Nava Atlas's Blog, page 57

Pollyanna by Eleanor H. Porter: Revisiting the Eternal Optimist

Most everyone knows what defines  a “Pollyanna” — someone who looks at the bright side of things no matter how dire, or who paints an overly optimistic picture of any situation. The 1913 novel Pollyanna by Eleanor H. Porter is perhaps less familiar now than the lasting expression that grew from its sentimental story.

Pollyanna, subtitled “The glad book,” was incredibly successful from the start, and inspired many adaptations in other media. Though intended as a children’s novel, it appealed to all ages.

Eleven-year-old Pollyanna Whittier, one of a legion of literary orphans, is sent to live with her aunt Polly, an icy spinster. This follows on the trope of another ebullient orphan of that era, Anne Shirley, better known as Anne of Green Gables (1908), who melts the heart of the stereotypical spinster who adopts her.

 

Introducing the “glad game”

Pollyanna and her departed father had devised a “glad game,” wherein they would try to find the silver lining in any situation, no matter how dire. So when Pollyanna got a pair of crutches for Christmas instead of the doll she longed for, she decided to be glad that she didn’t need the crutches.

Once she is living with her stern aunt, she is punished for being late for dinner and is relegated to eating bread and milk in the kitchen with the servant. No problem for her — she determines to enjoy the bread and milk and to like the servant.

In this essay, Jurrian Kamp muses on Pollyanna’s approach to life:

“The glad game shields her from her aunt’s stern attitude: when Aunt Polly puts her in an ugly attic room with no pictures, rugs or mirrors, she is glad for it.

If she had a nice bedroom, she probably wouldn’t notice the beautiful trees outside her window. Had her aunt given her a mirror, she would have to look at her freckles.”

Soon, Pollyanna is spreading her glad game to the resident of the dour Vermont town in which she now lives, transforming it into a joyous place to live.

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A comforting message on the eve of a world war

Sentimental, and occasional corny as the book can be, its comforting, positive message evidently resonated as the rumblings of World War I were being heard.

Indeed, the book was an instant bestseller. Newspapers reported that soon after its publication that the book sold more than 150,000 copies, and that the author, “Mrs. Eleanor H. Porter of Cambridge, Mass., is being overwhelmed with letters of appreciation and gratitude.” 

Building on the enthusiasm for the original, Pollyanna Grows Up was published in 1915.

 

There are limits to optimism

More than a century after its publication, I still see this expression crop up surprisingly often, and it’s never a compliment. “Such a Pollyanna” is a critical response to someone who is unrealistically optimistic.

Jurrian Kamp argues that there are limits to optimism and that even Pollyanna, in the end, learned not to be so completely a blind optimist:

“Eventually, however, even Pollyanna’s robust optimism is put to the test when she is hit by a car and her legs become paralyzed. Her response, for once, seems realistic.

She is grief-stricken and recognizes that it is easier to tell others to feel good about their plight than to tell oneself the same thing. She admits that the game is not fun if it is really hard to play.

Still, she is determined to find a reason to feel good about her plight. She decides she is glad that she cannot walk because her accident has caused her stern aunt to soften up.

The novel ends happily: the aunt marries her former lover and Pollyanna is sent to a hospital where she learns to walk again, able to appreciate the use of her legs far more as a result of being temporarily disabled.”

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Poster for the first film adaptation of Pollyanna (1920)

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Sequels and adaptations

Pollyanna’s success led to a sequel, Pollyanna Grows Up, published in 1915. Pollyanna books became a kind of early franchise, with a number of sequels written by authors other than Porter. One even came out as late as 1997: Pollyanna Plays the Game by Colleen L. Reece.

Pollyanna was adapted first for the stage as a comedy called Pollyanna: The Glad Girl. Met with critical and commercial success upon its Philadelphia debut, it toured the U.S. through 1819.

The first film adaptation appeared in 1920 with Mary Pickford in the title role, her first in a storied silent film career. The film, like the play and the book before it, was a smash success.

The 1960 Disney adaptation is the best known. Hayley Mills won a special Oscar for her portrayal of Pollyanna. The film departs in some significant ways from the book; still, it was a major success.

In 1973, the BBC aired the story as a six-part series. In 1989, Disney produced a made-for-television musical version with an African-American cast. In 2018, Brazilian telenovela presented a Spanish language version titled Poliana.

And this is just a partial listing of adaptations. Apparently, something about Pollyanna resonates. Perhaps it appeals to our better natures, the part of us that wants to stay optimistic even in the face of dire situations and the everyday challenges of life.

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The 1960 film adaptation starring Hayley Mills

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How the Pollyanna begins: A synopsis from serialization

Pollyanna was so popular that many newspapers serialized it the year after it appeared. The Baltimore Sun, April 30, 1914, introduced the first installment as follows:

Miss Polly Harrington, a wealthy spinster of forty has led a lonely life for many years in her house in Beldingville, Vermont. She receives the unwelcome news that, by the death of Reverend John Wittier, a poor home missionary and the widower of her late sister, his only child, Pollyanna, has been left an orphan.

Much as she dislikes the idea, Miss Polly considers it her duty to care for her niece. After she has swept the bare little attic room which has been earmarked for Pollyanna, the maid Nancy is sent to meet the small stranger, much to her chagrin.

Miss Polly, now Aunt Polly, receives the impulsive greeting of Pollyanna with icy coldness and the child is moved to tears when she sees the forlorn, hot little room where she must live.

But she meets the situation bravely, telling Nancy about the “glad game” she used to play with her father. It was a game that taught her to find something to be glad about in any trouble no matter how hard to bear.

There are no screens in Pollyanna’s attic room windows, so Aunt Polly won’t allow her to open them for fear of flies. And so, the little girl, who can’t sleep in the stifling heat, tiptoes about and makes her bed on the roof for the night.

Aunt Polly hears the unfamiliar sounds, and calls for Tom and Timothy, the servants, thinking there is a burglar on the roof. She is enraged when the “burglar” proves to bePollyanna, and as a punishment, condemns her niece to spend the rest of the night with her in her bed.

But  Pollyanna’s glad game turns the punishment into a reward to the amazement and indignation of her aunt.

During her walks about the town, Pollyanna often meets “The Man.” He looks so lonely that she ventures to speak to him on several occasions and tells him her name. But this only seems to increase his confusion, and he turns and walks away in haste.

With an offering of jelly, Pollyanna is sent to the house of an invalid whose chief business in life is complaining. The little girl wins the cross woman over by combing her curly black hair in a fascinating fashion and persuading her to look at her pretty face for the first time in years.

Pollyanna tries the glad game on the invalid and undertakes to discover for her what there is to be glad about in spending all the long days flat on her back in bed.

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Pollyanna by Eleanor H. Porter on Amazon*

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The author has the last word

In A 2013 essay in The Atlantic marking the book’s centenary, Ruth Graham wrote: 

“Pollyanna’s ‘glad game’ goes beyond simple positive thinking. Pollyanna isn’t always cheerful; she cries over disappointments large and small, and initially refuses to play the game when she suffers a major tragedy. It’s not that she’s naturally the world’s greatest optimist; rather, optimism is a tool she uses to make herself happy.

Her gladness is Gladwellian: It’s not a state of mind, but rather a skill that becomes stronger with practice. As the freckled little guru herself put it, ‘When you’re hunting for the glad things, you sort of forget the other kind.’ Welcome to the 21st century, Pollyanna. You’ll fit right in.”

Despite the book’s incredible success and staying power, Eleanor H. Porter was often roundly criticized for unleashing this cheerful-to-a-fault heroine. In an interview, she explained: 

“You know I have been made to suffer from the Pollyanna books. I have been placed often in a false light. People have thought that Pollyanna chirped that she was ‘glad’ at everything. I have never believed that we ought to deny discomfort and pain and evil; I have merely thought that it is far better to ‘greet the unknown with a cheer.'”

More about Pollyanna by Eleanor H. Porter

Wikipedia
Reader discussion on Goodreads
Pollyanna – 1960 film
Read Pollyanna online at Project Gutenberg
Listen to Pollyanna on Librivox

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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 Pollyanna by Eleanor H. Porter: Revisiting the Eternal Optimist appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.

Marianne Moore

Marianne Moore (November 15, 1887 – February 5, 1972) was a poet who belonged to the American Modernist movement. Her poetry was notable for its wit, irony, and use of syllabic verse. She was also a respected translator.

At right, a 1957 photo of Marianne Moore by the noted photographer Imogen Cunningham.

Politically, Marianne was heavily involved in the women’s suffrage movement in the United States, often supporting the movement anonymously through her writing. She was viewed as a celebrity throughout much of her life, and she received numerous honorary degrees and awards for her works, including the Pulitzer Prize and the National Medal for Literature.

 

Early life

Marianne was born in Kirkwood, Missouri, on November 15, 1887. Her mother and father separated before she was born, and she was raised by her mother, Mary Moore. She lived with her mother and her brother in St. Louis until the age of 16, and her grandfather, a Presbyterian minister, was a highly influential figure in her life.

After her grandfather’s death in 1894, Marianne and her family lived with relatives. In 1896, Marianne moved with her mother and brother to Pennsylvania, where her mother worked as an English teacher at a private school.

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College education and beyond

In 1905, Marianne enrolled at Bryn Mawr College, majoring in history, political science, and economics. Hilda Doolittle (“H.D.”), another future poet, was Marianne’s classmate during her freshman year.

As a student, Marianne began writing short stories for the college literary magazine, and this experience inspired her to become a professional writer. Ms. Moore graduated from Bryn Mawr College with her bachelor’s degree in 1909, and she then studied typing at Carlisle Commercial College.

From 1911 through 1915, Moore worked as a teacher at Carlisle Indian School. She moved with her mother to New York City in 1918 and became an assistant at the New York Public Library in 1921.

She was introduced to many poets, including Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams, and began to write for the Dial, a literary magazine. From 1925 to 1929, Marianne served as acting editor of the magazine.

 

Early publications

Marianne’s poetry was first published in spring 1915 in The Egoist and Poetry magazines. Poetry, her first book of poems, was published in 1921 by her former classmate, Hilda Doolittle, without Marianne’s knowledge. Observations, her second book of poetry, was published in 1924 and won the Dial Award that same year.

“The Octopus,” an exploration of Mt. Rainier that is now regarded as one of Marianne’s finest poems, was included in that publication. The volume also included “Marriage,” a poem written in free verse that featured quotations.

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Marianne Moore page on Amazon*

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Major works and awards

The 1930s and 40s were to be Marianne’s most productive years. Her next book of poems, Selected Poems, was published in 1935. It included poems that had been published in Observations and other poems that were published from 1932 to 1934. This was followed in 1941 after a gap of a few years by The Pangolin and Other Verse in 1936 and What Are Years?

Her subsequent work, Nevertheless, was published in 1944 and included an anti-war poem entitled “In Distrust of Merits.” W.H. Auden remarked that the poem was one of the best pieces of poetry from the World War II period.

Collected Poems was published in 1951, and won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. In 1953, Marianne also won the Bollingen Prize. Other works from the 1950s and 60s include Like a Bulwark (1956), O to Be a Dragon (1959), and Tell Me, Tell Me: Granite, Steel, and Other Topics (1966).

 

Poetic style and revision

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

She used stanzas that had a predetermined number of syllables to structure her poetry, and she enjoyed borrowing fragments and quotations from other writers in her works. About her own work, she commented “I tend to write in a patterned arrangement, with rhymes … to secure an effect of flowing continuity … there is a great amount of poetry in unconscious/fastidiousness.”

She had a special fondness for animals, and her poems frequently featured imagery from nature. Her friend William Carlos Williams once described her early works as evoking “the vastness of the particular.” He stated that when Marianne wrote even of a seemingly small object, the reader could feel “the swirl of great events.”

The Achievement of Marianne Moore: A Biography by Eugene P. Sheehy and Kenneth A. Lohf describes her work:

“Her line is long, gathering in its wake a host of observed detail and sharply drawn images, which she leaves to stir their own unaided ripples in the reader’s imagination. Her mood is at once elegant and ironic, conversational yet restrained, the starting point of her mediations often being rare or fabulous animals.”

In her later years, Marianne revised many of her earlier poems. In The Complete Poems of Marianne Moore (1967), she reduced “Poetry,” one of her most highly regarded poems, from its original thirty-one lines to just three lines. Although her revisions generated significant controversy, she maintained that the omissions were not accidental.

