Nava Atlas's Blog, page 58

Fanny Burney

Fanny Burney (June 13, 1752 – January 6, 1840), born Frances Burney, was a British novelist, diarist, and playwright best remembered for her first novel, Evelina (1778).

Born in Lynn Regis, now known as King’s Lynn, her father, Dr. Charles Burney, was a musician of note. Her mother, Esther Sleepe Burney, died when Fanny was ten, and this marked the time when she began writing in earnest.

Fanny’s literary output included four novels eight plays, a biography, and some twenty-five volumes of journals and letters. She was an influence on novelists of manner and satire who came a bit later, notably, Jane Austen and William Makepeace Thackeray.

 

Themes and literary reputation

Fanny’s fictional work touched on the lives of the English aristocracy, subtly (and sometimes not so subtly) satirizing their pretensions. She also delved into issues of women’s place in society.

Evelina and Cecelia were especially popular in their time, but her plays were not performed. Her father feared that his daughter’s reputation would be damaged. The one play that was performed wasn’t well-received, and closed after one performance.

It was considered scandalous for a woman to write and publish, and the fact that Fanny was admired rather than reviled for being a novelist was an exception.

Fanny Burney’s reputation as a novelist declined after her death. Critics and biographers gravitated to her posthumous diaries as a more fascinating source on life in the eighteenth century, though in Fanny’s case, a privileged one.

Contemporary scholars have taken a renewed interest in her work, especially when it addresses the issues and struggles in the lives of women, and as a critique of social mores of the time.

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Austin Dobson’s View of Fanny Burney’s life and work

The following brief biography of Fanny Burney’s life and work was published in The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, January 2, 1904, contributed to that publication by Austin Dobson upon the publication of an edition he edited titled The Diary and Letters of Madame D’Arblay (Fanny Burney’s eventual married title). It’s presented here with minor edits, though leaving the rather old-fashioned language intact.

Fanny Burney, an Eighteenth-Century Novelist Whose Work is Almost Forgotten Today

It’s doubtful if many readers today, even those who consider themselves fairly well versed in the history of British literature, could name offhand the author of Evelina. And yet in her day, Fanny Burney was one of the distinguished names in literary England, considered one of the brilliant novelists of the period.

Frances Burney was the daughter of a well-known musician and composer of the middle period of the eighteenth century, a man who was widely known and who held a prominent place in the musical world of the time. Charles Burney was the son of a portrait painter. The artistic strain showed itself in Charles’ taste for music.

His career was successful, and he even wrote a History of Music which was well received. It’s apparent, then, that Fanny had a literary and artistic background for her own development.

Fanny was born at King’s Lynn, where her father lived, engaged in his profession. In 1760 Burney removed to London, where his wife died shortly after. A good portion of Fanny’s girlhood was passed under the care of a stepmother, who seems to have done her whole duty by her.

Charles Burney was intimate with the artistic and literary circles of the capital; his children were reared in an atmosphere of culture and good taste. Fanny has been described as a demure and reserved little person, but full of humor and life when in the comfort of the domestic circle.

 

Becoming a diarist, growing into young womanhood

When Fanny was twelve, she began the keeping of a diary, which she prefaced with a whimsical introduction, “Addressed to a Certain Nobody.”

This record, to which she confided her innermost thoughts and opinions, her preferences and likings, her accounts and characterizations of the people she met, as well as her daily personal and family history, was kept up for years.

Aside from its quaint comments and self-revealing qualities, the diary is interesting in showing something of the young woman’s intellectual life, training, and aspirations. That she was an omnivorous reader of the literature of the time is apparent from the list of books she records.

She wrote of going to see Oliver Goldsmith’s new play, She Stoops to Conquer, in 1773 and describes it as “laughable and comic” but says that all diversions are insipid to her except the opera.

As she came into young womanhood she was busily engaged as her father’s secretary in assisting him in the preparation of his History of Music, a work that engaged his attention for several years, and which was regarded at the time as an important work. Fanny’s diary, which was steadily kept up, is especially interesting for the glimpses it gives of the literary celebrities of the time.

During her girlhood days, and because of her passion for writing, Fanny Burney had written a complete work of fiction which she had titled The History of Caroline Evelyn. But she burned the manuscript later and all that’s known about it is what she herself told.

A secret first novel

Just when she began working on Evelina, her first and greatest novel, is not clear from the record, but evidently, she had been at work on it for some time prior to 1776 when she first began to think of publishing. For fear that her handwriting might be recognized, she copied it out in a feigned hand.

It was written as an epistolary novel, that is, in the form of letters, a style that was popular at the time. Fanny’s only confidants were her sister and her eldest brother, James. The publisher was not aware of the identity of the author and his letters were directed to a “Mr. Grafton.” James posed as the book’s author.

The novel finally appeared in 1778, a period when, according to the literary critic Mr. Dobson, English fiction seemed to be suffering from “a kind of sleeping sickness.” A level of mediocrity prevailed in fiction writing.

The great masters who had followed Samuel Richardson’s success with Pamela (1740) were gone — as was Richardson himself. Henry Fielding, whose last novel, Amelia, appeared in 1751, was still read, and both Laurence Stern’s Tristram Shandy and The Vicar of Wakefield had been a considerable time before the public.

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Illustration by Hugh Thompson from a later edition of Evelina

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The author’s true identity emerges

Evelina: Or, The History of a Young Lady’s Entrance into the World came forth, almost unheralded, in the early part of 1778. The secret of authorship was well kept, the book made steady progress, and in two or three months, it began to gain serious attention.

It wasn’t until June of that year that Dr. Burney, the author’s father, read the book. He had read reviews of it without realizing that the author was his daughter. For a woman, and one so young, at that, to publish a novel was quite a radical act, and Fanny feared her beloved father’s reaction.

However, he was impressed with the novel and pleased by the favorable reactions to it by the public and critics, once he realized that it was by his daughter. He was happy for the recognition and praise that Fanny was receiving.

Fanny’s joy was complete when Dr. (Samuel) Johnson gave it the stamp of his hearty approval. She received from the publisher thirty pounds sterling for the novel. Its success made her an esteemed figure in London literary society.

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A second novel — Cecelia

In 1782, she published her second novel, Cecelia, or the Memoirs of an Heiress, and received 250 pounds for the copyright.

The story of a beautiful, smart young woman, Cecelia Beverly, the novel presents a marriage plot, albeit a somewhat unusual one. The book was well-received, though some critics thought it was a bit weighed down by the author’s awareness that she was writing for an audience — not just for herself as she had done with Evelina.

At thirty years of age, Fanny had, with two published novels, achieved a measure of success as a novelist that attracted the attention of Queen Caroline and King George III. They brought her into the court with an appointment in the royal household as “dresser” to the queen from 1786 to 1790.

The post interfered with her literary work, and after Cecelia, she wrote little that had an element of permanency about it.

It was at the end of 1792 that she met Alexandre D’Arbley, a French artillery officer and refugee, whom she married. The union was a happy one, and after the end of the French Revolution, she lived with her husband in France until the downfall of Napoleon. They had one son, Alexander, born in 1794.

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Frances d’Arblay (Fanny Burney) by Edward Francisco Burney

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Later years

Remarkably, Fanny had a mastectomy in 1810 — without anesthesia. She created the first detailed account of this type of operation, having been awake for its entirety. It hasn’t been established whether she had breast cancer or some other sort of disease of the breast tissue.

Along with her husband and son, she returned to England and lived in Bath until General D’Arbley died there in 1818.

Fanny’s last novel, The Wanderer (1814) was a work of incisive social criticism, but it wasn’t met with enthusiasm by her reading public, and wasn’t reprinted after its first edition. Fanny published Memoirs of Charles Burney in three volumes in 1832. She had remained close with her father until his death.

At one point, she moved to London to be closer to her son while he studied at University. Alexandre, who died in 1837,  predeceased her. Fanny Burney died in Bath in 1840; she, her husband, and son are buried in a family plot.

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Fanny Burney page on Amazon*

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Fanny Burney’s legacy

Fanny Burney’s novels included Evelina, Cecelia, Camilla, and The Wanderer. In addition, she wrote eight dramatic pieces, a tragedy and a comedy, all of which have been forgotten. Her Diaries and Letters was published about two years after her death.

It is often accepted that Fanny Burney’s legacy as a novelist rest on Evelina and Cecelia. A critic of note wrote that he doubts “if the piety of the enthusiast could ever revive — or rather, create — the slightest interest in The Wanderer, or that any but the fanatics of the out-of-date, or the student of manners, could struggle through Camilla.

Evelina marked a definite deviation in the progress of the English national fiction. Leaving Fielding’s breezy and bustling highway, leaving the analytical hothouse of Richardson, it carries the novel of manners into domestic life, and prepare the way for Maria Edgeworth and the exquisite parlor pieces of Jane Austen.

More about Fanny Burney

Novels

Evelina: Or The History of A Young Lady’s Entrance into the World  ( 1778)
Cecilia: Or, Memoirs of an Heiress  (1782)
Camilla: Or, A Picture of Youth  (1796, revised 1802)
The Wanderer: Or, Female Difficulties  (1814)

Journals and letters (selected editions)

The Early Diary of Frances Burney 1768–1778  (1889)
The Diary and Letters of Madame D’Arblay, Austin Dobson, ed. (1904)
The Diary of Fanny Burney, Lewis Gibbs, ed. (1971)
Dr. Johnson & Fanny Burney, Chauncy Brewster Tinker, ed. (1912)
The Early Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney, 1768–1786
The Court Journals and Letters of Frances Burney
The Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney (Madame D’Arblay) 1791–1840

Plays

The Witlings  (1779)
Edwy and Elgiva  (1790)
Hubert de Vere (1791)
The Siege of Pevensey  (1791)
Elberta (1791)
Love and Fashion (1799)
The Woman Hater, (1801)
A Busy Day  (1801)

Biography

Fanny Burney: A Biography by Claire Harman (2001)

More information and sources

British Library
Wikipedia
Reader discussion of Fanny Burney’s books on Goodreads
Burney Society at McGill University

Read and listen online

Audio recordings on Librivox
Fanny Burney’s works on Project Gutenberg

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

The post Fanny Burney appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.

