brontë wrote to Ellen:

“I went into the room where Branwell was to speak to him, about an hour after I got home; it was very forced work to address him. I might have spared myself the trouble, as he took no notice and made no reply; he was stupefied.

My fears were not in vain. I hear that he got a sovereign while I have been away, under pretence of paying a pressing debt; he went immediately and changed it at a public house, and has employed it as was to be expected. Emily concluded her account by saying that he was a hopeless being. It is too true. In his present state it is scarcely possible to stay in the room where he is.”

Madame Duclaux has also a very graphic account of a fire in which a drunken Branwell must have been burned to death had it not been that Emily entered the blazing room, and half carried in her arms, half dragged out, her besotted brother.

This is no doubt part of the extremely questionable Brontë tradition. The legend is almost certainly based on a similar episode in Jane Eyre. Mr Swinburne had a special delight in the belief that Emily was kinder than her sisters, but, as Mr. Shorter has shown, there is no clear evidence for the fact. It is quite plain that she did less in the way of remonstrance than the others.

1845.—In autumn Charlotte accidentally lighted on a manuscript volume of verses in her sister’s handwriting. She saw the value of the poems, and caught their new note. It was resolved that the sisters should publish a little volume together.

1846 (May).—Poems of the sisters Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell were published by Messrs. Aylott and Jones. The book cost the authors thirty guineas, and two copies supplied the public demand.

1846.—The three sisters were each busy on a novel, Emily was writing Wuthering Heights, Charlotte The Professor, and Anne Agnes Grey. It was a heavy and dreary time. Branwell became more and more the oppression of the family.

Out of very scanty means they had to pay his debts. The father was growing blind with cataract, and was deeply depressed, but the indomitable sisters completed their work, and Charlotte began Jane Eyre.

1846 (August).—Charlotte Brontë went to Manchester with her father, and Mr. Brontë went through an operation for cataract, which was successful. In the end of the year Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey were accepted by Newby, a third-rate publisher of the time, who issued many worthless novels on commission.

1847.—The Professor was declined, but Jane Eyre was accepted and published by Smith and Elder.

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Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

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1847 (14th December).—Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey were published by Newby, who was encouraged by the success of Jane Eyre. Charlotte Brontë writes:

“Wuthering Heights is, I suppose, at length published, at least Mr. Newby has sent the authors their six copies. I wonder how it will be received. I should say it merits the epithets of vigorous and original much more decidedly than Jane Eyre did. Agnes Grey should please such critics as Mr. Lewes, for it is true and “unexaggerated” enough. The books are not well got up; they abound in errors of the press.”

1848 (September).—Patrick Branwell Brontë died. Charlotte Brontë wrote: ‘I myself, with painful, mournful joy, heard him praying softly in his dying moments; and to the last prayer which my father offered up at his bedside, he added, “Amen.” How unusual that word appeared from his lips, of course you, who did not know him, cannot conceive.’ He was in the village just before his death. “The removal of our only brother must necessarily be regarded by us rather in the light of a mercy than as a chastisement.”

1848 (29th October).—Charlotte Brontë writes:

“Emily’s cold and cough are very obstinate. I fear she has a pain in the chest, and I sometimes catch a shortness in her breathing, when she has moved at all quickly. She looks very, very thin and pale. Her reserved nature occasions me great uneasiness of mind. It is useless to question her; you get no answers. It is still more useless to recommend remedies; they are never adopted.”

On 2nd November she writes again:

“My sister Emily has something like a slow inflammation of the lungs. . . . She is a real stoic in illness: she neither seeks nor will accept sympathy. . . . When she is ill there seems to be no sunshine in the world for me. The tie of sister is near and dear indeed, and I think a certain harshness in her powerful and peculiar character only makes me cling to her more.”

1848 (22nd November).—We have a glimpse of Emily in her last days. Charlotte Brontë writes to W. S. Williams:

“The North American Review is worth reading. There is no mincing the matter there. What a bad set the Bells must be! What appalling books they write! To-day, as Emily appeared a little easier, I thought the Review would amuse her, so I read it aloud to her and Anne.

As I sat between them at our quiet but now melancholy fireside, I studied the two ferocious authors. Ellis, the ‘man of uncommon talents, but dogged, brutal, and morose,’ sat leaning back in his easy chair, drawing his impeded breath as he best could, and looking, alas! piteously pale and wasted; it is not his wont to laugh, but he smiled, half amused and half in scorn as he listened.

Acton was sewing, no emotion ever stirs him to loquacity, so he only smiled too, dropping at the same time a single word of calm amazement to hear his character so darkly portrayed. I wonder what the reviewer would have thought of his own sagacity could he have beheld the pair as I did.” …

1848 (19th December).—Emily Brontë died, ‘conscious, panting, reluctant.’