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The legacy of Marianne Moore

After a series of strokes in her later life, Marianne passed away in New York City on February 5, 1972. She established a fund in her will to protect the Camperdown Elm tree in Prospect Park in New York City; she had previously written a poem about that particular tree.

After her death, Marianne was inducted into the St. Louis Walk of Fame in 1996. She was inducted into the New York State Writers Hall of Fame in 2012. The Rosenbach Museum and Library in Philadelphia preserved her living room in its original layout, and visitors today can view her entire library, including poetry drafts, photos, letters, and a baseball signed by Mickey Mantle.

More about Marianne Moore

On this site

12 Poems by Marianne Moore, Influential Modernist Poet
“Marriage” — A Modernist Poem by Marianne Moore (1923)

Selected works (poetry)

Poems, 1921
Observations, 1924
Selected Poems, 1935
The Pangolin and Other Verse, 1936
What Are Years, 1941
Nevertheless, 1944
A Face, 1949
Collected Poems, 1951
Like a Bulwark, 1956
Idiosyncrasy and Technique, 1958
O to Be a Dragon, 1959
Dress and Kindred Subjects (1965)
Tell Me, Tell Me: Granite, Steel and Other Topics (1966)
The Complete Poems of Marianne Moore (1967)
The Accented Syllable (1969)
The Complete Poems (1982)
Complete Poems (1994)
Becoming Marianne Moore: The Early Poems, 1907 –1 924 (2002)
Poems of Marianne Moore, ed by Grace Schulman (2003)

Selected Works (prose)

The Complete Prose of Marianne Moore (1986)
A Marianne Moore Reader (1961)
Predilections: Literary Essays (1955)

Biographies, letters, and literary criticism

The Achievement of Marianne Moore: A Biography by Eugene P. Sheehy and Kenneth A. Lohf
Marianne Moore: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. by Charles Tomlinson (1969)
Marianne Moore, Subversive Modernist by Taffy Martin (1986)
The Poetry of Marianne Moore: A Study in Voice and Value by Margaret Holley (1987)
Marianne Moore: A Literary Life by Charles Molesworth (1990)
Marianne Moore: The Art of a Modernist, ed. by Joseph Parisi (1990)
Marianne Moore: Questions of Authority by Cristanne Miller (1995)
The Selected Letters of Marianne Moore (1997)

More information and sources

Poem Hunter
Poetry Foundation
Poets.org
Wikipedia
Reader discussion on Goodreads

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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 Marianne Moore appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.

10 Celebrated Poems by Maya Angelou

Maya Angelou (1928 – 2014) was a multitalented American author, actress, screenwriter, and civil rights activist. She was also a prolific poet, publishing collections throughout her writing career. This selection of 10 celebrated poems by Maya Angelou is a sampling spanning nearly three decades of her prolific output.

Angelou is perhaps best known for her 1969 memoir, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. It made literary history as the first nonfiction best-seller by an African-American woman. But her poetry has also broken through academic circles, with poems like “Still I Rise” and “Phenomenal Woman” as part of American literary consciousness.

Her poetry speaks to personal power, female identity, and courage. Find links to analyses following the end of each poem.

Collections of Maya Angelou’s poetry include:

Just Give Me A Cool Drink Of Water ‘fore I Diiie (1971)
Oh Pray My Wings Are Gonna Fit Me Well (1975)
And Still I Rise (1978)
On The Pulse Of Morning (the inaugural poem, 1993)
Life Doesn’t Frighten Me (1993)
Phenomenal Woman (2011)
The Complete Poetry (2015)

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Learn more about Maya Angelou

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When I Think About Myself (1971)

When I think about myself,

I almost laugh myself to death,

My life has been one great big joke,

A dance that’s walked

A song that’s spoke,

I laugh so hard I almost choke

When I think about myself.

Sixty years in these folks’ world

The child I works for calls me girl

I say “Yes ma’am” for working’s sake.

Too proud to bend

Too poor to break,

I laugh until my stomach ache,

When I think about myself.

My folks can make me split my side,

I laughed so hard I nearly died,

The tales they tell, sound just like lying,

They grow the fruit,

But eat the rind,

I laugh until I start to crying,

When I think about my folks.

(From Just Give Me A Cool Drink Of Water ‘fore I Diiie, 1971)

Analysis of “When I Think About Myself”

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Alone (1975)

Lying, thinking

Last night

How to find my soul a home

Where water is not thirsty

And bread loaf is not stone

I came up with one thing

And I don’t believe I’m wrong

That nobody,

But nobody

Can make it out here alone.

Alone, all alone

Nobody, but nobody

Can make it out here alone.

There are some millionaires

With money they can’t use

Their wives run round like banshees

Their children sing the blues

They’ve got expensive doctors

To cure their hearts of stone.

But nobody

No, nobody

Can make it out here alone.

Alone, all alone

Nobody, but nobody

Can make it out here alone.

Now if you listen closely

I’ll tell you what I know

Storm clouds are gathering

The wind is gonna blow

The race of man is suffering

And I can hear the moan,

‘Cause nobody,

But nobody

Can make it out here alone.

Alone, all alone

Nobody, but nobody

Can make it out here alone.

(From Oh Pray My Wings Are Gonna Fit Me Well ©1975)

Analysis of “Alone”

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Quotes from I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

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Still I Rise (1978)

You may write me down in history

With your bitter, twisted lies,

You may trod me in the very dirt

But still, like dust, I’ll rise.

Does my sassiness upset you?

Why are you beset with gloom?

’Cause I walk like I’ve got oil wells

Pumping in my living room.

Just like moons and like suns,

With the certainty of tides,

Just like hopes springing high,

Still I’ll rise.

Did you want to see me broken?

Bowed head and lowered eyes?

Shoulders falling down like teardrops,

Weakened by my soulful cries?

Does my haughtiness offend you?

Don’t you take it awful hard

’Cause I laugh like I’ve got gold mines

Diggin’ in my own backyard.

You may shoot me with your words,

You may cut me with your eyes,

You may kill me with your hatefulness,

But still, like air, I’ll rise.

Does my sexiness upset you?

Does it come as a surprise

That I dance like I’ve got diamonds

At the meeting of my thighs?

Out of the huts of history’s shame

I rise

Up from a past that’s rooted in pain

I rise

I’m a black ocean, leaping and wide,

Welling and swelling I bear in the tide.

Leaving behind nights of terror and fear

I rise

Into a daybreak that’s wondrously clear

I rise

Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave,

I am the dream and the hope of the slave.

I rise

I rise

I rise.

(from And Still I Rise: A Book of Poems ©1978)

Analysis of “Still I Rise”

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Phenomenal Woman (1978)

Pretty women wonder where my secret lies.

I’m not cute or built to suit a fashion model’s size

But when I start to tell them,

They think I’m telling lies.

I say,

It’s in the reach of my arms

The span of my hips,

The stride of my step,

The curl of my lips.

I’m a woman

Phenomenally.

Phenomenal woman,

That’s me.

I walk into a room

Just as cool as you please,

And to a man,

The fellows stand or

Fall down on their knees.

Then they swarm around me,

A hive of honey bees.

I say,

It’s the fire in my eyes,

And the flash of my teeth,

The swing in my waist,

And the joy in my feet.

I’m a woman

Phenomenally.

Phenomenal woman,

That’s me.

Men themselves have wondered

What they see in me.

They try so much

But they can’t touch

My inner mystery.

When I try to show them

They say they still can’t see.

I say,

It’s in the arch of my back,

The sun of my smile,

The ride of my breasts,

The grace of my style.

I’m a woman

Phenomenally.

Phenomenal woman,

That’s me.

Now you understand

Just why my head’s not bowed.

I don’t shout or jump about

Or have to talk real loud.

When you see me passing

It ought to make you proud.

I say,

It’s in the click of my heels,

The bend of my hair,

the palm of my hand,

The need of my care,

‘Cause I’m a woman

Phenomenally.

Phenomenal woman,

That’s me.

(From And Still I Rise © 1978)

Analysis of “Phenomenal Woman”

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Woman Work (1978)

I’ve got the children to tend

The clothes to mend

The floor to mop

The food to shop

Then the chicken to fry

The baby to dry

I got company to feed

The garden to weed

I’ve got shirts to press

The tots to dress

The can to be cut

I gotta clean up this hut

Then see about the sick

And the cotton to pick.

Shine on me, sunshine

Rain on me, rain

Fall softly, dewdrops

And cool my brow again.

Storm, blow me from here

With your fiercest wind

Let me float across the sky

‘Til I can rest again.

Fall gently, snowflakes

Cover me with white

Cold icy kisses and

Let me rest tonight.

Sun, rain, curving sky

Mountain, oceans, leaf and stone

Star shine, moon glow

You’re all that I can call my own.

(From And Still I Rise, 1978)

Analysis of “Woman Work”

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Caged Bird (1983)

A free bird leaps

on the back of the wind

and floats downstream

till the current ends

and dips his wing

in the orange sun rays

and dares to claim the sky.

But a bird that stalks

down his narrow cage

can seldom see through

his bars of rage

his wings are clipped and

his feet are tied

so he opens his throat to sing.

The caged bird sings

with a fearful trill

of things unknown

but longed for still

and his tune is heard

on the distant hill

for the caged bird

sings of freedom.

The free bird thinks of another breeze

and the trade winds soft through the sighing trees

and the fat worms waiting on a dawn bright lawn

and he names the sky his own

But a caged bird stands on the grave of dreams

his shadow shouts on a nightmare scream

his wings are clipped and his feet are tied

so he opens his throat to sing.

The caged bird sings

with a fearful trill

of things unknown

but longed for still

and his tune is heard

on the distant hill

for the caged bird

sings of freedom.

(From Shaker, Why Don’t You Sing? © 1983)

Analysis of “Caged Bird”

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Maya Angelou Quotes to Live By

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Life Doesn’t Frighten Me (1993)

Shadows on the wall

Noises down the hall

Life doesn’t frighten me at all

Bad dogs barking loud

Big ghosts in a cloud

Life doesn’t frighten me at all

Mean old Mother Goose

Lions on the loose

They don’t frighten me at all

Dragons breathing flame

On my counterpane

That doesn’t frighten me at all.

I go boo

Make them shoo

I make fun

Way they run

I won’t cry

So they fly

I just smile

They go wild

Life doesn’t frighten me at all.

Tough guys fight

All alone at night

Life doesn’t frighten me at all.

Panthers in the park

Strangers in the dark

No, they don’t frighten me at all.

That new classroom where

Boys all pull my hair

(Kissy little girls

With their hair in curls)

They don’t frighten me at all.

Don’t show me frogs and snakes

And listen for my scream,

If I’m afraid at all

It’s only in my dreams.

I’ve got a magic charm

That I keep up my sleeve

I can walk the ocean floor

And never have to breathe.

Life doesn’t frighten me at all

Not at all

Not at all.

Life doesn’t frighten me at all.

(From a children’s book of the same title, 1993)

Analysis of “Life Doesn’t Frighten Me”

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On the Pulse of Morning (1993)

A Rock, A River, A Tree

Hosts to species long since departed,

Marked the mastodon,

The dinosaur, who left dried tokens

Of their sojourn here

On our planet floor,

Any broad alarm of their hastening doom

Is lost in the gloom of dust and ages.

But today, the Rock cries out to us, clearly, forcefully,

Come, you may stand upon my

Back and face your distant destiny,

But seek no haven in my shadow,

I will give you no hiding place down here.

You, created only a little lower than

The angels, have crouched too long in

The bruising darkness

Have lain too long

Facedown in ignorance,

Your mouths spilling words

Armed for slaughter.

The Rock cries out to us today,

You may stand upon me,

But do not hide your face.

(From On the Pulse of Morning,© 1993)

Analysis of “On the Pulse of the Morning”

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Maya Angelou page on Amazon*

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Touched by An Angel (1995)

We, unaccustomed to courage

exiles from delight

live coiled in shells of loneliness

until love leaves its high holy temple

and comes into our sight

to liberate us into life.

Love arrives

and in its train come ecstasies

old memories of pleasure

ancient histories of pain.

Yet if we are bold,

love strikes away the chains of fear

from our souls.

We are weaned from our timidity

In the flush of love’s light

we dare be brave

And suddenly we see

that love costs all we are

and will ever be.

Yet it is only love

which sets us free.