A Girl of the Limberlost by Gene Stratton-Porter (1909)

A Girl of the Limberlost by Gene Stratton-Porter (1863 – 1924) was the author’s third novel, published in 1909 as a sequel to Freckles (1905), both of which are stories for “children of all ages.”

Gene was enchanted by the great outdoors from an early age, and was encouraged by her parents to explore her surroundings. Her love of nature served as the foundation for her career as a naturalist, photographer, and writer.

In the course of her early explorations, Gene came upon the Limberlost Swamp near her home in rural Indiana. There she discovered birds, butterflies, and wildflowers that captured her imagination.

Though she did eventually marry and have a daughter, Gene disdained the domestic life that was expected of young women of her time. She was determined to enjoy a life of creativity and exploration as a way of expressing her love for the natural world.

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The 1945 film was one of several film adaptations 

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Many of Gene’s novels were adapted to film, especially in the 1920s. She even founded a production company, Gene Stratton-Porter Productions, to produce silent films based on her novels, and even directed some of them.

Another film iteration of The Girl of the Limberlost came out in 1945, and  the most recent adaptation of A Girl of the Limberlost was released in 1990.

Much of Gene Stratton-Porter’s work has been forgotten, but Freckles and A Girl of the Limberlost have stood the test of time among her many books.

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More about Gene Stratton-Porter

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A 1909 review of A Girl of the Limberlost

From the original review of A Girl of the Limberlost by Gene Stratton-Porter in the Stockton Daily Evening Record, August 21, 1909:

Here’s a sweet and tender tale which is a welcome addition to the libraries of our young people, as well as delightful reading for older ones. It is a sympathetic story with the ennobling love of nature as its basic thought.

None but the keenest lover of bird and insect life could have written so vividly of the birds and butterflies, and made the Limberlost come so alive with their songs and flutterings.

While the development of the plot seems strained in places, the action too rapid, and some of the situations too dramatic to be artistic, it’s not altogether for these qualities that the book is read.

Rather, it’s for the unfolding of Elnora Comstock’s tender, sympathetic, strong, and gentle character. And for the part in her character in which the woods and the wild creatures play that we follow with intense interest to the very end.

Wherever the author drops into her intimate descriptions of the life of the forest the book has a beauty all its own, and there must be some who read it that will be enticed into experimenting for themselves to see how much truth lies in the thought that nature holds more of value for us than manmade creations.

In Elnora Comstock, Gene Stratton-Porter has pictured A Girl of the Limberlost as almost too exquisite a creature, and yet she compels an affectionate admiration that makes the reader forget the incongruities.

Perhaps the truest picture of her is that which shows her as a lonely, sensitive child setting out for the first awful day at the City High School, and the resulting pain and confusion of contact with the crowding, jostling, scornful pupils who could see only the external signs of a life foreign to their own: One which was to show them, however, the depth and breadth of character that nature bestows on those who truly love it.

The only way to forgive the attitude of the girl’s mother, Katherine Comstock, toward her only child, is that she is, at least, partially insane and thus worthy of pity. Wholly lovable are the characters of Aunt Margaret and Uncle Wesley Sinton, whose care and watchfulness save Elnora, whom they adore, from many a painful experience.

The love story woven into the last chapters weakens the beauty of the first half of the book, and yet has in it much to stimulate thought. The author presents the reader with the contrasting personalities of A Girl of the Limberlost and Edith Carr, society leader, who is wealthy and magnificently beautiful.

The book will be welcome to all who enjoyed Freckles, for he and the “Swamp Angel” appear again in these pages, as lovable and interesting as ever.

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A Girl of the Limberlost on Amazon*

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Quotes from A Girl of the Limberlost

“To me, it seems the only pleasure in this world worth having is the joy we derive from living for those we love, and those we can help.”

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“I believe the best way to get an answer to prayer is to work for it.”

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“The Limberlost is life. Here it is a carefully kept park. You motor, sail and golf, all so secure and fine. But what I like is the excitement of choosing a path carefully, in the fear that the quagmire may reach out and suck me down; I even enjoy seeing an old canny vulture eyeing me as if it were saying, ‘ware the sting of the rattler, lest I pick your bones as I did old Limber’s. I like sufficient danger to put an edge on things. This is all so tame.”

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“What you are lies with you. If you are lazy, and accept your lot, you may live in it. If you are willing to work, you can write your name anywhere you choose, among the only ones who live beyond the grave in this world, the people who write books that help, make exquisite music, carve statues, paint pictures, and work for others. Never mind the calico dress, and the coarse shoes.”

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“The world is full of happy people, but no one ever hears of them. You must fight and make a scandal to get into the papers. No one knows about all the happy people. I am happy myself, and look how perfectly inconspicuous I am.”

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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 A Girl of the Limberlost by Gene Stratton-Porter (1909) appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.

The Girl of the Limberlost by Gene Stratton-Porter (1909)

The Girl of the Limberlost by Gene Stratton-Porter (1863 – 1924) was the author’s third novel, published in 1909 as a sequel to Freckles (1905), both of which are stories for “children of all ages.”

Gene was enchanted by the great outdoors from an early age, and was encouraged by her parents to explore her surroundings. Her love of nature served as the foundation for her career as a naturalist, photographer, and writer.

In the course of her early explorations, Gene came upon the Limberlost Swamp near her home in rural Indiana. There she discovered birds, butterflies, and wildflowers that captured her imagination.

Though she did eventually marry and have a daughter, Gene disdained the domestic life that was expected of young women of her time. She was determined to enjoy a life of creativity and exploration as a way of expressing her love for the natural world.

. . . . . . . . . .

The 1945 film was one of several film adaptations 

. . . . . . . . . .

Many of Gene’s novels were adapted to film, especially in the 1920s. She even founded a production company, Gene Stratton-Porter Productions, to produce silent films based on her novels, and even directed some of them.

Another film iteration of The Girl of the Limberlost came out in 1945, and  the most recent adaptation of A Girl of the Limberlost was released in 1990.

Much of Gene Stratton-Porter’s work has been forgotten, but Freckles and The Girl of the Limberlost have stood the test of time among her many books.

. . . . . . . . . .

More about Gene Stratton-Porter

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A 1909 review of The Girl of the Limberlost

From the original review of The Girl of the Limberlost by Gene Stratton-Porter in the Stockton Daily Evening Record, August 21, 1909:

Here’s a sweet and tender tale which is a welcome addition to the libraries of our young people, as well as delightful reading for older ones. It is a sympathetic story with the ennobling love of nature as its basic thought.

None but the keenest lover of bird and insect life could have written so vividly of the birds and butterflies, and made the Limberlost come so alive with their songs and flutterings.

While the development of the plot seems strained in places, the action too rapid, and some of the situations too dramatic to be artistic, it’s not altogether for these qualities that the book is read.

Rather, it’s for the unfolding of Elnora Comstock’s tender, sympathetic, strong, and gentle character. And for the part in her character in which the woods and the wild creatures play that we follow with intense interest to the very end.

Wherever the author drops into her intimate descriptions of the life of the forest the book has a beauty all its own, and there must be some who read it that will be enticed into experimenting for themselves to see how much truth lies in the thought that nature holds more of value for us than manmade creations.

In Elnora Comstock, Gene Stratton-Porter has pictured The Girl of the Limberlost as almost too exquisite a creature, and yet she compels an affectionate admiration that makes the reader forget the incongruities.

Perhaps the truest picture of her is that which shows her as a lonely, sensitive child setting out for the first awful day at the City High School, and the resulting pain and confusion of contact with the crowding, jostling, scornful pupils who could see only the external signs of a life foreign to their own: One which was to show them, however, the depth and breadth of character that nature bestows on those who truly love it.

The only way to forgive the attitude of the girl’s mother, Katherine Comstock, toward her only child, is that she is, at least, partially insane and thus worthy of pity. Wholly lovable are the characters of Aunt Margaret and Uncle Wesley Sinton, whose care and watchfulness save Elnora, whom they adore, from many a painful experience.

The love story woven into the last chapters weakens the beauty of the first half of the book, and yet has in it much to stimulate thought. The author presents the reader with the contrasting personalities of The Girl of the Limberlost and Edith Carr, society leader, who is wealthy and magnificently beautiful.

The book will be welcome to all who enjoyed Freckles, for he and the “Swamp Angel” appear again in these pages, as lovable and interesting as ever.

. . . . . . . . . .

Girl of the Limberlost on Amazon*

. . . . . . . . . .

Quotes from The Girl of Limberlost

“To me, it seems the only pleasure in this world worth having is the joy we derive from living for those we love, and those we can help.”

. . . . . . . . . .

“I believe the best way to get an answer to prayer is to work for it.”

. . . . . . . . . .

“The Limberlost is life. Here it is a carefully kept park. You motor, sail and golf, all so secure and fine. But what I like is the excitement of choosing a path carefully, in the fear that the quagmire may reach out and suck me down; I even enjoy seeing an old canny vulture eyeing me as if it were saying, ‘ware the sting of the rattler, lest I pick your bones as I did old Limber’s. I like sufficient danger to put an edge on things. This is all so tame.”

. . . . . . . . . .

“What you are lies with you. If you are lazy, and accept your lot, you may live in it. If you are willing to work, you can write your name anywhere you choose, among the only ones who live beyond the grave in this world, the people who write books that help, make exquisite music, carve statues, paint pictures, and work for others. Never mind the calico dress, and the coarse shoes.”

. . . . . . . . . .

“The world is full of happy people, but no one ever hears of them. You must fight and make a scandal to get into the papers. No one knows about all the happy people. I am happy myself, and look how perfectly inconspicuous I am.”

. . . . . . . . . .

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

The post The Girl of the Limberlost by Gene Stratton-Porter (1909) appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.

The Ghetto by Lola Ridge, Radical Poet

2018 marked the 100th anniversary of the first and most important book by Lola Ridge,The Ghetto and Other Poems. In it, the Irish-American poet known for her radicalism, celebrated the Jewish immigrants of New York City’s Lower East Side.

Terese Svoboda, author of Anything That Burns You: A Portrait of Radical Poet (2018) wrote of Ridge:

“A bigamist as well as an anarchist, Ridge left her son in an orphanage in L.A. soon after her arrival in the U.S., when she went to work for Emma Goldman and Margaret Sanger in New York. Ten years later, she protested Sacco and Vanzetti’s execution in Massachusetts, and faced down a rearing police horse.