(As thorough as this chronology of Emily Brontë is, it gives very short shrift to her demise. Here’s more about The Death of Emily Brontë.)

 
More about Emily Brontë

No Coward Soul is Mine: 5 Poems by Emily Brontë
Emily Brontë’s Poetry: A 19th-Century Analysis
The Night of Storms Has Passed: A Ghostly Poem by Emily Brontë
Keeper: Emily Brontë’s Fiercely Devoted Dog
10 Interesting Facts About the Brontë Sisters

The post A Chronology of the Brief Life of Emily Brontë appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.

Beyond the Legend: Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West’s Love Affair & Friendship

The relationship of Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West has gone down in literary history, and even today it holds a fascination, epitomizing the allure of the unconventional, the bohemian, the slightly eccentric and exotic.

On December 15, 1922, Virginia Woolf recorded in her diary that she had met “the lovely aristocratic Sackville-West last night at Clive’s. Not much to my severer taste … all the supple ease of the aristocracy, but not the wit of the artist.” 

She was, of course, writing of Vita, the woman who would go on to become her lover, friend, and confidante.

Their affair has inspired biographies, a West End play, and most recently, a 2019 film (the reception of the latter having been tepid). But none have come close to capturing the vibrant nuances and dynamics of their personalities, or the subtleties of a relationship that was more emotional than physical and that lasted until Virginia’s death in 1941.

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Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf

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A discouraging start

By the time she met Virginia, Vita was thirty years old and an established author, having published several volumes of poetry and fiction with more commercial than literary success.

Virginia was ten years older, and had published three novels and survived three major bouts of insanity. The age difference and the apparent emotional fragility did not deter Vita, however, whose first impressions were far more favorable than Virginia’s. Soon after their first meeting, she wrote to her husband Harold Nicholson:

“I simply adore Virginia Woolf, and so would you … Mrs Woolf is so simple…At first you think she is plain, then a sort of spiritual beauty imposes itself on you, and you find a fascination in watching her…I’ve rarely taken such a fancy to anyone”.

In true Vita style — slightly arrogant, slightly pushy, but with a charm and vitality that few could resist — she persuaded Virginia into several dinners (although not into membership of the P.E.N.Club, an international author’s society of which Vita was a member).

A flurried exchange of letters and books followed … and then nothing. Perhaps Vita was snubbed at Virginia’s refusal to join the P.E.N. Club, or more likely she was preoccupied with her new affair with architectural historian Geoffrey Scott.

Virginia, meanwhile, was working on both Mrs. Dalloway and The Common Reader. It wasn’t until late spring 1924 that correspondence between the two resumed and an intimacy, of sorts, was formed.

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

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Seduction in Bloomsbury

Despite her initial dismissal of Vita’s artistic merits, Virginia enjoyed both Vita’s poetry and fiction. In May 1924 she threw down a gauntlet: would Vita write a novel for the Hogarth Press (the small press she ran with her husband Leonard Woolf), and would she write it while on holiday in Italy that summer?

Vita responded by writing from Italy that she hoped “no one has ever yet, or ever will, throw down a glove I was not ready to pick up.” The result was Seducers In Ecuador, which she dedicated to Virginia.

Over the next few months, they settled into a tentative sparring back and forth, in language that became more and more flirtatious and intimate. Their letters show that a dichotomy of sorts was developing: Virginia saw Vita as the superior woman, while Vita saw Virginia as the superior writer.

Virginia’s response to Vita’s advances was a mix of guarded acquiescence and gentle mockery, and already Vita was playing not only the larger-than-life aristocrat (the “superior woman” that Virginia so admired) but also the protective maternal figure to Virginia’s sometimes helpless child.

Virginia, in turn, could also be Vita’s mistress of letters, appearing unattainable, unpredictable, and unapproachable; all aspects of her character that gave her a mysterious allure and simply added to Vita’s fascination.

But she was also affectionate and — perhaps more importantly — willing to indulge Vita’s aggressive side. When Vita accused her of using other people “for copy,” not thinking that Virginia would take offense, Virginia responded,

“I enjoyed your intimate letter…It gave me a great deal of pain – which is I’ve no doubt the first stage of intimacy…Never mind: I enjoyed your abuse very much.”

 

“I am reduced to a thing that wants Virginia …”

In September 1925, Harold Nicholson was informed by the Foreign Office that he would be posted to the British Legation in Tehran, and it was arranged that Vita would join him in January and remain until May.