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A Brave and Startling Truth (1995)

We, this people, on a small and lonely planet

Traveling through casual space

Past aloof stars, across the way of indifferent suns

To a destination where all signs tell us

It is possible and imperative that we learn

A brave and startling truth

And when we come to it

To the day of peacemaking

When we release our fingers

From fists of hostility

And allow the pure air to cool our palms

When we come to it

When the curtain falls on the minstrel show of hate

And faces sooted with scorn are scrubbed clean

When battlefields and coliseum

No longer rake our unique and particular sons and daughters

Up with the bruised and bloody grass

To lie in identical plots in foreign soil

When the rapacious storming of the churches

The screaming racket in the temples have ceased

When the pennants are waving gaily

When the banners of the world tremble

Stoutly in the good, clean breeze

When we come to it

When we let the rifles fall from our shoulders

And children dress their dolls in flags of truce

When land mines of death have been removed

And the aged can walk into evenings of peace

When religious ritual is not perfumed

By the incense of burning flesh

And childhood dreams are not kicked awake

By nightmares of abuse

When we come to it

Then we will confess that not the Pyramids

With their stones set in mysterious perfection

Nor the Gardens of Babylon

Hanging as eternal beauty

In our collective memory

Not the Grand Canyon

Kindled into delicious color

By Western sunsets

Nor the Danube, flowing its blue soul into Europe

Not the sacred peak of Mount Fuji

Stretching to the Rising Sun

Neither Father Amazon nor Mother Mississippi who, without favor,

Nurture all creatures in the depths and on the shores

These are not the only wonders of the world

When we come to it

We, this people, on this minuscule and kithless globe

Who reach daily for the bomb, the blade and the dagger

Yet who petition in the dark for tokens of peace

We, this people on this mote of matter

In whose mouths abide cankerous words

Which challenge our very existence

Yet out of those same mouths

Come songs of such exquisite sweetness

That the heart falters in its labor

And the body is quieted into awe

We, this people, on this small and drifting planet

Whose hands can strike with such abandon

That in a twinkling, life is sapped from the living

Yet those same hands can touch with such healing, irresistible tenderness

That the haughty neck is happy to bow

And the proud back is glad to bend

Out of such chaos, of such contradiction

We learn that we are neither devils nor divines

When we come to it

We, this people, on this wayward, floating body

Created on this earth, of this earth

Have the power to fashion for this earth

A climate where every man and every woman

Can live freely without sanctimonious piety

Without crippling fear

When we come to it

We must confess that we are the possible

We are the miraculous, the true wonder of this world

That is when, and only when

We come to it.

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4 Intrepid American Female Newspaper Publishers of the 1800s

For a small number of American female journalist-reformers of the 1800s, starting their own newspapers became a matter of necessity. Refused the opportunity to report on matters of importance by male-dominated mainstream newspapers, they took matters into their own hands.

Launching their own newspapers became platforms for raising awareness of the justice issues they fought for.

Anne Newport Royall, Mary Ann Shadd Cary, and Jovita Idár are no longer familiar names; Ida B. Wells (pictured above right) might be better known to those interested in African-American history. But all deserve to be better known and deserve a place of honor as publisher-reformers in an era when women’s voices were more often silenced than heard.

 

Fighting for the right to report

Even before women began fighting for the right to vote, they fought for the right to report. Women journalists wore their independence proudly, often refusing to conform to gender roles and society’s random limits for women.

In the 1800s, the few women who managed to step inside the world of newspaper work at all were often steered to writing about society, fashion, and domestic topics.

Those who wanted to report on hard news and social justice issues were usually thwarted. For a few undaunted women, there was just one remedy —to publish newspapers of their own.

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Seneca Falls Convention, 1848 — a turning point

The Seneca Falls Convention of 1848 proved to be something of a national turning point for American women. It was the first national event devoted to waking women up to their second-class citizenship.

Husbands and fathers controlled the lives of wives and daughters; females couldn’t own property or sign contracts; and of course, they couldn’t vote. Job prospects were mainly limited to poorly paid service and domestic work or teaching.

At the same time, the issue of slavery was tearing the country apart. Many of the same people (both male and female) involved with women’s rights were also involved in the abolition movement. Journalists often crossed paths and pens working for these causes and writing for anti-slavery and pro-women newspapers.

 

Reform-minded journalists

Following the Civil War, the slavery question may have been legally settled, but life for African-Americans continued to be challenging, if not downright dreadful. The women’s rights movement was in full force, but progress was painfully slow.

Reform-minded journalists weren’t willing to wait for permission to report on the injustice woven into every aspect of American life — civil rights, women’s rights, labor, immigration, education, and more.

Though women who started newspapers were few and far between, the listing that follows is by no means a complete overview. Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, for example, started and ran the women’s suffrage newspaper, The Revolution, from 1868 to 1872. But their names live on in the American consciousness. And you can read about Victoria Woodhull and The Weekly, a radical reform newspaper she launched with her husband and sister.

Here we focus on four women newspaper publishers who aren’t as well known today. Their lives and the spirit of the work they did deserve to be remembered and honored today, as they blazed trails for today’s female journalists and publishers.

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Anne Newport Royall (1769 – 1854)

“Free thought, free speech, and a free press!” That was the rallying cry of Anne Newport Royall, considered America’s first female journalist. Growing up impoverished and fatherless, she started her youth and adult life as a domestic servant.

Her writing career was launched later in life with a series of books filled with colorful accounts of southern states and territories. That made her a pioneering travel journalist, and she also broke ground as a political and investigative reporter.

Always poor and forever struggling, Anne used all of her resources to start a newspaper. She was in her early 60s when she launched it in 1831 under the odd name Paul Pry.  Later, she updated the name to The Huntress. There are no existing images of Anne Newport Royall, so we have to be content with an advertisement for Paul Pry, above.

In her own words, the paper was “dedicated to exposing all and every species of political evil and religious fraud, without fear or affection.”

Indeed, publishing her paper was hard going. It was written of her venture that “snow sometimes covered the floor where her paper was printed and the ink froze before it could record her blistering phrases.”

Anne was feared and scorned by Washington, D.C.’s powerful men — politicians, businessmen, and religious leaders — who dreaded seeing their names in her newspaper. But she dared to publish the truth. She was even convicted of being “a public scold” — which was actually a crime at the time!

Pushed down flights of stairs, beaten about the head, and ducking rocks thrown through her windows, nothing stopped her and no one intimidated her. She continued to publish The Huntress until she drew her last breath at age eighty-five, in 1854. It was all the more remarkable that she accomplished much of what she did before women officially began agitating for rights in the mid-19800s.

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Mary Ann Shadd Cary (1823 – 1893)

Mary Ann Shadd (later adding the name Cary when she married) was the proverbial apple who didn’t fall far from the tree. Growing up as the oldest of thirteen siblings in a close-knit free black family, she was deeply influenced by her parents’ devotion to equality. The Shadd family’s home was a stop on the Underground Railroad.

When the Fugitive Slave Act was passed in 1850, it put runaway slaves at ever greater peril. And for the first time, freeborn African-Americans like the Shadd family were also at risk of being captured and enslaved. Mary Ann and her brother moved to Canada, and the rest of the family soon followed.

In Chatham, Ontario, Mary Ann started a newspaper called The Provincial Freeman. This made her the first black woman publisher in all of North America, and the first woman publisher of any race in Canada. The Freeman promoted abolition and women’s rights, yet also fed the soul of Ontario’s black population (some 20,000) with literature and culture.

As the newspaper’s publisher and editor from 1853 to 1861, Mary Ann fearlessly traveled back and forth to the U.S. to gather news. After the Civil War broke out, she left her family behind in Canada, moved back to the U.S., and worked for the Union Army to recruit black soldiers.

First a teacher, then a journalist, Mary Ann was never content to rest on her laurels. She liked to say “It’s better to wear out than to rust out.” She earned a law degree, making her the second African-American woman to do so, and spent the last decade of her life practicing law in Washington, D.C.  Learn more about the remarkable Mary Ann Shadd Cary on this site.

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Ida B. Wells (1862 – 1931)

Ida B. Wells (also known as Ida B. Wells Barnett, 1862 – 1931) remains one of the legendary names of American journalism. More than seventy years before Rosa Parks refused to move to the back of a bus, Ida Bell Wells refused to move to the smoking car of a train where black passengers were expected to sit.

Ida filed a lawsuit against the railroad company following this 1884 incident and won — though the decision was later reversed. The story of her courage spread, and she was invited to write for black newspapers that were cropping up in big cities.

She contributed so many articles to The New York Age, The Detroit Plaindealer, and the Indianapolis World that she was dubbed “Princess of the Black Press.”

But Ida didn’t care to be a princess. In 1889 she started her newspaper in Memphis, her home town. Free Speech and Headlight supported women’s voting rights and promoted African-American education. Making so much noise about these issues made white people uncomfortable, and she was forced out of Memphis. Her newspaper had to be abandoned.

Ida moved to New York City and devoted her career to fighting lynching, the barbaric mob murders that claimed thousands of black lives. Greatly respected during her lifetime, Ida’s reputation continued to grow after her death.

Journalism awards and scholarships have been established in her honor, and there’s a museum celebrating her life and work in her home state of Missouri. A monument to her legacy is currently being built in Chicago.

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Jovita Idár (1885 – 1946) was a Mexican-American journalist and activist who grew up a large family dedicated to improving the lives of the Latino community in Laredo, Texas and beyond. Clever and imaginative as a girl, Jovita loved to study and adored writing — especially poetry.

She earned a teaching certificate in 1903 and went to work in nearby Los Ojuelos. Her Mexican-America students were forced into poorly equipped, segregated classrooms. There weren’t enough chairs and desks for them; even basics like paper and pencils were in short supply. Jovita found it extremely frustrating and wondered if she could help the schools more as a journalist.

Jovita’s father published a newspaper called La Crónica, a strong voice for Mexican-Americans in Texas. Jovita joined the paper and went undercover to expose the horrendous living and working conditions of Mexican-American laborers. She discovered the power of the printed word to create social change.

Her greatest passion was improving education for girls and poor children. To promote feminist ideals, she started another newspaper, Evolución. She also wrote editorials for other papers that promoted social change.

When the Texas Rangers and U.S. Army came to shut down one of them, she stood in the doorway to keep them from entering. Jovita ran her father’s newspaper after he died in 1914, and dedicated her career as a journalist and activist to improving the lives, schools, and working conditions of Mexican-Americans.

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12 Poems by Marianne Moore, Influential Modernist Poet

Marianne Moore (1887 – 1972) isn’t an easy poet to read or digest. Yet the patient and diligent reader will be amply rewarded. Here are 12 poems by Marianne Moore sampled from a long writing career that blossomed in the early 1920s and started even earlier than that.

Moore was a modernist poet who both influenced and was influenced by other modernist poets. In Marianne Moore: A Literary Life, biographer Charles Molesworth, attempted to sum up what made her the poet she came to be, not an easy task:

“It will not do to replace with something like tough-mindedness the picture of Moore’s obscurity or eccentricity or what she called, in a different context but with a hint of playful self-description her ‘Moor-ish gorgeousness.’

She is simple and complex, direct and subtle; her tone often blends the natural and the highly cultivated. Better if her readers try to maintain more than a single perspective.

Moore, clearly one of the most well-read and intelligent writers of her generation … never flaunted her learning. In an essay published in 1957, called ‘Subject, Predicate, Object,’ she spoke of the influence her mother had on her by awakening in her a strong curiosity in things like history.

But she went on: ‘Curiosity; and books. I think books are chiefly responsible for my doggedly self-determined efforts to write; books and verisimilitude; I like to describe things.’

This is very revealing, because Moore is first and last a literary poet; her intelligence and experience are bound up with reading, in a way outmoded among many people today.”

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Marianne Moore in 1935

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In addition to the poems following, here’s an entire post dedicated to “Marriage” — one of Moore’s  longest and most complex poems.

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Poetry

I too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond

      all this fiddle.

   Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one

      discovers that there is in

it after all, a place for the genuine.

      Hands that can grasp, eyes

      that can dilate, hair that can rise

          if it must, these things are important not because a

high-sounding interpretation can be put upon them but because

      they are

   useful; when they become so derivative as to become

      unintelligible, the

   same thing may be said for all of us—that we

      do not admire what

      we cannot understand. The bat,

          holding on upside down or in quest of something to

eat, elephants pushing, a wild horse taking a roll, a tireless

      wolf under

   a tree, the immovable critic twinkling his skin like a horse

      that feels a flea, the base-

   ball fan, the statistician—case after case

      could be cited did

      one wish it; nor is it valid

          to discriminate against “business documents and

school-books”; all these phenomena are important. One must

      make a distinction

   however: when dragged into prominence by half poets,

      the result is not poetry,

nor till the autocrats among us can be

  “literalists of

    the imagination”—above

      insolence and triviality and can present

for inspection, imaginary gardens with real toads in them,

      shall we have

   it. In the meantime, if you demand on the one hand, in

      defiance of their opinion—

   the raw material of poetry in

      all its rawness, and

      that which is on the other hand,

          genuine, then you are interested in poetry.