Solo and broke in the next decade, she traveled to Baghdad and Mexico – and took a lover at sixty-one. Her five books of poetry contain poems about lynching, execution, race riots, and imprisonment.”

Following the 1918 publication of The Ghetto and Other Poems, Ridge’s poetical works were gathered into four more collections. In addition to Svoboda’s Anything That Burns You, Collected Early Work of Lola Ridge was also published in 2018, signaling a reconsideration of her life and work.

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Lola Ridge, Radical Poet

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Following, in its glorious entirety, is what is still arguably Ridge’s most famous piece, It’s actually a sequence of forty-three free-verse poems under the umbrella of the title, The Ghetto.

The poem, originally published in The New Republic not long before it appeared in book form, received mixed reactions.

Bella Cohen in The New York Call commented: “She has mixed her paints in the old way, but she has thrown her brush across the canvas with strange, bold strokes.”

Critic Conrad Aiken wrote: “One hesitates to make suggestions. Miss Ridge might have to sacrifice too much vigor and richness to obtain a greater beauty of form; the effort might prove her undoing. By the degree of her success or failure in this undertaking, however, she would become aware of her real capacities as an artist.”

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THE GHETTO

I

Cool, inaccessible air

Is floating in velvety blackness shot with steel-blue lights,

But no breath stirs the heat

Leaning its ponderous bulk upon the Ghetto

And most on Hester street…

The heat…

Nosing in the body’s overflow,

Like a beast pressing its great steaming belly close,

Covering all avenues of air…

The heat in Hester street,

Heaped like a dray

With the garbage of the world.

Bodies dangle from the fire escapes

Or sprawl over the stoops…

Upturned faces glimmer pallidly—

Herring-yellow faces, spotted as with a mold,

And moist faces of girls

Like dank white lilies,

And infants’ faces with open parched mouths that suck at the air

as at empty teats.

Young women pass in groups,

Converging to the forums and meeting halls,

Surging indomitable, slow

Through the gross underbrush of heat.

Their heads are uncovered to the stars,

And they call to the young men and to one another

With a free camaraderie.

Only their eyes are ancient and alone…

The street crawls undulant,

Like a river addled

With its hot tide of flesh

That ever thickens.

Heavy surges of flesh

Break over the pavements,

Clavering like a surf—

Flesh of this abiding

Brood of those ancient mothers who saw the dawn break over Egypt…

And turned their cakes upon the dry hot stones

And went on

Till the gold of the Egyptians fell down off their arms…

Fasting and athirst…

And yet on…

Did they vision—with those eyes darkly clear,

That looked the sun in the face and were not blinded—

Across the centuries

The march of their enduring flesh?

Did they hear—

Under the molten silence

Of the desert like a stopped wheel—

(And the scorpions tick-ticking on the sand…)

The infinite procession of those feet?

II

I room at Sodos’—in the little green room that was Bennie’s—

With Sadie

And her old father and her mother,

Who is not so old and wears her own hair.

Old Sodos no longer makes saddles.

He has forgotten how.

He has forgotten most things—even Bennie who stays away

and sends wine on holidays—

And he does not like Sadie’s mother

Who hides God’s candles,

Nor Sadie

Whose young pagan breath puts out the light—

That should burn always,

Like Aaron’s before the Lord.

Time spins like a crazy dial in his brain,

And night by night

I see the love-gesture of his arm

In its green-greasy coat-sleeve

Circling the Book,

And the candles gleaming starkly

On the blotched-paper whiteness of his face,

Like a miswritten psalm…

Night by night

I hear his lifted praise,

Like a broken whinnying

Before the Lord’s shut gate.

Sadie dresses in black.

She has black-wet hair full of cold lights

And a fine-drawn face, too white.

All day the power machines

Drone in her ears…

All day the fine dust flies

Till throats are parched and itch

And the heat—like a kept corpse—

Fouls to the last corner.

Then—when needles move more slowly on the cloth

And sweaty fingers slacken

And hair falls in damp wisps over the eyes—

Sped by some power within,

Sadie quivers like a rod…

A thin black piston flying,

One with her machine.

She—who stabs the piece-work with her bitter eye

And bids the girls: “Slow down—

You’ll have him cutting us again!”

She—fiery static atom,

Held in place by the fierce pressure all about—

Speeds up the driven wheels

And biting steel—that twice

Has nipped her to the bone.

Nights, she reads

Those books that have most unset thought,

New-poured and malleable,

To which her thought

Leaps fusing at white heat,

Or spits her fire out in some dim manger of a hall,

Or at a protest meeting on the Square,

Her lit eyes kindling the mob…

Or dances madly at a festival.

Each dawn finds her a little whiter,

Though up and keyed to the long day,

Alert, yet weary… like a bird

That all night long has beat about a light.

The Gentile lover, that she charms and shrews,

Is one more pebble in the pack

For Sadie’s mother,

Who greets him with her narrowed eyes

That hold some welcome back.

“What’s to be done?” she’ll say,

“When Sadie wants she takes…

Better than Bennie with his Christian woman…

A man is not so like,

If they should fight,

To call her Jew…”

Yet when she lies in bed

And the soft babble of their talk comes to her

And the silences…

I know she never sleeps

Till the keen draught blowing up the empty hall

Edges through her transom

And she hears his foot on the first stairs.

Sarah and Anna live on the floor above.

Sarah is swarthy and ill-dressed.

Life for her has no ritual.

She would break an ideal like an egg for the winged thing at the core.

Her mind is hard and brilliant and cutting like an acetylene torch.

If any impurities drift there, they must be burnt up as in a clear flame.

It is droll that she should work in a pants factory.

—Yet where else… tousled and collar awry at her olive throat.

Besides her hands are unkempt.

With English… and everything… there is so little time.

She reads without bias—

Doubting clamorously—

Psychology, plays, science, philosophies—

Those giant flowers that have bloomed and withered, scattering their seed…

—And out of this young forcing soil what growth may come—

what amazing blossomings.

Anna is different.

One is always aware of Anna, and the young men turn their heads

to look at her.

She has the appeal of a folk-song

And her cheap clothes are always in rhythm.

When the strike was on she gave half her pay.

She would give anything—save the praise that is hers

And the love of her lyric body.

But Sarah’s desire covets nothing apart.

She would share all things…

Even her lover.

III

The sturdy Ghetto children

March by the parade,

Waving their toy flags,

Prancing to the bugles—

Lusty, unafraid…

Shaking little fire sticks

At the night—

The old blinking night—

Swerving out of the way,

Wrapped in her darkness like a shawl.

But a small girl

Cowers apart.

Her braided head,

Shiny as a black-bird’s

In the gleam of the torch-light,

Is poised as for flight.

Her eyes have the glow

Of darkened lights.

She stammers in Yiddish,

But I do not understand,

And there flits across her face

A shadow

As of a drawn blind.

I give her an orange,

Large and golden,

And she looks at it blankly.

I take her little cold hand and try to draw her to me,

But she is stiff…

Like a doll…

Suddenly she darts through the crowd

Like a little white panic

Blown along the night—

Away from the terror of oncoming feet…

And drums rattling like curses in red roaring mouths…

And torches spluttering silver fire

And lights that nose out hiding-places…

To the night—

Squatting like a hunchback

Under the curved stoop—

The old mammy-night

That has outlived beauty and knows the ways of fear—

The night—wide-opening crooked and comforting arms,

Hiding her as in a voluminous skirt.

The sturdy Ghetto children

March by the parade,

Waving their toy flags,

Prancing to the bugles,

Lusty, unafraid.

But I see a white frock

And eyes like hooded lights

Out of the shadow of pogroms

Watching… watching…

IV

Calicoes and furs,

Pocket-books and scarfs,

Razor strops and knives

(Patterns in check…)

Olive hands and russet head,

Pickles red and coppery,

Green pickles, brown pickles,

(Patterns in tapestry…)

Coral beads, blue beads,

Beads of pearl and amber,

Gewgaws, beauty pins—

Bijoutry for chits—

Darting rays of violet,

Amethyst and jade…

All the colors out to play,

Jumbled iridescently…

(Patterns in stained glass

Shivered into bits!)

Nooses of gay ribbon

Tugging at one’s sleeve,

Dainty little garters

Hanging out their sign…

Here a pout of frilly things—

There a sonsy feather…

(White beards, black beards

Like knots in the weave…)

And ah, the little babies—

Shiny black-eyed babies—

(Half a million pink toes

Wriggling altogether.)

Baskets full of babies

Like grapes on a vine.

Mothers waddling in and out,

Making all things right—

Picking up the slipped threads

In Grand street at night—

Grand street like a great bazaar,

Crowded like a float,

Bulging like a crazy quilt

Stretched on a line.

But nearer seen

This litter of the East

Takes on a garbled majesty.

The herded stalls

In dissolute array…

The glitter and the jumbled finery

And strangely juxtaposed

Cans, paper, rags

And colors decomposing,

Faded like old hair,

With flashes of barbaric hues

And eyes of mystery…

Flung

Like an ancient tapestry of motley weave

Upon the open wall of this new land.

Here, a tawny-headed girl…

Lemons in a greenish broth

And a huge earthen bowl

By a bronzed merchant

With a tall black lamb’s wool cap upon his head…

He has no glance for her.

His thrifty eyes

Bend—glittering, intent

Their hoarded looks

Upon his merchandise,

As though it were some splendid cloth

Or sumptuous raiment

Stitched in gold and red…

He seldom talks

Save of the goods he spreads—

The meager cotton with its dismal flower—

But with his skinny hands

That hover like two hawks

Above some luscious meat,

He fingers lovingly each calico,

As though it were a gorgeous shawl,

Or costly vesture

Wrought in silken thread,

Or strange bright carpet

Made for sandaled feet…

Here an old grey scholar stands.

His brooding eyes—

That hold long vistas without end

Of caravans and trees and roads,

And cities dwindling in remembrance—

Bend mostly on his tapes and thread.