The news startled Virginia into realizing how much Vita had come to mean to her. Vita was “doomed to go to Persia; & I minded the thought so much (thinking to lose sight of her for 5 years) that I conclude I am genuinely fond of her…”

With the prospect of months of separation, Virginia visited Vita’s home at Long Barn in Kent that December. She stayed for three nights, and Vita made a note in her diary for the 17th: “A peaceful evening.”

For the 18th, though: “Talked to her til 3 am — Not a peaceful evening.” It’s generally agreed that it was during this time at Long Barn the two became lovers.

After this progression of their relationship, separation was all the more difficult. Vita was honest with Harold who, after suffering through the chaos of Vita’s affair with Violet Trefusis just a few years earlier, was understandably worried.

Vita sought to reassure him, saying that she would not fall in love with Virginia, nor would Virginia fall in love with her. Despite this, on the journey to Tehran Vita penned some of the most poignant love letters in literary history.

From Italy, she wrote “I am reduced to a thing that wants Virginia,” and from the Red Sea, “I find it very difficult to look at the coast of Sinai when I am also looking inward and finding the image of Virginia everywhere.”

But Vita never entirely lost herself: in amongst the letters are the traveller’s insights and the adventurer’s spirit that would eventually find expression in A Passenger to Teheran, also published by the Hogarth Press.

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Signs of affection: “Potto” and “Donkey West”

When Vita returned from Tehran their relationship continued, but rarely in a sexual way. Vita was a passionate woman who often sought affairs outside of her marriage, but she had “too much real affection and respect” for Virginia to toy with her.

Mindful of the episodes of madness which had already left Virginia fragile, she initiated few sexual encounters. The love she felt for Virginia, she said, was not a sexual thing but “a mental thing; a spiritual thing, if you like, an intellectual thing, and she inspires and feeling of tenderness…”

Their letters during this time show a deepening of emotional intimacy along with a sense of fun, sometimes beginning in the traditional way of “Dearest Vita” or “My dearest Virginia”, but sometimes addressed to “Potto” (Virginia) and “Donkey West” (Vita).

They became close enough for uncomfortable observations to also occasionally be made. Virginia once wrote to Vita that, “there is something obscure…something that doesn’t vibrate in you…something reserved, muted … It’s in your writing too, by the bye. The thing I call central transparency — sometimes fails you there too.”

Vita knew Virginia was right, writing to Harold, “Damn the woman, she has put her finger on it … the thing which spoils me as a writer; destroys me as a poet.”

But emotional intimacy wasn’t enough. Vita was a fierce woman, with a longing for adventure that no amount of traveling to and from Tehran could satisfy. This time, the adventure presented itself in the form of Mary Campbell, wife of the poet Roy Campbell, and by October 1927 they were lovers.

Vita’s love letters to Virginia continued as if nothing was wrong, however Virginia sensed immediately that Vita’s attention had wandered.

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Orlando by Virginia Woolf: Gender and Sexuality Through Time

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The longest love letter in literature

The unexpected result of Vita’s lapses in fidelity, drawn out over a period of several months, was one of the most personal “biographies” in literary history: the fictional account of Vita’s life that was Orlando.

On October 9, Virginia wrote to Vita that she was aware of Mary Campbell, and also to tell her about the idea for Orlando:

“Suppose Orlando turned out to be Vita; and it’s all about you and the lusts of your flesh and the lure of your mind (heart you have none, who go gallivanting down the lanes with Campbell)…Shall you mind? Say yes, or No.”

Vita readily agreed. as the writing flowed, Orlando became a version of Vita that, while completely recognizable to anyone who knew her, was also purely Virginia’s; a creation that could not be taken from her, who was safe beyond the lure of other women.

It also posed some interesting questions for Virginia as she withdrew, busy writing the fictional Orlando / Vita into existence while the real Vita was continuing to see Mary Campbell. She often wondered in her diary which was the more real.

In September 1928 the two women took a long-awaited holiday to France — the first and only holiday they would take together. Both were nervous about the prospect of close day-to-day proximity, but the week was a success. Further successes followed on their return with the publication of Orlando.

Reviewers loved it and Vita, who had not so far been allowed to read a word, found herself “enchanted, under a spell.”

Even Harold Nicholson praised it, writing to Virginia from Berlin, “It really is Vita — her puzzled concentration, her absent-minded tenderness … She strides magnificent and clumsy through 350 years.”

Their son Nigel would later refer to the book as “the longest and most charming love letter in literature.” Only Vita’s mother disliked it, writing to Virginia, “… probably you do not realise how cruel you have been.”