(First published in Others for 1919: An Anthology of the New Verse)

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Baseball and Writing

(Suggested by post-game broadcasts)

Fanaticism? No.Writing is exciting

and baseball is like writing.

   You can never tell with either

      how it will go

      or what you will do;

   generating excitement—

   a fever in the victim—

   pitcher, catcher, fielder, batter.

      Victim in what category?

Owlman watching from the press box?

      To whom does it apply?

      Who is excited? Might it be I?

It’s a pitcher’s battle all the way—a duel—

a catcher’s, as, with cruel

   puma paw, Elston Howard lumbers lightly

      back to plate.(His spring

      de-winged a bat swing.)

   They have that killer instinct;

   yet Elston—whose catching

   arm has hurt them all with the bat—

      when questioned, says, unenviously,

   “I’m very satisfied. We won.”

      Shorn of the batting crown, says, “We”;

      robbed by a technicality.

When three players on a side play three positions

and modify conditions,

   the massive run need not be everything.

      “Going, going . . . “Is

       it? Roger Maris

   has it, running fast.You will

   never see a finer catch.Well . . .

   “Mickey, leaping like the devil”—why

      gild it, although deer sounds better—

snares what was speeding towards its treetop nest,

      one-handing the souvenir-to-be

      meant to be caught by you or me.

Assign Yogi Berra to Cape Canaveral;

he could handle any missile.

   He is no feather.”Strike! . . . Strike two!”

      Fouled back.A blur.

      It’s gone.You would infer

   that the bat had eyes.

   He put the wood to that one.

Praised, Skowron says, “Thanks, Mel.

   I think I helped a little bit.”

      All business, each, and modesty.

      Blanchard, Richardson, Kubek, Boyer.

      In that galaxy of nine, say which

     won the pennant? Each. It was he.

Those two magnificent saves from the knee-throws

by Boyer, finesses in twos—

   like Whitey’s three kinds of pitch and pre-

      diagnosis

      with pick-off psychosis.

   Pitching is a large subject.

   Your arm, too true at first, can learn to

   catch your corners—even trouble

      Mickey Mantle.(“Grazed a Yankee!

My baby pitcher, Montejo!”

      With some pedagogy,

       you’ll be tough, premature prodigy.)

They crowd him and curve him and aim for the knees. Trying

indeed! The secret implying:

   “I can stand here, bat held steady.”

      One may suit him;

      none has hit him.

   Imponderables smite him.

   Muscle kinks, infections, spike wounds

   require food, rest, respite from ruffians. (Drat it!

      Celebrity costs privacy!)

Cow’s milk, “tiger’s milk,” soy milk, carrot juice,

      brewer’s yeast (high-potency—

      concentrates presage victory

sped by Luis Arroyo, Hector Lopez—

deadly in a pinch. And “Yes,

   it’s work; I want you to bear down,

      but enjoy it

      while you’re doing it.”

   Mr. Houk and Mr. Sain,

   if you have a rummage sale,

   don’t sell Roland Sheldon or Tom Tresh.

       Studded with stars in belt and crown,

the Stadium is an adastrium.

      O flashing Orion,

      your stars are muscled like the lion.

(From The Complete Poems of Marianne Moore © 1961, 1989)

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Nevertheless

you’ve seen a strawberry

that’s had a struggle; yet

was, where the fragments met,

a hedgehog or a star-

fish for the multitude

of seeds. What better food

than apple seeds – the fruit

within the fruit – locked in

like counter-curved twin

hazelnuts? Frost that kills

the little rubber-plant –

leaves of kok-sagyyz-stalks, can’t

harm the roots; they still grow

in frozen ground. Once where

there was a prickley-pear –

leaf clinging to a barbed wire,

a root shot down to grow

in earth two feet below;

as carrots from mandrakes

or a ram’s-horn root some-

times. Victory won’t come

to me unless I go

to it; a grape tendril

ties a knot in knots till

knotted thirty times – so

the bound twig that’s under-

gone and over-gone, can’t stir.

The weak overcomes its

menace, the strong over-

comes itself. What is there

like fortitude! What sap

went through that little thread

to make the cherry red!

(Title poem from the collection Nevertheless, 1944)

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Rosemary

Beauty and Beauty’s son and rosemary–

Venus and Love, her son, to speak plainly—

born of the sea supposedly,

at Christmas each, in company,

braids a garland of festivity.

Not always rosemary—

 

since the flight to Egypt, blooming indifferently.

With lancelike leaf, green but silver underneath,

its flowers– white originally —

turned blue. The herb of memory,

imitating the blue robe of Mary,

is not too legendary

 

to flower both as symbol and as pungency.

Springing from stones beside the sea,

the height of Christ when he was thirty—three,

it feeds on dew and to the bee

“hath a dumb language”; is in reality

a kind of Christmas tree.

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A Grave

Man looking into the sea,

taking the view from those who have as much right to it as you

      have to yourself,

it is human nature to stand in the middle of a thing,

but you cannot stand in the middle of this;

the sea has nothing to give but a well excavated grave.

The firs stand in a procession, each with an emerald turkey-foot at

      the top,

reserved as their contours, saying nothing;

repression, however, is not the most obvious characteristic of the

      sea;

the sea is a collector, quick to return a rapacious look.

There are others besides you who have worn that look—

whose expression is no longer a protest; the fish no longer

      investigate them

for their bones have not lasted:

men lower nets, unconscious of the fact that they are desecrating

      a grave,

and row quickly away—the blades of the oars

moving together like the feet of water-spiders as if there were no

      such thing as death.

The wrinkles progress among themselves in a phalanx—beautiful

under networks of foam,

and fade breathlessly while the sea rustles in and out of the

      seaweed;

the birds swim through the air at top speed, emitting cat-calls as

      heretofore—

the tortoise-shell scourges about the feet of the cliffs, in motion

      beneath them;

and the ocean, under the pulsation of lighthouses and noise of

      bellbuoys,

advances as usual, looking as if it were not that ocean in which

      dropped things are bound to sink—

in which if they turn and twist, it is neither with volition nor

      consciousness.

(1921; later published in The Complete Poems of Marianne Moore, © 1981)

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Marianne Moore page on Amazon*

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The Paper Nautilus

   For authorities whose hopes

are shaped by mercenaries?

   Writers entrapped by

   teatime fame and by

commuters’ comforts? Not for these

   the paper nautilus

   constructs her thin glass shell.

   Giving her perishable

souvenir of hope, a dull

   white outside and smooth-

   edged inner surface

glossy as the sea, the watchful

   maker of it guards it

   day and night; she scarcely

   eats until the eggs are hatched.

Buried eight-fold in her eight

   arms, for she is in

   a sense a devil-

fish, her glass ram’s horn-cradled freight

   is hid but is not crushed;

   as Hercules, bitten

   by a crab loyal to the hydra,

was hindered to succeed,

   the intensively

   watched eggs coming from

the shell free it when they are freed,—

   leaving its wasp-nest flaws

   of white on white, and close-

   laid Ionic chiton-folds

like the lines in the mane of

   a Parthenon horse,

   round which the arms had

wound themselves as if they knew love

   is the only fortress

   strong enough to trust to.

(From The Complete Poems of Marianne Moore © 1961, 1989)

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The Past Is the Present

Revived bitterness

is unnecessary unless

   One is ignorant.

To-morrow will be

Yesterday unless you say the

    Days of the week back-

   Ward. Last weeks’ circus

Overflow frames an old grudge. Thus:

    When you attempt to

Force the doors and come

At the cause of the shouts, you thumb

   A brass nailed echo.

(This poem is in the public domain)

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Picking and Choosing

Literature is a phase of life: if

      one is afraid of it, the situation is irremediable; if

one approaches it familiarly,

      what one says of it is worthless. Words are constructive

when they are true; the opaque allusion—the simulated flight

upward—accomplishes nothing. Why cloud the fact

       that Shaw if self-conscious in the field of sentiment but is

             otherwise rewarding? that James is all that has been

       said of him but is not profound? It is not Hardy

            the distinguished novelist and Hardy the poet, but one man

“interpreting life through the medium of the

      emotions.” If he must give an opinion, it is permissible that the

critic should know what he likes. Gordon

       Craig with his “this is I” and “this is mine,” with his three

wise men, his “sad French greens” and his Chinese cherries—

     Gordon Craig, so

inclinational and unashamed—has carried

       the percept of being a good critic, to the last extreme. And

         Burke is a

psychologist—of acute, raccoon-

      like curiosity. Summa diligentia;

to the humbug whose name is so amusing—very young and very

rushed, Caesar crossed the Alps on the “top of a

      diligence.” We are not daft about the meaning but this

           familiarity

with wrong meanings puzzles one. Humming-

      bug, the candles are not wired for electricity.

Small dog, going over the lawn, nipping the linen and saying

that you have a badger—remember Xenophon;

       only the most rudimentary sort of behavior is necessary

to put us on the scent; a “right good

       salvo of barks,” a few “strong wrinkles” puckering the

skin between the ears, are all we ask.

(ca. 1920; This poem is in the public domain)

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You Say You Said

“Few words are best.”

      Not here. Discretion has been abandoned in this part

      of the world too lately

      For it to be admired. Disgust for it is like the

Equinox—all things in

One. Disgust is

      No psychologist and has not opportunity to be a hypocrite.

      It says to the saw-toothed bayonet and to the cue

Of blood behind the sub-

Marine—to the

      Poisoned comb, to the Kaiser of Germany and to the

      intolerant gateman at the exit from the eastbound ex-

      press: “I hate

You less than you must hate

Yourselves: You have

      Accoutred me. ‘Without enemies one’s courage flags.’

      Your error has been timed

      To aid me, I am in debt to you for you have primed 

Me against subterfuge.”

(1918; This poem is in the public domain)

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Ennui

He often expressed

A curious wish,

To be interchangeably

Man and fish;

To nibble the bait

Off the hook,

Said he,

And then slip away

Like a ghost

In the sea.

(1909; This poem is in the public domain)

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When I Buy Pictures

or what is closer to the truth,

when I look at that of which I may regard myself as the imaginary

      possessor,

I fix upon what would give me pleasure in my average moments:

the satire upon curiosity in which no more is discernible

than the intensity of the mood;

or quite the opposite—the old thing, the medieval decorated hat-

      box,

in which there are hounds with waists diminishing like the waist

      of the hour-glass,

and deer and birds and seated people;

it may be no more than a square of parquetry; the literal

      biography perhaps,

in letters standing well apart upon a parchment-like expanse;

an artichoke in six varieties of blue; the snipe-legged hieroglyphic

      in three parts;

the silver fence protecting Adam’s grave, or Michael taking Adam

      by the wrist.

Too stern an intellectual emphasis upon this quality or that

      detracts from one’s enjoyment.

It must not wish to disarm anything; nor may the approved

      triumph easily be honored—

that which is great because something else is small.

It comes to this: of whatever sort it is,

it must be “lit with piercing glances into the life of things”;

it must acknowledge the spiritual forces which have made it.

(1921; This poem is in the public domain)

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Silence

My father used to say,

“Superior people never make long visits,

have to be shown Longfellow’s grave

or the glass flowers at Harvard.

Self-reliant like the cat—

that takes its prey to privacy,

the mouse’s limp tail hanging like a shoelace from its mouth—

they sometimes enjoy solitude,

and can be robbed of speech

by speech which has delighted them.

The deepest feeling always shows itself in silence;

not in silence, but restraint.”

Nor was he insincere in saying, “Make my house your inn.”

Inns are not residences.

(1924; First published in The Dial)

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

“Marriage” is a 1923 modernist poem by Marianne Moore that’s considered one of her most fascinating, yet challenging works. Requiring  a great deal of insight to fully appreciate, it’s presented here in full, with links to two excellent and thorough analyses.

Marianne Moore (1887 – 1972 ) has stood the test of time as one of the pre-eminent American poets. Born in St. Louis, she graduated from Bryn Mawr in 1909, and had her first work published in Poetry magazine in 1915. Collected Poems (1951) won a Pulitzer Prize as well as the National Book Award.