What if they tweak his beard—

These raw young seed of Israel

Who have no backward vision in their eyes—

And mock him as he sways

Above the sunken arches of his feet—

They find no peg to hang their taunts upon.

His soul is like a rock

That bears a front worn smooth

By the coarse friction of the sea,

And, unperturbed, he keeps his bitter peace.

What if a rigid arm and stuffed blue shape,

Backed by a nickel star

Does prod him on,

Taking his proud patience for humility…

All gutters are as one

To that old race that has been thrust

From off the curbstones of the world…

And he smiles with the pale irony

Of one who holds

The wisdom of the Talmud stored away

In his mind’s lavender.

But this young trader,

Born to trade as to a caul,

Peddles the notions of the hour.

The gestures of the craft are his

And all the lore

As when to hold, withdraw, persuade, advance…

And be it gum or flags,

Or clean-all or the newest thing in tags,

Demand goes to him as the bee to flower.

And he—appraising

All who come and go

With his amazing

Slight-of-mind and glance

And nimble thought

And nature balanced like the scales at nought—

Looks Westward where the trade-lights glow,

And sees his vision rise—

A tape-ruled vision,

Circumscribed in stone—

Some fifty stories to the skies.

V

As I sit in my little fifth-floor room—

Bare,

Save for bed and chair,

And coppery stains

Left by seeping rains

On the low ceiling

And green plaster walls,

Where when night falls

Golden lady-bugs

Come out of their holes,

And roaches, sepia-brown, consort…

I hear bells pealing

Out of the gray church at Rutgers street,

Holding its high-flung cross above the Ghetto,

And, one floor down across the court,

The parrot screaming:

Vorwärts… Vorwärts…

The parrot frowsy-white,

Everlastingly swinging

On its iron bar.

A little old woman,

With a wig of smooth black hair

Gummed about her shrunken brows,

Comes sometimes on the fire escape.

An old stooped mother,

The left shoulder low

With that uneven droopiness that women know

Who have suckled many young…

Yet I have seen no other than the parrot there.

I watch her mornings as she shakes her rugs

Feebly, with futile reach

And fingers without clutch.

Her thews are slack

And curved the ruined back

And flesh empurpled like old meat,

Yet each conspires

To feed those guttering fires

With which her eyes are quick.

On Friday nights

Her candles signal

Infinite fine rays

To other windows,

Coupling other lights,

Linking the tenements

Like an endless prayer.

She seems less lonely than the bird

That day by day about the dismal house

Screams out his frenzied word…

That night by night—

If a dog yelps

Or a cat yawls

Or a sick child whines,

Or a door screaks on its hinges,

Or a man and woman fight—

Sends his cry above the huddled roofs:

Vorwärts… Vorwärts…

VI

In this dingy cafe

The old men sit muffled in woollens.

Everything is faded, shabby, colorless, old…

The chairs, loose-jointed,

Creaking like old bones—

The tables, the waiters, the walls,

Whose mottled plaster

Blends in one tone with the old flesh.

Young life and young thought are alike barred,

And no unheralded noises jolt old nerves,

And old wheezy breaths

Pass around old thoughts, dry as snuff,

And there is no divergence and no friction

Because life is flattened and ground as by many mills.

And it is here the Committee—

Sweet-breathed and smooth of skin

And supple of spine and knee,

With shining unpouched eyes

And the blood, high-powered,

Leaping in flexible arteries—

The insolent, young, enthusiastic, undiscriminating Committee,

Who would placard tombstones

And scatter leaflets even in graves,

Comes trampling with sacrilegious feet!

The old men turn stiffly,

Mumbling to each other.

They are gentle and torpid and busy with eating.

But one lifts a face of clayish pallor,

There is a dull fury in his eyes, like little rusty grates.

He rises slowly,

Trembling in his many swathings like an awakened mummy,

Ridiculous yet terrible.

—And the Committee flings him a waste glance,

Dropping a leaflet by his plate.

A lone fire flickers in the dusty eyes.

The lips chant inaudibly.

The warped shrunken body straightens like a tree.

And he curses…

With uplifted arms and perished fingers,

Claw-like, clutching…

So centuries ago

The old men cursed Acosta,

When they, prophetic, heard upon their sepulchres

Those feet that may not halt nor turn aside for ancient things.

VII

Here in this room, bare like a barn,

Egos gesture one to the other—

Naked, unformed, unwinged

Egos out of the shell,

Examining, searching, devouring—

Avid alike for the flower or the dung…

(Having no dainty antennae for the touch and withdrawal—

Only the open maw…)

Egos cawing,

Expanding in the mean egg…

Little squat tailors with unkempt faces,

Pale as lard,

Fur-makers, factory-hands, shop-workers,

News-boys with battling eyes

And bodies yet vibrant with the momentum of long runs,

Here and there a woman…

Words, words, words,

Pattering like hail,

Like hail falling without aim…

Egos rampant,

Screaming each other down.

One motions perpetually,

Waving arms like overgrowths.

He has burning eyes and a cough

And a thin voice piping

Like a flute among trombones.

One, red-bearded, rearing

A welter of maimed face bashed in from some old wound,

Garbles Max Stirner.

His words knock each other like little wooden blocks.

No one heeds him,

And a lank boy with hair over his eyes

Pounds upon the table.

—He is chairman.

Egos yet in the primer,

Hearing world-voices

Chanting grand arias…

Majors resonant,

Stunning with sound…

Baffling minors

Half-heard like rain on pools…

Majestic discordances

Greater than harmonies…

—Gleaning out of it all

Passion, bewilderment, pain…

Egos yearning with the world-old want in their eyes—

Hurt hot eyes that do not sleep enough…

Striving with infinite effort,

Frustrate yet ever pursuing

The great white Liberty,

Trailing her dissolving glory over each hard-won barricade—

Only to fade anew…

Egos crying out of unkempt deeps

And waving their dreams like flags—

Multi-colored dreams,

Winged and glorious…

A gas jet throws a stunted flame,

Vaguely illumining the groping faces.

And through the uncurtained window

Falls the waste light of stars,

As cold as wise men’s eyes…

Indifferent great stars,

Fortuitously glancing

At the secret meeting in this shut-in room,

Bare as a manger.

VIII

Lights go out

And the stark trunks of the factories

Melt into the drawn darkness,

Sheathing like a seamless garment.

And mothers take home their babies,

Waxen and delicately curled,

Like little potted flowers closed under the stars.

Lights go out

And the young men shut their eyes,

But life turns in them…

Life in the cramped ova

Tearing and rending asunder its living cells…

Wars, arts, discoveries, rebellions, travails, immolations,

cataclysms, hates…

Pent in the shut flesh.

And the young men twist on their beds in languor and dizziness

unsupportable…

Their eyes—heavy and dimmed

With dust of long oblivions in the gray pulp behind—

Staring as through a choked glass.

And they gaze at the moon—throwing off a faint heat—

The moon, blond and burning, creeping to their cots

Softly, as on naked feet…

Lolling on the coverlet… like a woman offering her white body.

Nude glory of the moon!

That leaps like an athlete on the bosoms of the young girls stripped

of their linens;

Stroking their breasts that are smooth and cool as mother-of-pearl

Till the nipples tingle and burn as though little lips plucked at them.

They shudder and grow faint.

And their ears are filled as with a delirious rhapsody,

That Life, like a drunken player,

Strikes out of their clear white bodies

As out of ivory keys.

Lights go out…

And the great lovers linger in little groups, still passionately debating,

Or one may walk in silence, listening only to the still summons of Life—

Life making the great Demand…

Calling its new Christs…

Till tears come, blurring the stars

That grow tender and comforting like the eyes of comrades;

And the moon rolls behind the Battery

Like a word molten out of the mouth of God.

Lights go out…

And colors rush together,

Fusing and floating away…

Pale worn gold like the settings of old jewels…

Mauves, exquisite, tremulous, and luminous purples

And burning spires in aureoles of light

Like shimmering auras.

They are covering up the pushcarts…

Now all have gone save an old man with mirrors—

Little oval mirrors like tiny pools.

He shuffles up a darkened street

And the moon burnishes his mirrors till they shine like phosphorus…

The moon like a skull,

Staring out of eyeless sockets at the old men trundling home the pushcarts.

IX

A sallow dawn is in the sky

As I enter my little green room.

Sadie’s light is still burning…

Without, the frail moon

Worn to a silvery tissue,

Throws a faint glamour on the roofs,

And down the shadowy spires

Lights tip-toe out…

Softly as when lovers close street doors.

Out of the Battery

A little wind

Stirs idly—as an arm

Trails over a boat’s side in dalliance—

Rippling the smooth dead surface of the heat,

And Hester street,

Like a forlorn woman over-born

By many babies at her teats,

Turns on her trampled bed to meet the day.

LIFE!

Startling, vigorous life,

That squirms under my touch,

And baffles me when I try to examine it,

Or hurls me back without apology.

Leaving my ego ruffled and preening itself.

Life,

Articulate, shrill,

Screaming in provocative assertion,

Or out of the black and clotted gutters,

Piping in silvery thin

Sweet staccato

Of children’s laughter,

Or clinging over the pushcarts

Like a litter of tiny bells

Or the jingle of silver coins,

Perpetually changing hands,

Or like the Jordan somberly

Swirling in tumultuous uncharted tides,

Surface-calm.

Electric currents of life,

Throwing off thoughts like sparks,

Glittering, disappearing,

Making unknown circuits,

Or out of spent particles stirring

Feeble contortions in old faiths

Passing before the new.

Long nights argued away

In meeting halls

Back of interminable stairways—

In Roumanian wine-shops

And little Russian tea-rooms…

Feet echoing through deserted streets

In the soft darkness before dawn…

Brows aching, throbbing, burning—

Life leaping in the shaken flesh

Like flame at an asbestos curtain.

Life—

Pent, overflowing

Stoops and façades,

Jostling, pushing, contriving,

Seething as in a great vat…

Bartering, changing, extorting,

Dreaming, debating, aspiring,

Astounding, indestructible

Life of the Ghetto…

Strong flux of life,

Like a bitter wine

Out of the bloody stills of the world…

Out of the Passion eternal.

 . . . . . . . . .