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Sissinghurst Gardens

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Sissinghurst

With Orlando, though, Vita felt as if Virginia truly had “found her out.” All aspects of her character, including those she usually kept hidden even from herself, had been laid bare. She felt as if there was nothing that could now be kept from Virginia.

As an artist and fellow writer, her admiration for Virginia increased, while emotionally she began to withdraw. Virginia once again sensed what was happening but knew that there was nothing she could do about Vita’s affairs.

Further change was precipitated by the resounding successes of Vita’s novels The Edwardians, published by the Hogarth Press in 1930, and All Passion Spent, published in 1931.

With the money that she earned Vita was able to purchase Sissinghurst Castle in Kent, the renovation of which would become her life’s project and the garden of which would make her more famous than her novels.

It also took her one step further away from Virginia, who split her time — along with Leonard — between London and Monk’s House in Sussex.

Although they saw each other from time to time and continued to exchange letters, the restoration of Sissinghurst took most of Vita’s attention while Virginia was enjoying a new friendship with the composer Ethel Smyth.

Her feelings for Vita remained unabated, but even she couldn’t close her eyes to the changes that were happening as Sissinghurst became the centre of Vita’s world.

 

The onset of war

With the approach of the Second World War, Virginia was becoming tense and fragile. Her nephew Julian Bell had been killed in the Spanish Civil War, and she had just finished her longest and most arduous (to write) novel, The Years.

It was against this background of bloody exhaustion that she wrote Three Guineas, a passionate denunciation of wars and the patriarchy which perpetuated them.

It was published in 1938 and caused one of the only serious quarrels she ever had with Vita, who alleged that the book contained “misleading arguments” that amounted to dishonesty.

Several stinging letters flew back and forth between London and Sissinghurst before Virginia was satisfied that Vita had not been accusing her of deliberate deceitfulness.

Behind all of this was the shadow of war, and their responses to it could not have been more different. Vita’s intrinsic aggressiveness was sparked to life — she came down from her pink Kentish tower, rolled up her sleeves and volunteered as a local ambulance driver.

Virginia, however, was horrified. War, to her, meant loss and deprivation. It meant no readers, and without readers there were no writers and no creativity. War also meant the end of personal independence as books struggled to sell and the Hogarth Press struggled to publish.

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“I might have saved her”

The women kept in touch through the first years of the war. Virginia occasionally visited Sissinghurst, when petrol rations and air raids allowed, and Vita kept the Woolfs supplied with butter and eggs.

But by 1941 Virginia had begun to drift into a strange state of serenity that quickly turned into the deepest of depressions. The strain of war, the fear of old age and of another period of insanity, and the terror of failing as a writer all converged to produce, for her, the perfect storm.

On March 28, 1941 Virginia ended her own life by drowning herself in the River Ouse.

Vita had had no idea of Virginia’s state of mind, and the shock would haunt her for years. Later, she wrote to Harold, “I still think that I might have saved her if only I had been there and had known the state of mind she was getting into.”

She could well have been right, but we will never know. It was the sad end of a long and passionate friendship that was far more vibrant in life than portrayed on screen, and one that will surely continue to fascinate for years to come.

Sources

All letter and diary quotes are taken from The Letters of Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf, edited by Louise DeSalvo and Mitchell Leaska, Cleis Press 1984, and from Vita: The Life of Vita Sackville-West by Victoria Glendinning, Penguin 1983.

Further reading

The Letters of Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf, edited by Louise DeSalvo and Mitchell Leaska.
Vita: The Life of Vita Sackville-West by Victoria Glendinning
Virginia Woolf by Hermione Lee
A Writer’s Diary by Virginia Woolf (edited by Leonard Woolf)

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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.

This review of Vita and Virginia (2019 film) is typical of the tepid response to the film

The post Beyond the Legend: Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West’s Love Affair & Friendship appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.

Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Fearless Journalist and Crusader for Justice

Ida B. Wells (1862–1931), also known as Ida B. Wells-Barnett, was a fearless journalist and crusader in the early civil rights movement. She was a feminist, editor, sociologist, and one of the founders of the NAACP.

She was best known for spearheading a national antilynching campaign, through which she worked tirelessly to end the uniquely American practice of the public mob murders of African-Americans. Wells’s reputation has continued to grow after her death.

There have been journalism awards established in her name as well as scholarships endowed in her honor, and there is even a museum celebrating her legacy in her hometown in Mississippi.

In 2020, nearly 90 years after her death, Ida B. Wells was awarded a long overdue posthumous Pulitzer Prize in the category of Special Citations and awards for “her outstanding and courageous reporting on the horrific and vicious violence against African Americans during the era of lynching.”