A thorough study guide to “Marriage” introduces its premise:

“The first twenty lines consist of Moore’s introduction to the subject of her poem—marriage, and why there needs to be a public promise for a private obligation. She refers to the institution as an ‘enterprise,’ which makes it sound like a business, something utilitarian and anonymous rather than passionate and personal.”

And writes in an essay that illuminates this lengthy poem:

“Published in 1923, just a year after the appearance of Ulysses and The Waste Land, Marianne Moore’s ‘Marriage’ is a landmark of High Modernism and one of her most ambitious and important works. “Marriage” is a long, complicated collage of statements and quotations regarding the institution of marriage and its problems as well as a critical exploration of gender roles and the relations between men and women.

This remarkable masterpiece stands apart from the rest of Moore’s work for several reasons: it is her longest and one of her most difficult, experimental works; it is perhaps her most openly feminist poem in its critique of marriage and patriarchy; and with its contradictory attitudes, it is also among her most ambivalent and complex.”

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Marriage by Marianne Moore

This institution,

perhaps one should say enterprise

out of respect for which

one says one need not change one’s mind

about a thing one has believed in,

requiring public promises

of one’s intention

to fulfill a private obligation:

I wonder what Adam and Eve

think of it by this time,

this firegilt steel

alive with goldenness;

how bright it shows —

“of circular traditions and impostures,

committing many spoils,”

requiring all one’s criminal ingenuity

to avoid!

Psychology which explains everything

explains nothing

and we are still in doubt.

Eve: beautiful woman —

I have seen her

when she was so handsome

she gave me a start,

able to write simultaneously

in three languages —

English, German and French

and talk in the meantime;

equally positive in demanding a commotion

and in stipulating quiet:

“I should like to be alone;”

to which the visitor replies,

“I should like to be alone;

why not be alone together?”

Below the incandescent stars

below the incandescent fruit,

the strange experience of beauty;

its existence is too much;

it tears one to pieces

and each fresh wave of consciousness

is poison.

“See her, see her in this common world,”

the central flaw

in that first crystal-fine experiment,

this amalgamation which can never be more

than an interesting possibility,

describing it

as “that strange paradise

unlike flesh, gold, or stately buildings,

the choicest piece of my life:

the heart rising

in its estate of peace

as a boat rises

with the rising of the water;”

constrained in speaking of the serpent —

that shed snakeskin in the history of politeness

not to be returned to again —

that invaluable accident

exonerating Adam.

And he has beauty also;

it’s distressing — the O thou

to whom, from whom,

without whom nothing — Adam;

“something feline,

something colubrine” — how true!

a crouching mythological monster

in that Persian miniature of emerald mines,

raw silk — ivory white, snow white,

oyster white and six others —

that paddock full of leopards and giraffes —

long lemonyellow bodies

sown with trapezoids of blue.

Alive with words,

vibrating like a cymbal

touched before it has been struck,

he has prophesied correctly —

the industrious waterfall,

“the speedy stream

which violently bears all before it,

at one time silent as the air

and now as powerful as the wind.”

“Treading chasms

on the uncertain footing of a spear,”

forgetting that there is in woman

a quality of mind

which is an instinctive manifestation

is unsafe,

he goes on speaking

in a formal, customary strain

of “past states,” the present state,

seals, promises,

the evil one suffered,

the good one enjoys,

hell, heaven,

everything convenient

to promote one’s joy.”

There is in him a state of mind

by force of which,

perceiving what it was not

intended that he should,

“he experiences a solemn joy

in seeing that he has become an idol.”

Plagued by the nightingale

in the new leaves,

with its silence —

not its silence but its silences,

he says of it:

“It clothes me with a shirt of fire.”

“He dares not clap his hands

to make it go on

lest it should fly off;

if he does nothing, it will sleep;

if he cries out, it will not understand.”

Unnerved by the nightingale

and dazzled by the apple,

impelled by “the illusion of a fire

effectual to extinguish fire,”

compared with which

the shining of the earth

is but deformity — a fire

“as high as deep as bright as broad

as long as life itself,”

he stumbles over marriage,

“a very trivial object indeed”

to have destroyed the attitude

in which he stood —

the ease of the philosopher

unfathered by a woman.

Unhelpful Hymen!

“a kind of overgrown cupid”

reduced to insignificance

by the mechanical advertising

parading as involuntary comment,

by that experiment of Adam’s

with ways out but no way in —

the ritual of marriage,

augmenting all its lavishness;

its fiddle-head ferns,

lotus flowers, opuntias, white dromedaries,

its hippopotamus —

nose and mouth combined

in one magnificent hopper,

“the crested screamer —

that huge bird almost a lizard,”

its snake and the potent apple.

He tells us

that “for love

that will gaze an eagle blind,

that is like a Hercules

climbing the trees

in the garden of the Hesperides,

from forty-five to seventy

is the best age,”

commending it

as a fine art, as an experiment,

a duty or as merely recreation.

One must not call him ruffian

nor friction a calamity —

the fight to be affectionate:

“no truth can be fully known

until it has been tried

by the tooth of disputation.”

The blue panther with black eyes,

the basalt panther with blue eyes,

entirely graceful —

one must give them the path —

the black obsidian Diana

who “darkeneth her countenance

as a bear doth,

causing her husband to sigh,”

the spiked hand

that has an affection for one

and proves it to the bone,

impatient to assure you

that impatience is the mark of independence

not of bondage.

“Married people often look that way” —

“seldom and cold, up and down,

mixed and malarial

with a good day and bad.”

“When do we feed?”

We occidentals are so unemotional,

we quarrel as we feed;

one’s self is quite lost,

the irony preserved

in “the Ahasuerus tête à tête banquet”

with its “good monster, lead the way,”

with little laughter

and munificence of humor

in that quixotic atmosphere of frankness

in which “Four o’clock does not exist

but at five o’clock

the ladies in their imperious humility

are ready to receive you”;

in which experience attests

that men have power

and sometimes one is made to feel it.

He says, “what monarch would not blush

to have a wife

with hair like a shaving-brush?

The fact of woman

is not `the sound of the flute

but every poison.'”

She says, “`Men are monopolists

of stars, garters, buttons

and other shining baubles’ —

unfit to be the guardians

of another person’s happiness.”

He says, “These mummies

must be handled carefully —

`the crumbs from a lion’s meal,

a couple of shins and the bit of an ear’;

turn to the letter M

and you will find

that `a wife is a coffin,’

that severe object

with the pleasing geometry

stipulating space and not people,

refusing to be buried

and uniquely disappointing,

revengefully wrought in the attitude

of an adoring child

to a distinguished parent.”

She says, “This butterfly,

this waterfly, this nomad

that has `proposed

to settle on my hand for life.’ —

What can one do with it?

There must have been more time

in Shakespeare’s day

to sit and watch a play.

You know so many artists are fools.”

He says, “You know so many fools

who are not artists.”

The fact forgot

that “some have merely rights

while some have obligations,”

he loves himself so much,

he can permit himself

no rival in that love.

She loves herself so much,

she cannot see herself enough —

a statuette of ivory on ivory,

the logical last touch

to an expansive splendor

earned as wages for work done:

one is not rich but poor

when one can always seem so right.

What can one do for them —

these savages

condemned to disaffect

all those who are not visionaries

alert to undertake the silly task

of making people noble?

This model of petrine fidelity

who “leaves her peaceful husband

only because she has seen enough of him” —

that orator reminding you,

“I am yours to command.”

“Everything to do with love is mystery;

it is more than a day’s work

to investigate this science.”

One sees that it is rare —

that striking grasp of opposites

opposed each to the other, not to unity,

which in cycloid inclusiveness

has dwarfed the demonstration

of Columbus with the egg —

a triumph of simplicity —

that charitive Euroclydon

of frightening disinterestedness

which the world hates,

admitting:

“I am such a cow,

if I had a sorrow,

I should feel it a long time;

I am not one of those

who have a great sorrow

in the morning

and a great joy at noon;”

which says: “I have encountered it

among those unpretentious

protegés of wisdom,

where seeming to parade

as the debater and the Roman,

the statesmanship

of an archaic Daniel Webster

persists to their simplicity of temper

as the essence of the matter:

`Liberty and union

now and forever;’

the book on the writing-table;

the hand in the breast-pocket.”

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Marianne Moore page on Amazon*

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Further Reading

“Marianne Moore and the Problem of ‘Marriage,”’ by David Bergman. American Literature 60, no. 2 (1988)
“‘The Tooth of Disputation’: Marianne Moore’s ‘Marriage,'” by Lynn Keller and Cristanne Miller, Sagetrieb 6, no. 3 (1987)
“The Collage of ‘Marriage’: Marianne Moore’s Formal and Cultural Critique,” by Elizabeth W.Joyce, Mosaic 26, no. 4 (1993)
Omissions Are Not Accidents: Gender in the Art of Marianne Moore by Jeanne Heuving (1992)

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Selma Lagerlöf

Selma Lagerlöf  (November 20, 1858 – March 16, 1940) was a Swedish author who has the distinction of being the first woman ever to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, and the first Swede to win the award.

She was also an active teacher throughout her professional life and in 1914 became the first female admitted to the Swedish Academy.

Once, when asked for her favorite color, Swedish author, Selma Lagerlöf answered, “Sunset.” A suitable answer for a woman who more often chose the thrill of a good story over personal adventure, romanticism over realism, and the pleasures of home over traveling afar.

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Selma in 1881

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Childhood and early life

Selma Ottilia Lovisa Lagerlöf was born in Värmland, Sweden, in a single-story red house with a tile roof, called Mårbacka. She describes her early years in this “little homestead, with low buildings overshadowed by giant trees” in The Story of a Story (1902) and Memories of My Childhood (1934).

Her father, Erik Gustav, was a retired army officer, who devoted himself to the life of a gentleman farmer, with progressive ideals that were often unrealized. Her mother, Lovisa Elisabeth, was the daughter of a wealthy merchant and mine owner.

When she was three years old, Selma was diagnosed with paralysis. Her parents took her to the seaside town of  Strömstad the following summer, on Sweden’s west coast, in hopes of restoring her health.

She continued to improve, and after a winter’s treatment at Orthopedic Institute in Stockholm, when she was nine years old, she could walk more easily. Still, one hip would remain weakened throughout her life.

One of her remarkable experiences in the city was attending the play “My Rose of the Forest” at the Royal Dramatic Theatre. After she returned home to Mårbacka, the children in the family played theatre, building a wall with beds, bureaus, tables and chairs and covering it with blanket and quilts, to create a stage backdrop.

 

A great reader

Selma read plays, novels, and poetry throughout her younger years; stories were always important to her. Both her grandmother and her Aunt Ottiliana told her stories and, when Selma was old enough, she read aloud to her mother. Her Aunt Lovisa always had a book hidden in her sewing basket.

In the evenings, after knitting and handicrafts were set aside, the family sometimes read aloud Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales, One Thousand and One Nights, Esaias Tegnér’s Frithiof’s Saga (1825) or Johan Ludvig Runeberg’s Fänrik Ståls sägner (1848).

While she was staying in Stockholm, Selma read her way through Walter Scott’s fiction, before her tenth birthday.

Her mother and her governess did not allow her to read indiscriminately, however; they withdrew Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White (1859) at the most exciting part. And, when she was studying for her first communion, The Barber-Surgeon’s Tales (1853-67) by Zacharias Topelius was declared too “worldly” (although it was acceptable afterwards).

Selma did single out one book from her childhood, however: “For me acquaintance with this Indian story (Osceola) had a decisive effect on my whole life. It awoke in me a deep, powerful desire to produce something as fine. Thanks to this book, I knew as a child that later I should above all love to write novels.”

The novel in question is Osceola the Seminole, or, The Red Fawn of the Flower Land (1858) by Thomas Mayne Reid.

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Becoming a teacher

Selma’s governess, Aline, had believed that she might have a talent for storytelling, so she encouraged Selma’s aspirations. When Aline’s older sister, Elin, took over the tutoring, however, she did not recognize any exceptional talent in Selma, so she steered her attention elsewhere.

At twenty, Selma took the examination to attend teachers’ college. Harry Edward Maule, in his 1917 biography, Selma Lagerlöf; The Woman, her Work, her Message, described her anxiety. There were forty applicants and only twenty-five opportunities available for study at the Women’s Superior Training College – Selma’s bid was successful.

After her three-year program, 1882 to 1885, at Högre lärarinneseminariet in Stockholm, Selma was appointed to the Grammar School for Girls in Kandskrona, Skane. She worked there for ten years.

One of her pupils, Anna Clara (later Fru Dr Romanus-Alfven), observed that Selma taught everything from Darwinism to Socialism to Utilitarianism and, as Anna Clara, continues, she “never turned us away with the excuse that we were too young to understand.”