Anything That Burns You: A Portrait of Lola Ridge, Radical Poet on Amazon*

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More about Lola Ridge

Lola Ridge at Poetry Foundation
Lola Ridge on Poem Hunter


Lola Ridge, a Great Irish Writer and Why You’ve Never Heard of Her
Lola Ridge, the Radical Modernist We Won’t Forget Twice
“Anything That Burns You”: Lola Ridge

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

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Madeleine B. Stern’s Brilliant Analysis of Little Women

Louisa May Alcott: A Biography by Madeleine B. Stern (1999) is considered the definitive biography of the famous author of Little Women (1868). Presented here is Stern’s brilliant analysis of Little Women.

Tracing the life of Louisa May Alcott (1832 – 1888) the writer, Stern gives penetrating insight not only into Alcott’s life, but her very essence as a writer.

As a writer myself, I have found much wisdom in these pages and have marveled at Alcott’s ability to “simmer a story” in her head while fulfilling duties around the house, and then later sitting down to spill it out on paper to submit without editing.

Stern’s chapter on the creation and writing of Little Women analyzes the creation of the book, how Alcott wove fact and fiction together, and why the book has such universal appeal, transcending not only gender and age, but time.

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Learn more about Louisa May Alcott

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A request for Louisa May Alcott from a publisher

Stern begins with Thomas Niles of Roberts Bros. urging Louisa to try her hand at a girl’s book, hoping to duplicate the runaway success of the “Oliver Optic” series for boys. Impressed by the success of Hospital Sketches, Alcott’s first foray into realism, Niles hoped to capitalize on that style and the author’s recent success for the juvenile market.

I had always wondered why he approached Louisa as she didn’t have any direct experience in writing for juveniles and Stern reveals why: “She [Louisa] have proved her ability to report observations in Hospital Sketches; she had indicated her powers of appealing to juvenile readers in her editorship of Merry’s Museum.

Could not Miss Alcott combine both talents in a domestic novel that would reflect American life for the enjoyment of American youth?

 

How she wrote for children

Louisa saw no trick in writing for children: simply tell the truth. Describe life as it is, using the real language of children (slang and all). For Louisa, it was a simple calculation. Wisely deciding to write what she knew, she drew upon the rich history of her own childhood.

Stern describes Bronson’s ideal of the “happy, kind and loving family, a home where peace and gentle quiet abide.” Little Women was to be the depiction of that ideal home.

Although the Alcott home life was often fraught with anxiety and chaos due to their poverty, there was plenty to build upon in Little Women based upon the ideal that they attempted to live. On occasion, that ideal did play out.

 

Carrying on the family work

Bronson and Ralph Waldo Emerson believed in Louisa’s ability to relate to children; Waldo had called her the “poet of children, who knew their angels” (Ibid). Certainly Bronson had something to gain by Louisa’s agreeing to write the story as Robert Bros. promised to publish his book, Tablets, if she agreed.

But he had urged her for years to write good stories for children as the nurturing of the minds of children was nearest and dearest to his heart. If he could no longer do it, his daughter could take up the mantle through her gift with a story.

Stern writes, “The door was Hillside’s. Could Louisa open it, recover those despised recollections of childhood, and find in the biography of one foolish person the miniature paraphrase of the hundred volumes of the universal history?”

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Little Women: A Book I Come Back to for Comfort and Guidance

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Mixing fiction seamlessly with fact

Mining her vast storehouse of memories, Louisa transcribed her childhood, mixing fiction seamlessly with fact to create a compelling story. Both she and Thomas Niles, her publisher, felt the book was “dull” after the first twelve chapters, but Niles’ niece and other children who read the manuscript had different ideas.

Louisa may not have enjoyed the creative satisfaction of churning out Little Women as she had with her A. M. Barnard thrillers, but her pen was creating sheer lightning in the guise of simple truth and family devotion.

Characters and settings from the book were composites of real people and events. Stern writes of Laurie: “Laurie would inherit from Ladislas [Wisniewski, Louisa’s love interest from her first tour of Europe] his curly black hair and big black eyes, his musical skill, and his foreign background, while Alf [Whitman, a lifelong friend from Louisa’s theater days] would endow him with high spirits and a sober kind of fascination.”

Mr. March’s letters came from Bronson’s writings while living at “Concordia” (just before they embarked on Fruitlands) while Marmee’s notes to her daughters originated from jottings in the girls’ various journals.

Louisa’s “The Olive Leaf,” a family newspaper created while the family lived in destitution in Boston as a means of entertainment, became “The Pickwick Portfolio,” carrying with it the various Dickensian characters.

What was real and what was fiction? Did Amy (May) really burn Jo’s (Louisa’s) manuscript? Did she really fall through the ice? Did Anna have the experience of Meg, being dressed up like a doll by her wealthy friends?

Stern writes, “It scarcely mattered. Fact was embedded into fiction, and a domestic noel begun in which the local and the universal were married, in which adolescents were clothed in flesh and blood.”

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Illustrations for Little Women by Jessie Wilcox Smith

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Creation of an American classic

Little did Louisa know that this story based her own family life and their “queer” adventures would become the story that was on the heart of all Americans.



It was time America had its own literature, its own family. The March family was quintessential New England and yet their story transcended New England, having, as Madeleine Stern put it, “a more universal reality than that of a single village.”

For the first time teenage readers met themselves: adolescent characters navigating through the daily trials and triumphs, emerging into adulthood. Meg begins her own family with John. Jo strikes out on her own as a working woman and writer, living far away from home New York City.

Amy evolves into a woman of grace, leaving behind selfish impulses and eventually leading Laurie to his better self. Beth was not destined to enter the world of adults but left behind an example and a spirit that guided her sister Jo to a place where she could reconcile her ambitions with her love of family.

Stern writes, “Then the families of the nation might open the door of Hillside to find not the Marches, but themselves waiting within. Under to roof of one New England home, they would see all the homes of America.”

 

To marry or not to marry …

Part two of Little Women, dubbed Good Wives, was written not at Orchard House but in Boston on Brookline Street. The demands of readers were great; such was the price of success, a success she had dreamt of since being a teenager herself.

Yes, the girls would marry even though she wished that Jo could have remained like herself, a “literary spinster.” It was not from lack of suitors. George Bartlett, a fellow actor in the local theatricals, offered his help in reading the proofs of the first part of the book and his help was gratefully accepted. His attentions upon the “chronic old maid,” however were politely rebuffed.

 

Monies earned, stories told

Moving with May into the new Bellevue Hotel on Beacon Street, Louisa continue work on the second half of the book while receiving her first royalties totally three hundred dollars for three thousand copies sold.

Here she relived the pain of Lizzie’s death, brought Amy and Laurie together in a boat they would pull together and had Professor Bhaer serenade Jo with the song Louisa herself had sung for Mr. Emerson.

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Louisa May Alcott: A biography by Madeleine B. Stern on Amazon*

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A timely restorative to the Alcott family

Stern writes, “Devoutly Louisa hoped that the new year of 1869 would bring to the Orchard House a happy harvesting from the tears and laughter she had sowed in the book where she had found her style at last.”

It would come to pass with a harvest pressed down, shaken together, and running over, as it says in the scriptures. “The long-standing hurts were healed, the reception of the March family into the hearts of New England proved a timely restorative to one who had created that family.”

— Contributed by Susan Bailey,  a writer and lifelong student of Louisa May Alcott. She maintains the only blog devoted exclusively to Alcott, Louisa May Alcott is My Passion.

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

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A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf: Two 1929 reviews + quotes

A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf has stood the test of time as a feminist classic, though the fact that it remains relevant is a sorry statement of contemporary culture. Following are presented two reviews from both sides of the Atlantic in the year in which it was published, plus a selection of quotes.

A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf was published in 1929 by Hogarth Press, a publishing company in the U.K. that the author herself ran with her husband, Leonard Woolf. It was published the same year by Harcourt, Brace in the U.S.

Based on two lectures Virginia Woolf delivered at Newnham and Girton Colleges, two women’s colleges in Britain, it has since become a seminal feminist text.

A Room of One’s Own is presented as an extended essay, arguing for a place for women writers in the literary world, a place which, until then, had been male dominated. While there are far more women writers that are able to live by their pens today, many arguments and points posed by the essay remain relevant.

In this classic essay, Woolf cites her frustration with lack of formal education — both her own and for many other women of her time, and critiques the attendant need for social and financial dependence on men.

The most famous line in the essay, pertaining to women who wish to write, especially fiction, is that “A woman must have money and a room of her own…”

Author Mary Gordon supplied the Foreword to a 1989 edition of A Room of One’s Own, writing:

“A Room of One’s Own opened Woolf up to the charges – snobbery, aestheticism – by that time habitually laid at the Bloomsbury gate by the generation that came of age in the late Twenties.

To an extent, the accusations are just: Woolf is concerned with the fate of women of genius, not with that of ordinary women; her plea is that we create a world in which Shakespeare’s sister might survive her gift, not one in which a miner’s wife can have her rights to property; Woolf’s passion is for literature, not for universal justice.

The thesis of A Room of One’s Own – women must have money and privacy in order to write – is inevitably connected to questions of class: ‘Genius like Shakespeare’s is not born among labouring, uneducated, servile people.’ The words are hard; how infuriating they must have been to, say, a D.H. Lawrence. But Woolf is firm. Genius needs freedom; it cannot flower if it is encumbered by fear, or rancor, or dependency, and without money freedom is impossible.”

Today, it’s easy to embrace the groundbreaking feminist angle of A Room of One’s Own, but how was it received in 1929, when its thesis must have seemed quite revolutionary? Virginia Woolf was already quite highly respected, and so this work was surprisingly well received and embraced, and in the years ahead, became a feminist classic.

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You might also enjoy: Virginia Woolf Quotes on Living and Writing

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Following are two contemporaneous reviews from both sides of the pond.

 

The creative spirit at work

From the original review in The Los Angles Times, December 1, 1929, by Lillian C. Ford: In A Room of One’s Own (Harcourt, Brace), Virginia Woolf shows the creative spirit at work, and she does it in a way that makes the book a delight.

Having been asked to speak on the subject “Women and Fiction,” Woolf finds she must do a lot of thinking. She does it, and let us in on the process. We than go with her to lunch at a men’s college called Oxbridge, where she is told that a woman may not step on the grass nor enter the library (except by special arrangement) nor do other things open to men.