 
Early life

The following biography of Ida B. Wells is excerpted from Afro-American Women Writers 1746 – 1933 by Ann Allen Shockley:

For more than forty years Ida B. Wells was one of the most fearless and one of the most respected women in the United States.” She was widely known as a crusading editor, journalist, organizer, lecturer, social reformer, and feminist.

Born a slave on the threshold of freedom, 16 July 1862, at Holly Springs, Mississippi, Ida Bell Wells was the oldest of eight children. Her parents were Jim Wells, son of his master and a highly skilled carpenter, and Elizabeth Warrenton, an expert cook. The two were married in slavery and repeated their vows when freed.

Deeply religious, Ida’s parents instilled in her biblical teachings and the importance of getting an education. She went to Rust College in her hometown, a Freedmen’s Aid school with all grade levels. A “pretty little girl, slightly nut-brown, with delicate features” she became an exceptional student in the school where her father was a member of the first Trustee Board.

When the yellow fever epidemic of 1878 reached Holly Springs, Ida’s parents and their youngest child died. Two other children had passed on earlier, leaving Ida and her four brothers and sisters.

Showing at the age of fourteen the strength and determination that marked her all her life, she undertook to keep the family together.

After passing the examination for county schoolteacher, she was assigned a one-room school six miles away. After one term, she was encouraged by a widowed aunt to come to Memphis to teach and live with her. While studying for the city school examination, she taught in Shelby County.

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Refusal to move from a white train car and litigation

In May 1884, when she was traveling on the Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad to teach in Woodstock, Tennessee, a conductor asked her to move to the smoking car. When she refused, the conductor, with the assistance of the baggage man, tried to force her out. During the fracas, lda braced her feet on the back of the seat and bit the conductor’s hand.

Getting off at the next stop, she returned to Memphis and brought a suit against the railroad. She won the case and was awarded five hundred dollars and damages.

In writing of her victory, the white Memphis Daily Appeal of December 25, 1884, captioned the story: “A Darky Damsel Obtains a Verdict for Damages against the Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad.”

Her triumph was short-lived, however, for the railroad appealed and the Supreme Court of Tennessee reversed the decision on April 5, 1887. It was the first case in which a colored plaintiff in the South had appealed to a state court since the repeal of the Civil Rights Bill by the United States Supreme Court.

 

First forays into journalism

Ida qualified to teach in the Memphis school system, and became a primary grade teacher for seven years. To further her education, she attended summer school at Fisk University, studied privately with experienced teachers, and read voraciously.

Her writing talent emerged when she was elected editor of a small church paper, the Evening Star. Then, much to her surprise, for she had no newspaper training, she was invited to contribute to the Living Way, a Baptist weekly. Adopting the pen name of “Iola,” she wrote her first article for the paper on the railroad suit.

Soon the young journalist, who had learned to “handle a goose-quill, with diamond point, as easily as any man in the newspaper work,” was in demand. She wrote for the American Baptist, Detroit Plaindealer, Christian Index, Indianapolis World, Gate City Press, and A. M. E. Review.

She also edited the “Home” department of Our Women and Children. Called the “brilliant Iola” and “Princess of the Press,” she was the first woman to attend the Afro-American Press Convention in Louisville, Kentucky, and was elected assistant secretary. There she read a paper, “Women in Journalism, or, How I would Edit.”

 

Buying into newspaper ownership

Her opportunity to edit a paper came when she bought a one-third interest in the Memphis Free Speech and Headlight in 1889.

Not one to hold her tongue or her pen, she wrote an article about the poor conditions of the local black schools, deploring not only the physical structures but the inadequacies of the teachers also. The exposé provoked ill feeling against her among both blacks and whites, and she was not rehired to teach the following year.

She had never particularly enjoyed teaching because of its “confinement and monotony,” and now she set out to express what she called her “real me” in newspaper work.

Shortening the name of the paper to the Free Speech, she devoted full-time to traveling for the paper and making it a success.

Free Speech soon became a household word “up and down the Delta.” It was printed on pink paper so the illiterate could identify it, and circulation increased from fifteen hundred to four thousand.

 

Urging black people to move west to escape lynching

On March 9, 1892, the lynching in Memphis of three young black businessmen, owners of the People’s Grocery Company and friends of Ida’s, changed the direction of her life.

Away at the time in Natchez, Mississippi, she returned to write blistering editorials that condemned whites for permitting the lynching and urged its black citizens to leave the city and go west.

Hundreds of black people began to move away, including entire church congregations. She also encouraged blacks to boycott white businesses, introducing the first black boycott.