Even while absorbed in teaching, Selma intended to write. She was influenced by works in the college library, including Heroes and Hero Worship by Thomas Carlyle (1841), which she first read in the spring 1884, and reread often, admiring its “direct and fine” prose.

 
Beginning to write

“Before Aline had advised me not to write, I had felt only a vague, intangible longing, but now this longing has become a fixed determination,” Selma wrote in her memoir.

Carlyle’s prose was an inspiration: “I had the distinct feeling, that I also could write such prose – the ability to write thus straight from the heart, to deal freely and unhindered with the reader, to express irony, love and wisdom in imaginative and brilliant language appealed to me as exquisite.”

When she later discovered his History of the French Revolution (1837), she felt the “same feeling of inner kinship.”

She began writing short stories in 1881  and when her father’s health deteriorated as he approached death, Selma wrote to escape her pain. Much of this work found its way into the five chapters she submitted to a writing contest sponsored by the women’s paper Idun in the spring of 1890.

When Selma won first prize, she requested a year’s leave from teaching to complete her novel and, with the tangible support of friends and colleagues, she undertook the project.

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Becoming a published author

In August 1891, Selma finished what would become her best-known novel, The Saga of Gösta Berling, the story of a demoted minister who comes to stay at a manor in Ekeby. His adventures – and those of the other pensioners and residents there – were published at Christmas (also by Idun) and launched a long and impressive career.

Selma had tremendous confidence in her work, as expressed in a letter written to her mother, April 23, 1891 (translated by Anna Nordlund in a 2004 article in Scandinavian Studies (76.2):

“You see, mother, I have a terribly strong belief in the genius inside me; how else could I write and publish anything? I believe that this is the best book yet in Swedish, and I cannot understand when people talk about its deficiencies and how I will improve.”

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Selma Lagerlöf page on Amazon*

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A prolific career

Her confidence was warranted. Over the course of her career, she would publish more than thirty works. And Värmland would become synonymous with “Gösta Berling” land — travelers from all over the world would be drawn to visit this part of the continent, intrigued by her fiction.

Walter A. Berendsohn’s 1927 biography, Selma Lagerlöf: Her Life and Work notes that Gösta’s action unfolds between two Christmas Eves and “flows on like a river which here and there expands into a quiet lake.”

The background to all of the adventures is Lake Löven (Värmland’s fictionalized Lake Fryken) and while there’s “no exact parallel” in English literature, “there burns in it the same passionate intensity which glows through the pages of Jane Eyre.”

Selma wrote The Wonderful Adventures of Nils (1906) in response to a request from the Swedish school board. Her second volume of stories about a young boy flying over the countryside on a goose would be published five years later.

When the volumes were translated into other languages, the focus was shifted away from the Swedish geographical details to the stories about the natural world, maintaining their simplicity and charm.

Her trio of novels detailing the life and history of a Swedish family was also very popular. It had been published in three volumes – The General’s Ring (1925), Charlotte Löwensköld (1925), and Anna Svärd (1928) – and, later, would be combined into The Ring of the Löwenskölds (1931).

In a 1931 preface to Berendsohn’s biographical work, Vita Sackville-West describes Selma as “a poet writing in prose,” whose “realism is deliberate, whereas her romanticism (with a vengeance) is instinctive.”

She observes “that she writes always as a woman: not one of her books could have been written by a man. Her art is essentially feminine, not masculine, yet without the slightest consciousness of sex.”

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14 Women Who Won the Nobel Prize in Literature

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Recognition and awards, including the Nobel Prize

Selma’s peers were not the only admirers of her work. Following the success of The Saga of Gösta Berling, King Oskar and Prince Eugen gave Selma a traveling scholarship in 1895, to free her from the demands of teaching. She traveled on the continent and in the Near East, and her journeys in Italy, with her friend and companion Sophie Elkan, were particularly influential.

In 1909, Selma became the first Swede and the first woman to receive the Nobel Prize for literature. She would also be the first woman, in 1914, to be elected to the prestigious group of eighteen authors and scholars which comprised the Swedish Academy.

Many of her works were made into films after 1919, including a version of her debut novel in 1924 Sweden, Gösta Berling’s Saga, directed by Mauritz Stiller. It starred the young actress Greta Garbo as the Countess Elizabeth and Lars Hanson as Gösta Berling. In 1925, an opera by Riccardo Zandonai would also be produced based on this popular story.

 

Selma Lagerlöf’s legacy

In her memoir about her childhood in Mårbacka, Selma writes: “When I grow up, I want to live in a house that is painted white and has an upper story and a slate roof; and I would like to have a grand salon where we can dance when we have parties.”

In fact, as soon as she was able to do so, in 1907, she repurchased Mårbacka, which had been sold following her father’s death. With the aid of her Nobel Prize winnings, she was able to finally secure the property in 1910, when she was fifty-one years old.

Thereafter, she wintered in Falun, Dalarna; she spent the rest of the year living on and managing the estate, with its dozens of tenants and a hundred cultivated acres. The homestead now operates as a museum.

In 1911, she addressed the international congress on suffrage in Sweden: “Have we done nothing which entitles us to equal rights with man? Our time on earth has been long – as long as his.” As a young reader, she was moved by stories “about those who have struggled against great odds and who, in the end, have attained success.”

Although her position on suffrage and women’s rights was considered conventional by some, she did recognized social and political injustice and often worked towards change for individuals in need. For instance, the proceeds from the Gösta Berling film were devoted to a “Gösta Berling Fund” dispensed to needy and elderly authoresses.

A documentary film on Selma Lagerlöf was produced by Suntower Entertainment Group (2014), in Swedish, with glimpses of the homestead museum and footage of the author in her later life.

In the same questionnaire, in which she was asked about her favourite colour, Selma was asked to define her favorite quality in a man and in a woman (her answer was the same for both: “Depth and earnestness”) and about her favorite occupation. Her reply – “The study of character” – is still evident in her published works today.

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

More about Selma Lagerlöf

Major works

Selma Lagerlöf was incredibly prolific, and her works are too numerous to list here. For a complete list of her works, denoting which have been translated into English, see this listing on Wikipedia.

Selected Biographies

Selma Lagerlöf: The Woman, her Work, her Message by Harry Edward Maule (1917)
Selma Lagerlöf: Her Life and Work by Walter A. Berendsohn (1931)
Selma Lagerlöf I (1942) and Selma Lagerlöf II  by Elin Wägner (1943)
The Critical Reception of Selma Lagerlöf in France by Anne Theodora Nelson (1962)
Selma Lagerlöf by Vivi Edström (1984)

More information 

Selma Lagerlöf: A Nobel Mind
Reader discussion on Goodreads
Selma Lagerlöf on the Nobel Prize site
Fourteen-minute video biography in Swedish, including many photographs, and cover images of some of her published works

Read and listen online

Project Gutenberg
Librivox

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3 Trailblazing Women Sports Journalists: Ina Louise Young, Mary Garber, and Anita Martini

The story of women in American journalism has a common thread: From Colonial times on, women have fought for the right to report. That was (and still remains) especially true for women sports journalists, including this trio of trailblazers: Ina Louise Young, Mary Garber (at right), and Anita Martini.

Sports journalism seems like the final frontier because there have been more women reporting from the battlefield than from the playing field. Consider that during World War II, there were about 140 accredited female war correspondents. That’s not a huge number, but still eclipses the handful of female sports reporters working at the time.

 

Bias against women sports journalists, past and present

There are more female sports journalists today than ever, but they still face significant bias. And disturbingly but not surprisingly, they’re subject to sexual harassment, a common occurrence in  the field of journalism toward women in general. 

Do a search on sexism and female journalists and you’ll come across tons of articles like Female Sports Journalists Still Face Rampant Sexism on the Job.

And that’s even setting aside an implicit bias toward covering women athletes and sporting events, but that’s another matter altogether. 

Rediscovering pioneering female journalists from the past isn’t particularly difficult, even though they were in a vast minority. But female sports journalists of the past haven’t merely been forgotten; hardly any even existed. That’s what makes the work and lives of determined women like the ones following especially exciting to discover.

To use a fitting cliché, it’s still not an even playing field. Sports journalism is a rough-and-tumble field that might only get easier if there’s strength in numbers — more women stepping up to the plate, so to speak, and getting the respect they deserve.

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Ina Eloise Young

Ina Eloise Young (1881 – 1947) was America’s first female sports editor. She adored playing sports as well as writing about them.

In high school and her two years at the University of Colorado at Boulder, she was on the basketball and fencing teams. Her favorite sport was baseball, though as a female, she wasn’t allowed to play, only to watch.

Returning to her home town of Trinidad, Colorado, she worked as a general reporter for the local newspaper, the Chronicle-News.

When the 1905 baseball season started, she learned that none of her male colleagues knew how to keep a baseball scorecard. They grudgingly allowed her to report on baseball games until they could find a new man for the job.

But within a few weeks, Ina proved that she was right where she belonged. The following year, the newspaper promoted her to sports editor.

It was quite a novelty for a woman to cover baseball’s national World Series, but that’s just what Ina did starting in 1908. She wrote of her life as a sports reporter and editor:

“I wouldn’t change my place with any woman I know … I’m as happy and independent as a lark, they give me a big salary, six weeks vacation, my expenses paid all over with the ball team, and courteous, considerate treatment. Instinctively they know how to treat a woman. I ask no better society than that of sporting men.”

In that way, Ina Eloise Young was luckier than the rare female sports writers and editors who came after her, like Mary Garber, and many who work in the field today.

More: Society for American Baseball Research

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Mary Garber

Photo: Digital Forsyth

Mary Garber (1916 – 2008) was a sports-crazy girl growing up in 1920s North Carolina who dreamed of becoming an athlete. But topping out at five feet tall and ninety pounds as a teen put an end to her ambition.

After graduating from college in the late 1930s, Mary returned home to Winston-Salem, where she worked as a general reporter for the local newspaper. When the sports stringer joined the Navy during World War II, Mary was given his assignments and fell in love with the job.

Mary was returned — quite unhappily — to general reporting after the war and badgered her editor for a whole year to put her back on the sports beat.

As a female, Mary was often barred from press boxes, locker rooms, and journalism associations. Seeing herself as an underdog, she developed empathy for black athletes and related to their struggle for respect. She was the first white reporter in her segregated state to report on games at black high schools and colleges — stories that no one else would cover.

Mary took courage from her hero, Jackie Robinson. His dignity and attitude gave her courage when, as she recalled, “people would step on me and hurt my feelings.”

Mary was elected president of the Atlantic Coast Conference Sportswriters Association in the late 1970s. The honor was especially sweet because she hadn’t been allowed to join that very group in the 1950s. Mary became a major inspiration to aspiring female sportswriters. A Mary Garber Pioneer Award is given each year to an outstanding woman in sports media.

Just before Mary Garber died in 2008, she was inducted into the Hall of Fame of the National Sportscasters and Sportswriters Association.

More: A Look Back at Pioneering Sports Writer Mary Garber

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Anita Martini

Anita Martini (1939–1993) was Texas-based sports journalist who worked in radio and television. A native of Galveston, she began her career on radio in 1965, where she did interviews from the Astrodome stands.

That might sound pretty cool, but it wasn’t — female reporters weren’t allowed on the field. It took seven more years until she could report from the Astrodome’s press box.

Anita’s firsts: Anita achieved a number of firsts for women in sports journalism: In 1973, she became the first female journalist to cover a major league all-star game. The following year, she was the first woman reporter allowed into the locker room of a major-league team. She was also the first woman to co-host a sports talk show in a major radio market (1972 – 1979).

Anita often said that she didn’t become a sports reporter so that she could be the first woman to do this or that. She loved sports, especially baseball, and wanted to be the best at whatever she did. 

Though her life was cut short by illness, she was an inspiration for female sports journalists who followed in her footsteps.

In 2007, some years after her death, Anita Martini was inducted into the Texas Baseball Hall of Fame. By 2011, when the Hall presented an exhibit on women in baseball, she was completely left out. This caused a huge outcry from people who had worked with her, and proves how easy it is to forget the trailblazers if their stories aren’t kept alive!

More: Celebrating Women in Baseball While Forgetting Anita Martini

More trailblazing female sports journalists to explore:

Phyllis George
Jayne Kennedy
Leslie Visser
Gayle Gardner
Robin Roberts
Anne Doyle
Christine Brennan

And see more about trailblazing women journalists here on Literary Ladies Guide.