Then she goes to a nearby women’s college and dines on a substantial stew, with prunes and custard for dessert.

All of this brings questions to the fore. Why the difference in the privileges, education, and even the food given to men as compared with women? What does it mean — that women are inferior?

Has it possibly something to do with women and their place in literature and the arts, specifically in fiction? Why is it that men, all through the ages, have had books and power and honors and time for research while women have had — children?

Sine they must continue to have children if the race is to go on, are we to conclude that women have no place in the arts? By a leisurely, but nonetheless brilliant course of reasoning, Mrs. Woolf comes to the conclusion that we may yet shine; that our great creative period is in the future.

But, if we are to achieve in the same degree as men and not merely in isolated instances, we must have two things assured; five hundred pounds a year and a room of our own.

If you miss this book, which is profound and subtle and gently ironic and beautifully written, you will have missed an important reading experience.

. . . . . . . . . . .

A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf on Amazon*

. . . . . . . . . . . 

A consideration of woman’s creative power

From the original review of the Hogarth Press edition of A Room of One’s Own, The Guardian, U.K., November 19, 1929:  It is too little to say that this imaginative and suggestive essay is a consideration of woman’s creative power and the effect upon it of the restrictions under which, until quite recently, she has laboured.

For besides its main theme, which is summed up in “a room of one’s own,” something that creative women, and indeed all women, have had little access to throughout history, it is full of adventures down unknown alleys of thought which the reader will be glad to share.

One realises afresh the full meaning of originality, the magic of the mind which plays around the concrete facts as though they were all spirit. And when the book is finished it is with a renewed sense of zest and stimulus that one takes up life again and looks anew at objects which before were only ordinary.

The main theme is woven throughout. Mrs. Woolf imagines Shakespeare with a twin sister gifted in all respects as he was:

“I told you in the course of this paper that Shakespeare had a sister; but do not look for her in Sir Sidney Lee’s life of the poet. She died young—alas, she never wrote a word. She lies buried where the omnibuses now stop, opposite the Elephant and Castle.

Now my belief is that this poet who never wrote a word and was buried at the cross–roads still lives. She lives in you and in me, and in many other women who are not here to–night, for they are washing up the dishes and putting the children to bed.

But she lives; for great poets do not die; they are continuing presences; they need only the opportunity to walk among us in the flesh.”

Suicide at the crossroads is the least that could befall the woman genius. And the common room — in which Fanny Burney had to do her thinking. This lays bare the hard lot of women, and shows how genius, save in the rarest of cases, has to be grown and tended and how circumstances play the largest part in furthering it.

 

Quotes from A Room of One’s Own

“A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.”

. . . . . . . . . . . 

“Women have burnt like beacons in all the works of all the poets from the beginning of time. Indeed if woman had no existence save in the fiction written by men, one would imagine her a person of the utmost importance; very various; heroic and mean; splendid and sordid; beautiful and hideous in the extreme; as great as a man, some would say greater. But this is woman in fiction.”

. . . . . . . . . . . 

“The history of men’s opposition to women’s emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself.”

. . . . . . . . . . . 

“Anything may happen when womanhood has ceased to be a protected occupation.”

. . . . . . . . . . . 

“So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say.”

. . . . . . . . . . . 

“Suppose, for instance, that men were only represented in literature as the lovers of women, and were never the friends of men, soldiers, thinkers, dreamers; how few parts in the plays of Shakespeare could be allotted to them; how literature would suffer! We might perhaps have most of Othello; and a good deal of Antony; but no Caesar, no Brutus, no Hamlet, no Lear, no Jaques–literature would be incredibly impoverished, as indeed literature is impoverished beyond our counting by the doors that have been shut upon women.”

. . . . . . . . . . . 

“All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn, for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds.”

. . . . . . . . . . . 

“Women have sat indoors all these millions of years, so that by this time the very walls are permeated by their creative force, which has, indeed, so overcharged the capacity of bricks and mortar that it must needs harness itself to pens and brushes and business and politics.”

“Literature is strewn with the wreckage of those who have minded beyond reason the opinion of others.”

. . . . . . . . . . . 

“I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.”

. . . . . . . . . . . 

“Fiction is like a spider’s web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners.”

. . . . . . . . . . . 

“Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.”

. . . . . . . . . . . 

“Then may I tell you that the very next words I read were these – ‘Chloe liked Olivia…’ Do not start. Do not blush. Let us admit in the privacy of our own society that these things sometimes happen. Sometimes women do like women.”

“Anyone who has the temerity to write about Jane Austen is aware of two facts: first, that of all great writers she is the most difficult to catch in the act of greatness; second, that there are twenty-five elderly gentlemen living in the neighbourhood of London who resent any slight upon her genius as if it were an insult to the chastity of their aunts.”

. . . . . . . . . . . 

“Therefore I would ask you to write all kinds of books, hesitating at no subject however trivial or however vast. By hook or by crook, I hope that you will possess yourselves of money enough to travel and to idle, to contemplate the future or the past of the world, to dream over books and loiter at street corners and let the line of thought dip deep into the stream.”

. . . . . . . . . . . 

“Women and fiction remain, so far as I am concerned, unsolved problems.”

. . . . . . . . . . . 

“Yet it is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.”

More about A Room of One’s Own

Reader discussion of A Room of One’s Own on Goodreads
Wikipedia
British Library
Guardian’s 100 Best Nonfiction Books

. . . . . . . . . .

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

The post A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf: Two 1929 reviews + quotes appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.

Ariel by Sylvia Plath — a review and analysis

Ariel was the second published collection by Sylvia Plath (1932 – 1963). It came out two years after she took her own life at age thirty. Following is an analysis of Ariel by Sylvia Plath as well as a review, both from 1965, the year in which it was first published.

Plath’s poetry, considered part of the “confessional movement,” was influenced by Robert Lowell as well as by her friend, the poet Anne Sexton, who also explored dark themes and death in her work (and who, like Plath, committed suicide). Depression had been a constant companion, leading to a life of struggle that was reflected in her work. 

Once Plath started to publish, her star quickly rose in the world of poetry. Her first collection, The Colossus, was published in 1960. Its poems were intense, personal, and delicately crafted. In Ariel, the beauty of craft remains even as it reveals the fissures growing in the poet’s psyche. According to the Penguin Companion to American Literature:

“The Colossus (1960) and the posthumous Ariel (1965) show a remarkable development. The first is a largely personal poetry, intense and delicately rendered, usually dealing with the relationship of the poet and a perceived object from which she seeks illumination, ‘that rare, random descent.’

It is controlled, serious verse but her later work shows new strains and pressures at work and becomes a poetry of anguished confession.”

The 1965 edition revealed the heavy hand of Ted Hughes. He had omitted twelve poems that Plath had earmarked for the collection, and included twelve others of his own choosing. In 2004, a restored edition of Ariel was published.

Following are two reviews of Ariel from 1965, the first of which is by A. Alvarez, a longtime champion of Plath and her poetry, and a poet in his own right.

. . . . . . . . . . .

Learn more about Sylvia Plath

. . . . . . . . . . .

Poetry in Extremis — an analysis of Ariel

From the original review in The Observer, March 14, 1965, written by A. Alvarez: It is over two years now since Sylvia Plath died at the age of thirty, and in that time a myth has been gathering around her work.

It has to do with her extraordinary outburst of creative energy in the months before her death, culminating in the last few weeks when, as she herself wrote, she was at work every morning between four and seven, producing two sometimes three poems a day.

All of these last verses were intensely personal, nearly all were about dying. So when her death finally came it was prepared for and, in some degree, understood.

However wanton it seemed, it was also, in a way, inevitable, even justified, like some final unwritten poem.

The last works were something quite new in poetry. I wrote at the time in The Observer that Plath was “systematically probing that narrow, violent areas between the viable and the impossible, between experience which can be transmuted into poetry and that which is overwhelming.”

In order to tap knowingly the deep reservoirs of feeling that are released usually only in breakdown she was deliberately cutting her way through poetic conventions, shedding her old life, old emotions, old forms. Yet she underwent this process as an artist.

If the poems are despairing, vengeful, and destructive, they are at the same time tender, open, and also unusually clever, sardonic, hard minded:

Dying

Is an art, like everything else.

I do it exceptionally well.

I do it so it feels like hell.

I do it so it feels real.

I guess you could say I’ve a call.

The myth, then, is a diversion from the objective achievement. For the very reason that it has an originality that keeps it apart from any poetic fads. It is too concentrated and detached and ironic for “confessional” verse, with all hat implies of self-indulgent cashing-in on misfortunes; and it is violent without any deliberate exploitation of horrors and petty nastiness.

If these last poems could never have been predicted from her first collection, The Colossus, this is not simply because such a leap is always unforeseeable, but because her earlier absorption with style would, in the the usual order of things, have made it doubly hard for her to bore through the crust of mere craftsmanship and release the lava below.

Technically, the basic difference between the earlier and later poems is that the first were written for the eye, and the last for the ear. They need to be read aloud; they are original because she discovered in them her own speaking voice, her own identity.

So the poems run with an inner rhythm which alters with the pressure of feeling and allows the images, which came crowding in with an incredible fertility and accuracy, to shift into one another, define and modify one another, and rub off colors each on the next.

To take a straightforward example from “The Arrival of the Bee Box”:

I put my eye on the grid.

It is dark, dark.

With the swarm feeling of African hands

Minute and shrunk for export.

Black on black, angrily clambering.

How can I let them out?

It is the noise that appeals me most of all,

The unintelligible syllables.

It is like a Roman mob,

Small, taken one by one, but my god,

     together!

I lay my ear to furious Latin,

I am not Caesar.

I have simply ordered a box of maniacs.

They can be sent back.

They can die, I need feed them nothing, I

     am the owner.

It starts as simple narrative description; but as “dark” is repeated it is somehow made to reverberate inwardly, crystallizing into a metaphor which voices her underlying sense of threat.

That menace carries over into the next bit of description (of the noise) and shift, though another image, into wry helplessness (“I am not Caesar”); at which point a sense of proportion reasserts itself: “They can die … I am the am the owner.”