 

A serious death threat

In May, Ida B. Wells left an editorial at the paper to be published while she attended the A. M. E. General Conference in Philadelphia, where she was to be the guest of author Frances Ellen Watkins Harper. From there, she was scheduled to go to New York to see T. Thomas Fortune, the brilliant editor of the New York Age.

While in the company of Fortune, she learned about the destruction of her press by an angry white mob. Her partner, J. C. Fleming, had been run out of town, and friends sent word warning her not to return, for whites were threatening to kill her on sight.

The editorial that ignited the wrath of whites concerned the lynching of black men because of white women:

“Nobody in this section believes the old thread-bare lie that Negro men assault white women. If southern white men are not careful they will over-reach themselves and a conclusion will be reached which will be very damaging to the moral reputation of their women.”

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Militant anti-lynching writings

Now an exile from home, Ida was asked by T. Thomas Fortune to write for the New York Age. For the June 5, 1892 issue, she substantiated her Memphis editorial by writing an incisive factual front-page piece on lynching. Four months later, it was published again in pamphlet form and called Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases (1892).

Her writing aroused the interest of the eminent race leader, Frederick Douglass, who published a letter in the pamphlet citing her as a “Brave woman!” That was the beginning of a lifetime friendship between the two.

Ida B. Well’s militant writings against lynching awakened other black women to rally behind her cause. Victoria Earle Matthews, writer and reformer of New York, and Maritcha Lyons, a Brooklyn schoolteacher, led a group of black women to give lda a testimonial at Lyric Hall, in October, 1892. She was presented with five hundred dollars and a gold brooch in the shape of a pen.

This event turned out to be an important occasion in her life, for before a large gathering of prominent black women, she gave her first public lecture on the horrors of lynching. The testimonial had another historic aspect also, for it laid the groundwork for the beginning of the black women’s club movement.

 

A writer and speaker in demand

Out of it came the Women’s Loyal Union. Ida B. Well’s ability as an organizer was readily recognized, and Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin of Boston asked her to assist in forming the Woman’s Era Club. Earning the title “Mother of Clubs,” she helped form women’s groups throughout New England and in Chicago, where one was named in her honor.

She was an outstanding worker in the National Association of Colored Women and, in 1924, ran for president against Mary McLeod Bethune.

Ida now was receiving numerous requests to speak on the subject of lynching. During April and May of 1893, she traveled to England, Scotland, and Wales, and in 1894 visited England again for six months. Her speeches there led to the formation of an Anti-Lynching Committee.

Besieged to write as well as to speak, she was asked to send back articles about her trip to the Chicago daily paper, the Inter-Ocean (subsequently the Herald-Examiner), writing a column “Ida B. Wells Abroad.” She commented in her autobiography that she was the first black person to become a regular paid correspondent for a daily paper in the United States.

Always quick to publicize racial disparities, she protested against the barring of blacks from the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893. She, along with Frederick Douglass and Frederick J. Loudin, an original Fisk University Jubilee Singer, appealed for funds to publish a pamphlet protesting the discrimination.

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Settling in Chicago; becoming a wife and mother

Ida B. Wells settled in Chicago, where she wrote her indictment, A Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynching in the United States, 1892-1893-1894 (1895). This notable work presented both lynching statistics and its history.

She joined the staff of the first black Chicago newspaper, the Conservator, which was owned by Ferdinand L. Barnett, a widower and attorney. Romance entered the picture, and on June 27, 1895, Ida married Barnett. They had four children, but motherhood did not stop her from continuing her writing and lecturing.

In the role of social reformer, she founded the Negro Fellowship League in the most blighted section of Chicago’s South Side. The league gave a refuge to those who were homeless, offered religious services, and helped the unemployed. As the first black woman to be appointed a probation officer, she used the league’s services to assist with her work.

An aggressive feminist, she organized in January 1913 the first suffrage group composed of black women, the Alpha Suffrage Club, which published a newsletter, the Alpha Suffrage Record.

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A focus on antilynching activism

She was called upon also to investigate riots in such places as Springfield, Illinois; Elaine, Arkansas; and East St. Louis. Her stories on these events ran in the Chicago Defender, Broad Ax, and Whip. She carried her mission against mob rule all the way to the White House in 1898.

Armed with resolutions from a Chicago rally against lynching, she presented them to President William McKinley. In 1900, she published a pamphlet, Mob Rule in New Orleans: Robert Charles and His Fight to the Death.

A firm believer in organizing for unity, she was one of the original group who, with W. E. B. Du Bois, conceived of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

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10 Pioneering African-American Women Journalists

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The legacy of Ida B. Wells Barnett

All through her life, Ida B. Wells-Barnett was a dynamic, bold, and strong-minded woman who fought against lynching and for the rights of her people.