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The Years by Virginia Woolf (1937) — views from the past and present

The Years by Virginia Woolf (1937) was the last novel she had published in her lifetime. Spanning some fifty years, it covers the trajectory of the respectable Pargiter family from the 1880s to the 1930s.

One of its overarching themes is the passage of time, and it does so by detailing small, mostly private moments of the characters lives. Still, it moves away from the stream of consciousness style that she’s best known for, and into a more traditional narrative.

The novel is less internal than most of Virginia Woolf’s books, and traces the lives of the Pargiter family and the dailyness of their existence. From the Penguin Modern Classics edition:

“The most popular of Virginia Woolf’s novels during her lifetime, The Years is a savage indictment of British society at the turn of the century, edited with an introduction and notes by Jeri Johnson in Penguin Modern Classics.

The Years is the story of three generations of the Pargiter family — their intimacies and estrangements, anxieties and triumphs — mapped out against the bustling rhythms of London’s streets during the first decades of the twentieth century.

Growing up in a typically Victorian household, the Pargiter children must learn to find their footing in an alternative world, where the rules of etiquette have shifted from the drawing-room to the air-raid shelter.

A work of fluid and dazzling lucidity, The Years eschews a simple line of development in favour of a varied and constantly changing style, emphasizes the radical discontinuity of personal experiences and historical events.

Virginia Woolf’s penultimate novel celebrates the resilience of the individual self and, in her dazzlingly fluid and distinctive voice, she confidently paints a broad canvas across time, generation and class.”

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Learn more about Virginia Woolf

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An unusual family saga

The sections of the novel takes place on a single day of a specific year. The year is further defined by the cycle of seasons. For example, the opening year, 1880, has Colonel Abel Pargiter visiting his mistress, Mira, in a dingy suburb. and opens with “It was an uncertain spring.” At home, his wife is dying.

As the novel progresses, we encounter the Colonel’s children. As described by in an essay on the novel by Nuala Casey in London Fictions, they are: “Selfless Eleanor, barrister Maurice, homely Milly, romantic Delia, academic Edward, feminist Rose and free-spirited Martin.” Further, writes Casey:

“At first glance, The Years appears to be a family saga worthy of Galsworthy, a radical departure from Woolf’s modernist masterpieces such as Mrs. Dalloway and The Waves but as you read on it becomes apparent that the author is doing something very interesting and very different here. This is Woolf’s, possibly subconscious, swan song, where she bids farewell to the present through a dreamlike journey through her past.”

The Years was a success on both sides of the Atlantic, and in fact, made it onto several best seller lists in North America despite its very British flavor. It was, by many accounts, the most popular of her novels during her lifetime. Here’s a typically laudatory review from 1937, the year in which it was published:

 

Virginia Woolf Illuminates the Falling Drops of Time

From the original review in the Montreal Gazette, April 3, 1937:  It is six years since Virginia Woolf has given us a novel — and six years is a long time to wait for Virginia Woolf. Especially after such a book as The Waves.

After The Waves, so beautiful, so significant, but so utterly strange in form as to baffle many readers, where was Mrs. Woolf going, what was to be the next step?

The Years is the answer. The monologues have been abandoned. This is natural: they were for the one book; the author has not pressed on to the remote inaccessible reaches of style The Waves might have foreshadowed.

Nor has Mrs. Woolf retreated to the ordinary straightforward narrative of Night and Day and The Voyage out. She is far beyond the earl method; it is too rigid and machine-like for her Ariel spirit, for her philosophy of Time.

The Years belongs with Orlando, Mrs. Dalloway, Jacob’s Room, and To the Lighthouse. If The Waves was a peculiar intensification, The Years is an enlargement of the essential Virginia Woolf.

With the exception of Orlando, which begins in the days of Elizabeth and follows the changing course of English history to the era of Queen Victoria, the new novel covers a greater span of time than any of them — nearly sixty years.

 
Nothing happens but the passage of Time

Because of its range, someone has spoken of it with the term “epic,” but you have only to compare it with the rolling grandeur of a War and Peace to realize that epic is not the word.

The Years is certainly not dramatic. Parnell dies. King Edward dies. Some of the other characters die. But, except forMrs. Pargiter, whose death opens the book, the deaths are off-stage, or rather off-page. The people simply sink down under the rising tide of Time; they are engulfed change.

The Great War [World War I] comes in, but it, too, is only an incident in the endless flux. There is an air-raid scene, but the bombs fall on far-away streets; the noise is like a disturbance in a dream.

Nothing happens but the passage of Time, slowly, stealthily, working its change. The leaves fall. Mrs. Pargiter dies. The raindrops fall — “One sliding met another and together in on drop they rolled to the bottom of the windowpane.”

 
Made up of moments and symbols

The word is lyric. In The Years, as always, Mrs. Woolf writes with an uncanny omnipresence, but her way is not to attempt the telling of all, but to dwell on a detail here and a detail there, to illuminate the moment.

But now much more she reveals by telling less. The Years, like life itself, is made up of moment and symbols. A recurring phrase, a gesture, a snatch of a tune, a fallen tree, the cooing of pigeons, they bind all things together.

“All passes, all changes,” thought Kitty, returning to the country from London. But is there a pattern? wondered Eleanor at the family reunion which closes the book.

“Does everything then come over again a little differently? she thought. If so, is there a pattern; a theme, recurring, like music; half remembered, half forseen? … a gigantic pattern, momentarily perceptible?”

And yet — “Directly something got together, it broke. She had a feeling of desolation. And then you have to pick up the pieces, and make something new, sometimes different.”

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The Years by Virginia Woolf on Amazon*

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All things must pass

Style and philosophy are inseparable. Virginia Woolf writes in moments, the most trivial moments, because that’s the way she gets at life. Life is not a grand structure but a series — no, not even a series, perhaps: a collection — of moments. Is there a pattern? Who knows? Everything changes, everything passes. What is continuity?

Kitty realizes that the land doesn’t belong to her, but to her children. Does it actually belong to them? No; they too, pass.

Abercorn Terrace belonged to the Colonel Abel Pargiter. It was sold. The Colonel lived on and on, after his wife died, while his children grew up. But at last he disappeared. Abercorn Terrace passed away from the Pargiters.

Continuity and change and time — these are the themes the Virginia Woolf explores, as much in The Years as in To the Lighthouse or Jacob’s Room.

 
The riddle of personality — who are we?

And the riddle of the personality figures largely as well. Who are we? How can we now others if we do not know ourselves? Can people be whole and free?

“There must be another life, here and now,” thought Eleanor. “This is too short, too broken. We know nothing, even about ourselves. We’re only just beginning, she thought, to understand here and there …”

These absorbing philosophical questions go deeper than the surface changes of history. But The Years moves on more than one plane. Almost imperceptibly, we become aware of changing habits, changing manners, the sinking of one generation, and the rising of another.

One despairs of doing justice to this long novel in a review. One cannot even grasp its full significance in one reading. Not this year, not for many a year, will English literature bring forth a novel more beautiful, more profound.

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You might also enjoy this review of Mrs. Dalloway

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Quotes from The Years

“There must be another life, she thought, sinking back into her chair, exasperated. Not in dreams; but here and now, in this room, with living people.”

“She felt as if she were standing on the edge of a precipice with her hair blown back; she was about to grasp something that just evaded her. There must be another life, here and now, she repeated. This is too short, too broken. We know nothing, even about ourselves.”

“When shall we be free? When shall we live adventurously, wholly, not like cripples in a cave?”

“Love ought to stop on both sides, don’t you think, simultaneously?’ He spoke without any stress on the words, so as not to wake the sleepers. ‘But it won’t — that’s the devil,’ he added in the same undertone.”

“Thinking was torment; why not give up thinking, and drift and dream?”

“Millions of things came back to her. Atoms danced apart and massed themselves. But how did they compose what people called a life?”

“She felt as if things were moving past her as she lay stretched on the bed under the single sheet. But it’s not landscape any longer, she thought; it’s people’s lives, their changing lives.”

“Old age must have endless avenues, stretching away and away down its darkness, she supposed, and now one door opened and then another.”

“But why do I notice everything? She thought. Why must I think? She did not want to think. She wanted to force her mind to become a blank and lie back, and accept quietly, tolerantly, whatever came.”

 
More about The Years by Virginia Woolf

The Years study guide
The Years on Book Snob
Reader discussion on Goodreads

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Victoria Woodhull: Rabble Rousing Suffragist and First American Woman to Run for President

Shirley Chisholm may have been the first woman to seek the presidential nomination from one of the two major political parties — that was in 1972 — but exactly one hundred years before that, Victoria Woodhull (1838 – 1927) was the first woman to launch a national presidential campaign. She did so under the banner of the Equal Rights Party.

And running for president long before women even had the right to vote was just one chapter in an incredibly colorful, yet largely forgotten American life.

Victoria was a suffragist, publisher, stockbroker, orator, and agitator. She was also accused at various points of being a bigamist, prostitute, spiritual charlatan, and adulteress.

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A controversial figure in a tumultuous time

Imagine this scenario to see why the life of a rabble-rouser like Victoria Woodhull is still relevant today:

A woman is running for president.
The institution of marriage is being redefined, as are sexual standards.
A culture war is raging between organized religion and secular beliefs.
The rights and economic fortunes of women and immigrants are in flux.
Popular spiritual and political leaders are caught in webs of hypocrisy.
A nationwide financial collapse is followed by a resurgence of wealth that benefits the already super-wealthy in a competitive, aggressive era.

No, this isn’t a capsule of 21st-century America. It’s post-Civil War New York City — the late 1860s and early 1870s, to be exact. The issues and struggles are eerily similar, but the players are different — and far more dramatic and flamboyant than those in the public arena today.

Though nearly always mired in controversy, Victoria fought for what she believed in — equal rights for women, labor reform, and “free love” — the 19th-century term for granting women the opportunity to marry, have children, divorce, and take lovers without the interference of government and society.

In one of her many public speeches, she famously declared:

“Yes, I am a free lover! I have an inalienable, constitutional, and natural right to love whom I may, to love as long or as short a period as I can, to change that love every day if I please, and with that right neither you nor any law you can frame have any right to interfere.”

With a large, squalid family never far from her side, Victoria and her equally colorful sister, Tennessee (Tennie) Claflin, shocked and challenged a post-Civil War society that was grappling with new ideas about class, religion, sexuality, and the role of women.

 
“The most famous woman in America”

Victoria and Tennessee, the sibling with whom she was closest, lived the classic rags-to-riches tale twice over, and crossed paths (often with dramatic consequences) with some of the most renowned and influential people of their time:

Cornelius Vanderbilt, Henry Ward Beecher and his sisters (Harriet Beecher Stowe and Isabella Beecher Hooker, and suffragists Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton were among  those who were friends and enemies of Victoria.

Though not as well remembered as some of her famous contemporaries today, Victoria was for a time called “the most famous woman in America.” She was always a divisive figure who inspired admiration and respect by some; loathing and fear by others.

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Books about Victoria Woodhull on Amazon*

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Clairvoyant sisters and a family of charlatans

From the time they were young, the sisters were the star attractions of the Claflin family’s traveling medicine and clairvoyance show, taking full advantage of the public hunger for magnetic healing, magical elixirs, and spirit channeling in the aftermath of the Civil War.

Victoria possessed a distinctive aquiline beauty and carried herself with a regal air. Tennessee’s wily intelligence was masked by a bubbly, coquettish demeanor and an uninhibited spirit.

Spiritualism was a powerful cultural force in the post-Civil War years, a time when those who lost loved once in the devastating conflict looked for ways to communicate with the dead. Victoria and Tennessee became skilled at convincing those who were grieving that they could do just that.

The sisters’ earnings became the main support of their unscrupulous parents, a pair of uneducated, conniving rubes, and their large brood of siblings. 

Chased from one town to another, the eccentric Buck and Roxanna Claflin were purveyors of quackery and fraud, and the attractive daughters raised suspicions of selling sex along with their magical cures and messages from the dead.

 

A forced teenage marriage to a dissipated alcoholic

The truly dramatic portion of Victoria’s life began when she was in her late twenties. She and the family had temporarily settled in St. Louis after wandering from one Midwestern city to another dispensing their snake oil and doing spiritual readings.

The family, minus a few siblings who had grown and broken away, now included Canning Woodhull, a dissipated alcoholic and failed doctor. Victoria’s parents had married her off to Woodhull when she was barely fifteen.

Though she was repulsed by him from the start, the couple managed to have two children — Byron, a boy of limited mental capacity, and Zula Maud, a daughter who was Victoria’s joy.