So a trivial incident gathers into a whole complicated nexus of feelings about the way her life is getting out of control. It is a brilliant balancing act between colloquial sanity and images which echo down and open up the depths.

Many of the poems are more difficult than that, rawer, more extreme. But all have that combination of exploratory invention, violent, threatened personal involvement and a quizzical edge of detachment. The poems are casual yet concentrated, slangy yet utterly unexpected.

They are works of great artistic purity and despite all the nihilism, great generosity.

Ariel is only a selection from a mass of work Plath left. Some of the other pomes have been printed here and there, some have been recorded, some exist only in manuscript. It is to be hoped that all this remaining verse will soon be published. As it is, this book is a major literary event.

. . . . . . . . . . .

10 of Sylvia Plath’s Best-Loved Poems

. . . . . . . . . . .

A 1965 review of Ariel by Sylvia Plath

From the original review in The Age, Melbourne, Australia, July 10, 1965: Sylvia Plath was born in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1932. In 1956, while studying on a Fulbright grant, she met and married the poet Ted Hughes. In 1960 her first book of poems appeared, and in 1963, she committed suicide.

The poems written in the last three years of her life have been gathered in a volume titled Ariel.

They are difficult, uncertain poems, some extremely obscure and all primarily dependent on central images. Formal rhythm and the logic of rational statement are both dispensed with, the main principle of organization being a free-association technique.

How does a doomed poetess in her late twenties see death? Sylvia Plath was, in poetry at least, a stubbornly brave young woman, determined to face reality objectively, but at the same time neither to posture nor to cant.

The poems witness to a singularly pure sense of reality, a personality capable of many responses and of sustaining an attitude effectively. At one extreme she celebrates the ritual murder of her subconscious father-image in jangling staccato phrases parodying the clichés of agony column verse, and culminating in a Walpurgisnacht frenzy.

At the other she writes bitterly of her ability to survive:

It’s the theatrical

Comeback in broad day

To the same place, the same face, the same brute

Amused shout:

“A miracle!”

That knocks me out.

Some of her images take on forceful private meanings. Poppies are associated with violence and with the malignant blood cells of hemophilia, the Medusa head with the reality of death, bees with the life of the soul after death.

The last of the is a traditional usage, the other two subjective and personal. Such associations and identifications when they occur are almost always oblique and contribute to the enigmatic texture of the poetry.

Her achievement raises issues concerning the value of literature and its relation to life. The last poem suggests that words are dubious allies in the struggle to maintain a sense of reality. They are solid and fixed and resonant, abut as circumstances alter, they become emptied of meaning.

Years later I

Encounter them on the road —

Words dry and riderless,

The indefatigable hoof-taps

While

From the bottom of the pool, fixed

     stars

Govern a life.

Nevertheless, her own work affirms the abiding value of literary creation, for poet and reader alike. It is no mean feat to have recorded an enduring attitude to death that embraces a sense of life in the face of suffering and weakness.

Plath’s poems are a tribute to the resourcefulness of the creative imagination and its capacity to render meaningful the hazardous course of an individual life.

. . . . . . . . . . . .

Ariel by Sylvia Plath (the restored edition) on Amazon*

. . . . . . . . . . . .

More about Ariel by Sylvia Plath

Reader discussion on Goodreads
Sylvia Plath’s Joy (The New Yorker)
A Close Reading of Ariel — The British Library

. . . . . . . . . . . .

*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 Ariel by Sylvia Plath — a review and analysis appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.

Ariel by Sylvia Plath — a review and analyisis

Ariel was the second published collection by Sylvia Plath (1932 – 1963). It came out two years after she took her own life at age thirty. Depression had been a constant companion, leading to a life of struggle that was reflected in her work. Following is an analysis of Ariel by Sylvia Plath as well as a review, both from 1965, the year in which it was first published.

Plath’s poetry, considered part of the “confessional movement,” was influenced by Robert Lowell as well as by her friend, the poet Anne Sexton, who also explored dark themes and death in her work (and who, like Plath, committed suicide).

Once Plath started to publish, her star quickly rose in the world of poetry. Her first collection, The Colossus, was published in 1960. Its poems were intense, personal, and delicately crafted. In Ariel, the beauty of craft remains even as it reveals the fissures growing in the poet’s psyche. According to the Penguin Companion to American Literature:

“The Colossus (1960) and the posthumous Ariel (1965) show a remarkable development. The first is a largely personal poetry, intense and delicately rendered, usually dealing with the relationship of the poet and a perceived object from which she seeks illumination, ‘that rare, random descent.’

It is controlled, serious verse but her later work shows new strains and pressures at work and becomes a poetry of anguished confession.”

The 1965 edition revealed the heavy hand of Ted Hughes. He had omitted twelve poems that Plath had earmarked for the collection, and included twelve others of his own choosing. In 2004, a restored edition of Ariel was published.

Following are two reviews of Ariel from 1965, the first of which is by A. Alvarez, a longtime champion of Plath and her poetry, and a poet in his own right.

. . . . . . . . . . .

Learn more about Sylvia Plath

. . . . . . . . . . .

Poetry in Extremis — an analysis of Ariel

From the original review in The Observer, March 14, 1965, written by A. Alvarez: It is over two years now since Sylvia Plath died at the age of thirty, and in that time a myth has been gathering around her work.

It has to do with her extraordinary outburst of creative energy in the months before her death, culminating in the last few weeks when, as she herself wrote, she was at work every morning between four and seven, producing two sometimes three poems a day.

All of these last verses were intensely personal, nearly all were about dying. So when her death finally came it was prepared for and, in some degree, understood.

However wanton it seemed, it was also, in a way, inevitable, even justified, like some final unwritten poem.

The last works were something quite new in poetry. I wrote at the time in The Observer that Plath was “systematically probing that narrow, violent areas between the viable and the impossible, between experience which can be transmuted into poetry and that which is overwhelming.”

In order to tap knowingly the deep reservoirs of feeling that are released usually only in breakdown she was deliberately cutting her way through poetic conventions, shedding her old life, old emotions, old forms. Yet she underwent this process as an artist.

If the poems are despairing, vengeful, and destructive, they are at the same time tender, open, and also unusually clever, sardonic, hard minded:

Dying

Is an art, like everything else.

I do it exceptionally well.

I do it so it feels like hell.

I do it so it feels real.

I guess you could say I’ve a call.

The myth, then, is a diversion from the objective achievement. For the very has an originality that keeps it apart from any poetic fads. It is too concentrated and detached and ironic for “confessional” verse, with all hat implies of self-indulgent cashing-in on misfortunes; and it is violent without any deliberate exploitation of horrors and petty nastiness.

If these last poems could never have been predicted from her first collection, The Colossus, this is not simply because such a leap is always unforeseeable, but because her earlier absorption with style would, in the the usual order of things, have made it doubly hard for her to bore through the crust of mere craftsmanship and release the lava below.

Technically, the basic difference between the earlier and later poems is that the first were written for the eye, and the last for the ear. They need to be read aloud; they are original because she discovered in them her own speaking voice, her own identity.

So the poems run with an inner rhythm which alters with the pressure of feeling and allows the images, which came crowding in with an incredible fertility and accuracy, to shift into one another, define and modify one another, and rub off colors each on the next.

To take a straightforward example from “The Arrival of the Bee Box”:

I put my eye on the grid.

It is dark, dark.

With the swarm feeling of African hands

Minute and shrunk for export.

Black on black, angrily clambering.

How can I let them out?

It is the noise that appeals me most of all,

The unintelligible syllables.

It is like a Roman mob,

Small, taken one by one, but my god,

     together!

I lay my ear to furious Latin,

I am not Caesar.

I have simply ordered a box of maniacs.

They can be sent back.

They can die, I need feed them nothing, I

     am the owner.

It starts as simple narrative description; but as “dark” is repeated it is somehow made to reverberate inwardly, crystallizing into a metaphor which voices her underlying sense of threat.

That menace carries over into the next bit of description (of the noise) and shift, though another image, into wry helplessness (“I am not Caesar”); at which point a sense of proportion reasserts itself: “They can die … I am the am the owner.”

So a trivial incident gathers into a whole complicated nexus of feelings about the way her life is getting out of control. It is a brilliant balancing act between colloquial sanity and images which echo down and open up the depths.

Many of the poems are more difficult than that, rawer, more extreme. But all have that combination of exploratory invention, violent, threatened personal involvement and a quizzical edge of detachment. The poems are casual yet concentrated, slangy yet utterly unexpected.

They are works of great artistic purity and despite all the nihilism, great generosity.

Ariel is only a selection from a mass of work Plath left. Some of the other pomes have been printed here and there, some have been recorded, some exist only in manuscript. It is to be hoped that all this remaining verse will soon be published. As it is, this book is a major literary event.

. . . . . . . . . . .

10 of Sylvia Plath’s Best-Loved Poems

. . . . . . . . . . .

A 1965 review of Ariel by Sylvia Plath

From the original review in The Age, Melbourne, Australia, July 10, 1965: Sylvia Plath was born in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1932. In 1956, while studying on a Fulbright grant, she met and married the poet Ted Hughes. In 1960 her first book of poems appeared, and in 1963, she committed suicide.

The poems written in the last three years of her life have been gathered in a volume titled Ariel.

They are difficult, uncertain poems, some extremely obscure and all primarily dependent on central images. Formal rhythm and the logic of rational statement are both dispensed with, the main principle of organization being a free-association technique.

How does a doomed poetess in her late twenties see death? Sylvia Plath was, in poetry at least, a stubbornly brave young woman, determined to face reality objectively, but at the same time neither to posture nor to cant.

The poems witness to a singularly pure sense of reality, a personality capable of many responses and of sustaining an attitude effectively. At one extreme she celebrates the ritual murder of her subconscious father-image in jangling staccato phrases parodying the clichés of agony column verse, and culminating in a Walpurgisnacht frenzy.

At the other she writes bitterly of her ability to survive:

It’s the theatrical

Comeback in broad day

To the same place, the same face, the same brute

Amused shout:

“A miracle!”

That knocks me out.

Some of her images take on forceful private meanings. Poppies are associated with violence and with the malignant blood cells of hemophilia, the Medusa head with the reality of death, bees with the life of the soul after death.