She spoke her mind whenever the occasion warranted, and because of this, she was frequently “not only opposed by whites, but some of her own people were often hostile, impugning her motives.”

She fought a “lonely and almost single-handed fight” against lynching long before men or women of any race entered the arena.”

She left her story in an autobiography begun in 1928. Her memoirs were eventually edited by her daughter, Alfreda M. Duster, and published under the title Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of lda B. Wells (1970).

On March 25, 1931, Ida B. Wells died of uremic poisoning. In 1940, the Chicago Housing Authority named a housing project on the South Side in her honor. Ten years after that, the city designated her as one of the twenty-five outstanding women in Chicago’s history.

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Books by and about Ida B. Wells-Barnett on Amazon*

More about Ida B. Wells-Barnett

Books by Ida B. Wells-Barnett

Southern Horrors: Lunch Law in all its Phases (1892)
A Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynchings in the United States, 1892-1893-1894 (1895)
Lynch Law in Georgia (1899)
Mob Rule in New Orleans: Robert Charles and His Fight to the Death (1900)
Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells, edited by Alfreda M. Duster (second edition, 2020)

Biography

To Keep the Waters Troubled: The Life of Ida B. Wells by Linda McMurry (1999)
Ida: A Sword Among Lions by Paula Giddings (2009)
Passionate for Justice: Ida B. Wells as Prophet for Our Time by Catherine Meeks (2019)

More information

Wikipedia
National Women’s History Museum
Works by Ida B. Wells-Barnett at Project Gutenberg

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

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Two Jane Austen-inspired Novels by Sonali Dev: Pride, Prejudice, and Other Flavors & Recipe for Persuasion

It is a truth universally acknowledged that there are Jane Austen fans so devoted that they read Pride and Prejudice (and/or her other novels) every year or two. Contemporary Austen-flavored retellings only add fuel to the literary fire. In that vein, the witty pen of Sonali Dev has produced Pride, Prejudice and Other Flavors (2019) and Recipe for Persuasion (2020).

For fervent devotees, for whom there can never be Too Much Jane, Ms. Dev’s novels will be a delicious treat. They transpose Austen-esque complicated relationships to the modern world, and season them with culinary themes. Here’s a look at these entertaining reads by Sonali Dev.

 

Pride, Prejudice, and Other Flavors By Sonali Dev

A compelling, gender-swapped modern retelling of Jane Austen’s classic Pride and Prejudice by critically acclaimed author Sonali Dev provides a poignant exploration of cultural assimilation, identity, and the true places our hearts learn to call home. Pride, Prejudice and Other Flavors (William Morrow, 2019) gives powerful voice to two charismatic characters who will delight readers.

Award-winning author Sonali Dev launches a new series about the Rajes — an immigrant Indian family descended from royalty, who have painstakingly built their lives in San Francisco.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that only in an overachieving Indian American family can a genius daughter be considered a black sheep.

Trisha, an empowered American woman descended from Indian royalty, and D.J., the British man who leaves behind his career and culinary acclaim to come to California to care for his grievously ill sister.

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Pride, Prejudice and Other Flavors is available on Amazon*

and wherever books are sold

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Dr. Trisha Raje is San Francisco’s most acclaimed neurosurgeon. But that’s not enough for the Rajes, her influential immigrant family who’s achieved power by making its own non-negotiable rules:

Never trust an outsider
Never do anything to jeopardize your brother’s political aspirations
And never, ever, defy your family

Trisha is guilty of breaking all three rules. But now she has a chance to redeem herself. So long as she doesn’t repeat old mistakes.

Up-and-coming chef DJ Caine has known people like Trisha before, people who judge him by his rough beginnings and place pedigree above character. He needs the lucrative job the Rajes offer, but he values his pride too much to indulge Trisha’s arrogance. And then he discovers that she’s the only surgeon who can save his sister’s life.

As the two clash, their assumptions crumble like the spun sugar on one of DJ’s stunning desserts. But before a future can be savored there’s a past to be reckoned with…

A family trying to build home in a new land. A man who has never felt at home anywhere. And a choice to be made between the two.

Sonali Dev cannily weaves references to challenges still faced by those of multi-ethnic heritage. And yet, Trisha’s family is as American as Tikka Masala. Her brother is running for Governor of California; her sister (hiding an unplanned, high-risk pregnancy) is his campaign manager; a dear cousin is the owner of a struggling neighborhood restaurant.