 

A life-changing second husband

At a meeting of the St. Louis Spiritualists Society, where she made an impromptu speech, Victoria caught the eye of Colonel James Blood.

A Civil War veteran and ostensibly an upstanding citizen, Blood harbored radical views on social issues for the time, including those on sexuality and women’s rights. He helped give voice and order to Victoria and Tennie’s vague notions and helped shape their predilection for controversial causes.

After divorcing Woodhull and taking Blood for her husband, Victoria led her family to New York City in 1868, following a directive from Demosthenes, her longtime spirit guide. Demosthenes even conveyed to Victoria the exact address of the building on Great Jones Street where the family was to take residency, or so she claimed.

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Becoming the “lady stockbrokers”

Cornelius “Commodore” Vanderbilt, the railroad magnate (and one of the 19th century’s “robber barons”) was at the time in his twilight years and considered the richest man in America.

He scorned clergymen and physicians, instead taking comfort from spiritual mediums and healers of all sorts. The sisters wasted no time in making their way into his life once they became aware of his predilections.

Victoria brought Vanderbilt messages from his favorite son, who had died in the Civil War, and Tennie eased his pains with her healing hands. Soon she attended to Vanderbilt’s other physical needs by becoming his mistress. Vanderbilt may have chosen Tennie for his bedmate, but he admired Victoria’s intelligence.

Victoria took heed of Vanderbilt’s stock market tips and made a tidy sum in the aftermath of the 1869 Black Friday collapse of the gold market. Acquiring a taste for finance, Victoria and Tennie prevailed upon Vanderbilt to back them as they opened their own Wall Street brokerage firm.

Causing a sensation as “the lady brokers,” the sisters were the first American women to enter into the profession.

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Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly; a presidential run

With the behind-the-scenes assistance of Blood as well as the radical intellectual Stephen Pearl Andrews, the sisters’ newfound wealth gave them the means to launch Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly.

It was a lively newsprint journal that served as a platform for their views on social issues, women’s rights (including ownership of their own bodies), marriage and divorce, and sexual freedom. It was particularly concerned with exposing political and moral hypocrisy.

The first issue also announced Victoria’s candidacy for president of the United States, another first for American women. This was radical indeed, given that women would not be granted the right to vote until some fifty years later. And never mind that she was also a bit under the constitutional age to become president.

Victoria named as her running mate Frederick Douglass. The famed African-American abolitionist and orator never agreed to the nomination, and never campaigned with her.

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A minister’s seductions — the Henry Ward Beecher scandal

Victoria’s nascent friendship with Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and other women’s movement leaders made her privy to a secret: Henry Ward Beecher, the beloved and nationally famed minister of Brooklyn’s Plymouth Church, had seduced Elizabeth Tilton, the wife of his best friend, Theodore Tilton.

Spreading among Victoria’s influential circle of contemporaries were whispers that the affair was but one in a long series of seductions by Beecher of married women in his parish.

Far from being shocked, Victoria viewed Beecher as a man who secretly practiced the sexual freedom that she openly preached. For some time, she explored a way to expose his hypocrisy that would be to her benefit.

In the midst of an intensive and lengthy cover-up, Theodore Tilton became the surprising emissary sent to placate Victoria. Elizabeth’s moody and obsessive wronged husband instead fell victim to Victoria’s charms, resulting in a brief, passionate affair.

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Victoria speaking before the House Judiciary Committee along with a group of suffragists on January 11, 1871

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Ascending in the women’s rights movement

Upon presenting an argument before the House Judiciary Committee in the nation’s capital for women’s right to vote under the protection of the 14th amendment, Victoria was embraced as a leader for the cause by the National Women Suffrage Association.

Yet Victoria’s alliance with the suffrage movement was always uneasy. She was too untethered and eccentric for the ladies, who were, for the most part, prim and proper. And, as history would later show, rather racist.

Though increasingly spurned by the members of the women’s rights movement, Victoria’s most loyal friends invited her to participate in the winter National Woman Suffrage Association convention.

There, she rallied the women to form their own political party, at the top of which was her own bid for the presidency of the United States. This would be, she proclaimed, a way to gain attention for the cause of suffrage.

At the May 1871 speech to the Woman’s Suffrage Convention, Victoria gave what would become one of her most famous speeches, “A Lecture on Constitutional Equality,” now known as “The Great Secession Speech.” In part, she said: 

“If Congress refuses to listen to and grant what women ask, there is but one course left then to pursue. Women have no government. Men have organized a government, and they maintain it to the utter exclusion of women….

Under such glaring inconsistencies, such unwarrantable tyranny, such unscrupulous despotism, what is there left for women to do but to become the mothers of the future government?

There is one alternative left, and we have resolved on that. This convention is for the purpose of this declaration. As surely as one year passes from this day, and this right is not fully, frankly and unequivocally considered, we shall proceed to call another convention expressly to frame a new constitution and to erect a new government, complete in all its parts and to take measures to maintain it as effectually as men do theirs.

We mean treason; we mean secession, and on a thousand times grander scale than was that of the south. We are plotting revolution; we will overslough this bogus republic and plant a government of righteousness in its stead, which shall not only profess to derive its power from consent of the governed, but shall do so in reality.”

No one could deny Victoria’s power to stir up a crowd like very few others, male or female, could. Her speeches, with their drama and hints of scandal, were extremely popular and often drew thousands.

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Depicting Victoria, “Get thee behind me, (Mrs.) Satan!” was a well-known 1872 cartoon by Thomas Nast 

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Exposing the Beecher-Tilton affair

As Victoria became more of a public figure, she was reviled for her views, especially when it came to free love. This was the Victorian era, during which the ideal of womanhood was to be “the angel in the house.” In the public eye, Victoria was Mrs. Satan — the polar opposite of an angel.

Pushed to her limits by a double standard that was destroying her reputation, Victoria seethed as she observed her critics thriving. The public taunts by none other than Beecher’s sisters, Catherine Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe proved to be the last straw.

Victoria exposed the Beecher-Tilton affair, first in a speech, then in the Weekly, declaring that she refused to be made a martyr for her views.

Theodore Tilton, independent of Victoria’s actions, had pressed charges against Beecher for “criminal seduction,” culminating in what was to become the most sensational trial of the nineteenth century, one that was a national obsession for months.

 

In prison on election day

Anthony Comstock, a self-righteous battler against all that he deemed immoral, took a copy of the scandal issue of The Weekly to the Federal authorities. He had proof that it had been sent through the mails, and sending obscenity through the mails was a Federal offense.

Victoria and Tennie had just left the office of the Weekly with a fresh bundle of papers and were riding home in a carriage when U.S. Marshalls stopped them with a warrant for their arrest. The sisters were taken to Circuit Court and questioned.

On Election Day, presidential candidate Victoria Woodhull and Tennessee were held the Ludlow Street jail.

The plight of Victoria and Tennie on such obviously trumped-up charges brought them a new wave of sympathizers and supporters. Their jail cell was crowded with visitors and there was no lack of gentlemen willing to pay their court costs and attorneys fees.

Days later, Victoria and Tennie appeared before a Grand Jury in a packed courthouse. The newspapers howled at the blatant invasion of freedom of  the press. 

The brief boost to the Weekly’s circulation was a temporary salve for its declining fortunes, but her ordeals left Victoria exhausted and dispirited. Abandoned by even her staunchest allies and friends, Victoria’s frustration and anguish drove her to divorce Blood.

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Losing Cornelius Vanderbilt’s support

Victoria’s reputation as an orator, businesswoman, muckraking journalist, and advocate for women’s suffrage grew, even as the advice and moral and financial support of Cornelius Vanderbilt was waning.

His new, younger wife, plucked from the cream of society, was a more appropriate choice for him than Tennie Claflin, in the estimation of the elderly Commodore’s grown sons and daughters.

Vanderbilt’s new bride lured him back to traditional religion and proper medical doctors. Vanderbilt’s abrupt withdrawal from their lives was compounded by the depressed economy following another market crash.

 

A downward spiral for the Woodhull and Claflin clan

The national mood seemed to be swinging back to more conservative views. The radical stances espoused by Victoria and Tennessee experienced profound pushback, and they themselves felt increasingly ostracized and marginalized. 

The Woodhull and Claflin clan were forced to give up their 38th St. mansion. They fought to keep the Weekly alive at all costs, but it soon grew impossible to do so.

Victoria embarked on a grueling lecture tour to support the publication and the family. By this time, she had taken in her first husband, Canning Woodhull, now addicted to morphine as well as alcohol. Outraged society charged Victoria with “living with two husbands.”

The sisters’ fortunes were quicly waned and their brokerage slipped into debt. Victoria was suffering from nervous exhaustion, and the future was bleak.

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A disputed will saves the day

When all hope seemed lost and the Woodhull and Claflin clan was clearly in crisis mode, the Vanderbilt fortune returned in the form of a disputed will. The old Commodore, having just died, left nearly his entire fortune to his son William in hopes of keeping his railroad empire intact.

His remaining children, outraged by their token bequests, went to court to contest the will, charging that their father had been of unsound mind when he had last updated it. Portraying him as a nutcase unduly influenced by bogus healers and spirit mediums, they devised a plan to call Victoria and Tennessee as witnesses.

This threat propelled William to quick action. Noting the financial distress of the Claflin family, he offered to pay the sisters off with a tidy sum if they’d leave the country before they could be called to the witness stand.

Victoria and Tennessee haggled with William, getting him to agree to an amount that was a small fortune for any ordinary American family not in the league of the Vanderbilts. 

 

Finding refuge in England

Victoria and her children, Tennie, and Buck and Roxana Claflin were suddenly comfortable again thanks to the Vanderbilt payoff, and boarded a ship bound for England. 

When Victoria set sail with her two children, with Tennessee and their parents still in tow, she vowed to return as soon as she could to resume her fight for her beliefs, and to vindicate herself against those who had tried to destroy her. 

After having been mired in controversy for nearly all their lives, the sisters now craved respectability. Victoria captured the fancy of a wealthy young banker, John Biddulph Martin, while lecturing to a curious British audience. Eventually, over the objections of his family, the two were married.

Tennessee married an even more fabulously wealthy baronet. The sisters fought as hard to gain social standing as they had previously done to earn notoriety.

Unable to completely rest on their laurels, the sisters continued to promote for favored causes, though in a much quieter manner.

The sisters remained in England for the rest of their lives, enjoying a relatively peaceful existence and doing good works, careful to steer clear of controversy — at least, most of the time.

Victoria Woodhull died on June 9, 1927 at Norton Park in Bredon’s Norton, Worcestershire, England.

 

Victoria Woodhull’s complicated legacy

Though many of Victoria’s views on social issues and women’s rights were quite progressive, her stances on other issues were surprisingly regressive.

Despite her belief that women should have domain over their own bodies, she was virulently anti-abortion. She also ascribed to eugenics and supported forced sterilization of those she deemed unfit to breed.

Though she had chosen Frederick Douglass, an African-American, as her unwitting running mate, there’s also evidence that she, like a number of other white suffragists of her time, was racist.

Victoria was recognized as a powerful extemporaneous speaker, though scholars almost uniformly believe that her writings and more polished speeches were heavily edited by her second husband, James Blood, and fellow radical Stephen Pearl Andrews. This no doubt is due to her lack of formal education.

Yet despite her muddled legacy and lifetime of being embroiled in controversy and scandal, Victoria Woodhull is recognized as a fearless advocate for women’s freedom and for the bold statement of running for president at a time when women didn’t even have the right to vote. 

Here are just a few ways that Victoria has been recognized over the years:

 A historical marker was erected outside the Homer Public Library in Licking County, Ohio (where the Claflin clan resided for some years. It honors  Victoria as the “First Woman Candidate For President of the United States.”

1980: The Broadway musical Onward Victoria was inspired by her life. It wasn’t very well received, but still …
2001: Victoria Woodhull was belatedly inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame .
2003: The Woodhull Freedom Foundation is an advocacy organization for sexual freedom in a human rights context. 
There have been numerous full-scale biographies of Victoria in recent years, including Other Powers by Barbara Goldsmith, Notorious Victoria by Mary Gabriel, The Scarlett Sisters by Myra Macpherson, and others.

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More about Victoria Woodhull

Wikipedia
The Strange Tale of the First American Woman to Run for President (Politico)
9 Things You Should Know About Victoria Woodhull
Biography of Victoria Woodhull by Theodore Tilton (1871)
Selected Writings of Victoria Woodhull

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