Their story is our story, and the infused beauty of the interwoven tales brims with flavor and delight. Pride, Prejudice and Other Flavors is at once a compelling, heartwarming romance between two strangers from completely different worlds, and a poignant examination of cultural assimilation, identity, and an exploration of the places we come to call “home.”

“Like a gender-swapped Pride and Prejudice, sparks fly … Dev’s fifth novel faces such issues as cultural assimilation, familial forgiveness, and medical ethics head-on. Her descriptions … are mouthwatering. Ideal for romantics and foodies alike.” — Booklist

 

Recipe for Persuasion by Sonali Dev

When waiting for a new book is half agony, half hope … acclaimed author Sonali Dev Delivers!

“I must speak to you by such means as are within my reach. You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope. Tell me not that I am too late, that such precious feelings are gone forever. I offer myself to you again with a heart even more your own than when you almost broke it, eight years and a half ago. Dare not say that man forgets sooner than woman, that his love has an earlier death. I have loved none but you. Unjust I may have been, weak and resentful I have been, but never inconstant.”  — from Jane Austen’s Persuasion

A delicious reinterpretation of Persuasion, considered by some Jane Austen’s best novel, Sonali Dev’s Recipe for Persuasion (William Morrow, 2020)  provides a poignant exploration of loves, romantic and familial, lost and re-found.

Executive editor Tessa Woodward notes, “Persuasion is the Austen novel most known for its well-rounded heart, emotional depth, what makes someone worthy of love and respect – and Sonali Dev has written Recipe for Persuasion to pay tribute to the subtle nuances of the original.”

Award-winning author Sonali Dev continues her new series about the Rajes — an immigrant Indian family descended from royalty, who have painstakingly built their lives in San Francisco.

Recipe for Persuasion is a clever, deeply layered, and heartwarming romantic comedy that follows in the Jane Austen tradition—this time, with a twist on Persuasion.

And while having a fun cooking hook, like Pride, Prejudice and Other Flavors, Recipe for Persuasion incorporates a darker thread of familial discord and dysfunction, a counterpoint to the pop-culture friendly plot.

The heroine is a renowned chef who has been paired with a soccer star on a reality competition, hoping to give her restaurant a much-needed publicity boost. Her partner just happens to be the one man she ever loved … and lost.

Chef Ashna Raje desperately needs a new strategy. How else can she save her beloved restaurant and prove to her estranged, overachieving mother that she isn’t a complete screw up?

When she’s asked to join the cast of Cooking with the Stars, the latest hit reality show teaming chefs with celebrities, it seems like just the leap of faith she needs to put her restaurant back on the map. She’s a chef, what’s the worst that could happen?

Rico Silva, that’s what.

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Recipe for Persuasion is available on Amazon*

and wherever books are sold

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Being paired with a celebrity who was her first love, the man who ghosted her at the worst possible time in her life, only proves what Ashna has always believed: leaps of faith are a recipe for disaster. World Cup winning soccer star Rico Silva isn’t too happy to be paired up with Ashna either.

Losing Ashna years ago almost destroyed him. The only silver lining to this bizarre situation is that he can finally prove to Ashna that he’s definitely over her.

But when their catastrophic first meeting goes viral, social media becomes obsessed with their chemistry. The competition on the show is fierce…and so is the simmering desire between Ashna and Rico.

Every minute they spend together rekindles feelings that pull them toward their disastrous past. Will letting go again be another recipe for heartbreak—or a recipe for persuasion?

In Recipe for Persuasion, Sonali Dev once again takes readers on an unforgettable adventure in this fresh, fun, and enchanting romantic comedy.

“Clever allusions to Persuasion aside (even Jane Austen fans will be challenged to spot them all), this is a sumptuously multilayered story about the ways love gets tangled in family life and romantic relationships.” — Library Journal (Starred review)

“Dev balances the toe-curling romance with high-octane family drama, fleshing out Ashna’s strained relationship with her mother with touching flashbacks to her parents’ past. Dev’s candor and sensitivity in both story lines set this family-centric romance apart. Readers are sure to be impressed.” — Publishers Weekly (Starred review)

About the Author:

Award-winning author Sonali Dev writes Bollywood-style love stories that let her explore issues faced by women around the world while still indulging her faith in a happily ever after. Sonali lives in the Chicago suburbs with her very patient and often amused husband and two teens who demand both patience and humor, and the world’s most perfect dog. Find her on the web:

https://www.facebook.com/SonaliDev.author

https://twitter.com/Sonali_Dev

https://www.instagram.com/sonali.dev/

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The post Two Jane Austen-inspired Novels by Sonali Dev: Pride, Prejudice, and Other Flavors & Recipe for Persuasion appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.