The last of the is a traditional usage, the other two subjective and personal. Such associations and identifications when they occur are almost always oblique and contribute to the enigmatic texture of the poetry.

Her achievement raises issues concerning the value of literature and its relation to life. The last poem suggests that words are dubious allies in the struggle to maintain a sense of reality. They are solid and fixed and resonant, abut as circumstances alter, they become emptied of meaning.

Years later I

Encounter them on the road —

Words dry and riderless,

The indefatigable hoof-taps

While

From the bottom of the pool, fixed

     stars

Govern a life.

Nevertheless, her own work affirms the abiding value of literary creation, for poet and reader alike. It is no mean feat to have recorded an enduring attitude to death that embraces a sense of life in the face of suffering and weakness.

Plath’s poems are a tribute to the resourcefulness of the creative imagination and its capacity to render meaningful the hazardous course of an individual life.

. . . . . . . . . . . .

Ariel by Sylvia Plath (the restored edition) on Amazon*

. . . . . . . . . . . .

More about Ariel by Sylvia Plath

Reader discussion on Goodreads
Sylvia Plath’s Joy (The New Yorker)
A Close Reading of Ariel — The British Library

. . . . . . . . . . . .

*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 Ariel by Sylvia Plath — a review and analyisis appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.

A Street in Bronzeville by Gwendolyn Brooks (1945) — Two Reviews

Gwendolyn Brooks (1917 – 2000) was just twenty-eight years old when her first book, A Street In Bronzeville, was published in 1945. Following are two original reviews from 1945 of A Street in Bronzeville, which are typical of the universal praise it received.

The title of this poetry collection, whose title was a reference to  Chicago’s South Side where the poet grew up, was very well reviewed and led to her winning a Guggenheim Fellowship. 

Gwendolyn Brooks’ poetic work included sonnets, ballads, and blues rhythm in free verse. She also created lengthy lyrical poems, some of which were book-length. Each poem is an exquisitely crafted portrait of fictionalized (but true-to-life) characters and landmarks of the community. 

From Bronzeville forward, Brooks’ poetry work revealed thoughtful, honest, and sometimes harsh reflections of urban African American life of the mid-twentieth century. Though her lens focused on black America, many of the themes of her poetry were universal, hence its broad appeal, and the respect it earned.

Poetry was how Gwendolyn Brook made her unique, singular life. In 1968, she was named Poet Laureate for the state of Illinois, and from 1985 to 1986, she served as Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. Later in her life, she taught at a number of prestigious colleges and universities.

. . . . . . . . . . .

Learn more about Gwendolyn Brooks

. . . . . . . . . . .

Chicago Can Take Pride in New, Young Voice in Poetry

From the original review of A Street in Bronzeville in the Chicago Tribune, August 26, 1945, review by Paul Engle: The publication of A Street in Bronzeville is an exceptional event in the literary life of Chicago, for it is the first book of a solidly Chicago person.

Miss Brooks attended Englewood High School and Wilson Junior College. I hope they know it and are proud. But it is also an event of national importance, for Miss Brooks is the first Negro poet to write wholly out of a deep and imaginative talent.

Here is the story of a day on the South Side; it has the marvelous title of “The Sundays of Satin Legs Smith,” itself a poem. In it, Miss Brooks shows that she has a vigorous mind and uses it cunningly with slow concentration of word.

There are many poems about people and they’re all accurately human, alert, and moving. Miss Brooks goes through Chicago with her eyes wide open, taking the reader right inside the reality observed. There are keen notes on our mortal frailty, such as the amorous gentleman who, seeing an attractive woman, “wonders as his stomach breaks up in to fire and lights …”

How long it will be

Before he can, with reasonably

slight risk of rebuke, put

his hand on her knee.

There are poems which bear the immediate sense of the personal life strongly lived out:

It was quite a time for loving.

It was midnight. It was May.

But in the crowding darkness

Not a word did they say.

There is the quick observation of the shame and sorrow behind performance, as in “Queen of the Blues”:

Mame was singing

At the Midnight club.

And the place was red

With blues.

She could shake her body

Across the floor.

For what did she have

To lose?

The longest piece in the book is a sequence of poems about the soldier, called “Gay Chaps at the Bar.” They are the most controlled, the most intense poems in the book.

And they can be read for what they are and not, as the publishers want us to believe, as Negro poems. For they should no more be called Negro poetry than the poems of Robert Frost should be called white poetry. They’re poems for all readers who want warmth and softness, a quick hand and slow voice.

. . . . . . . . . .

11 Iconic Poems by Gwendolyn Brooks

. . . . . . . . . .

Poignant Music

From the original review in the Hartford Courant, November 11, 1945: It’s an encouraging sign when any good poetry is published today, and even more encouraging when such poetry is by a gifted, unusual voice bespeaking Negro genius.

We have had the fine mastery and sense for the classic form of Countee Cullen, the poignant realism of Langston Hughes, and more recently, the powerful prose of Richard Wright. That the quality of rhythmic song is innate to the black pen has been persistently demonstrated by the work of these and other writers.

Now comes Gwendolyn Brooks, displaying all the old, ready aptitude for idiomatic music, but with a great deal of depth, original thinking, and expression.

Here is a fearlessly eloquent poet who can handle any mood or meter equally well, any subject and form, and at the same time give us poetry of ideas, not merely cerebral, which goes far beyond the bitterness against the “the White Race.” The bitterness is there, but it’s not the exclusively motivating factor.

Gwendolyn Brooks writes good satirical sketches, comic verse, love poems, acid sketches of Negro life and manners, poetry of the tenderest emotion and compassion, and verses about the the war that stab the conscience.

In a good deal of her work she prefers the use of consonance to rhyme, and somehow this manner seems curiously fitted to her purpose.

Illustrative of the poet’s depth of perception and trenchant expression, is the following poem:

The White Troops Had Their Order But the Negroes Looked Like Men

They had supposed their formula was fixed.

They had obeyed instructions to devise

A type of cold, a type of hooded gaze.

But when the Negroes came they were perplexed.

These Negroes looked like men. Besides, it taxed

Time and the temper to remember those

Congenital iniquities that cause

Disfavor of the darkness. Such as boxed

Their feelings properly, complete to tags —

A box for dark men and a box for Other —

Would often find the contents had been scrambled.

Or even switched. Who really gave two figs?

Neither the earth nor heaven ever trembled.

And there was nothing startling in the weather.

[read an analysis of this poem, “Gwendolyn Brooks and Positive Integration”]

If this is her first book, in the years to come we may certainly expect great poetry form Gwendolyn Brooks. All the promise and the poignant music are here.

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Gwendolyn Brooks page on Amazon*

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The post A Street in Bronzeville by Gwendolyn Brooks (1945) — Two Reviews appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.

11 Iconic Poems by Gwendolyn Brooks

Gwendolyn Brooks (1917 – 2000) sustained a decades-long career as a poet, and was recognized with many awards and honors during her lifetime. Following is a sampling of poems by Gwendolyn Brooks, with links to analyses following each one.

This selection doesn’t claim to be the most iconic of her poems, as that would be a tough call — so much of her work is a worthy part of the American literary canon. Brooks’s poetic work included sonnets, ballads, and blues rhythm in free verse. She also created lyrical poems, some of which were book-length.

Much of her poetry reflected on urban African-American life, though its themes were universal to the human experience. Her output was impressive, encompassing more than twenty books, including children’s books.

Brooks broke into book publishing in 1945 with A Street In Bronzeville, referring to an area in the Chicago’s South Side. It was an auspicious beginning, as this poetry collection led to her winning a Guggenheim Fellowship.

The epic, book-length poem Annie Allen (1949) earned Brooks a Pulitzer Prize in 1950, making her the first African-American to win this award. 

In her storied career, Brooks was Poet Laureate for the state of Illinois, Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, and taught at several prominent universities. But what she’s remembered for most was this skill with which she used her poetic voice to spread tolerance and understanding the black experience in America.

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More about Gwendolyn Brooks

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The Children of the Poor

1

People who have no children can be hard:

Attain a mail of ice and insolence:

Need not pause in the fire, and in no sense

Hesitate in the hurricane to guard.

And when wide world is bitten and bewarred

They perish purely, waving their spirits hence

Without a trace of grace or of offense

To laugh or fail, diffident, wonder-starred.

While through a throttling dark we others hear

The little lifting helplessness, the queer

Whimper-whine; whose unridiculous

Lost softness softly makes a trap for us.

And makes a curse. And makes a sugar of

The malocclusions, the inconditions of love.

2

What shall I give my children? who are poor,

Who are adjudged the leastwise of the land,

Who are my sweetest lepers, who demand

No velvet and no velvety velour;

But who have begged me for a brisk contour,

Crying that they are quasi, contraband

Because unfinished, graven by a hand

Less than angelic, admirable or sure.

My hand is stuffed with mode, design, device.

But I lack access to my proper stone.

And plenitude of plan shall not suffice

Nor grief nor love shall be enough alone

To ratify my little halves who bear

Across an autumn freezing everywhere.

3

And shall I prime my children, pray, to pray?

Mites, come invade most frugal vestibules

Spectered with crusts of penitents’ renewals

And all hysterics arrogant for a day.

Instruct yourselves here is no devil to pay.

Children, confine your lights in jellied rules;

Resemble graves; be metaphysical mules.

Learn Lord will not distort nor leave the fray.

Behind the scurryings of your neat motif

I shall wait, if you wish: revise the psalm

If that should frighten you: sew up belief

If that should tear: turn, singularly calm

At forehead and at fingers rather wise,

Holding the bandage ready for your eyes.

(from Annie Allen, 1949)

Analysis of Children of the Poor

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The Mother

Abortions will not let you forget.

You remember the children you got that you did not get,

The damp small pulps with a little or with no hair,

The singers and workers that never handled the air.

You will never neglect or beat

Them, or silence or buy with a sweet.

You will never wind up the sucking-thumb

Or scuttle off ghosts that come.

You will never leave them, controlling your luscious sigh,

Return for a snack of them, with gobbling mother-eye.

I have heard in the voices of the wind the voices of my dim killed

children.

I have contracted. I have eased

My dim dears at the breasts they could never suck.

I have said, Sweets, if I sinned, if I seized

Your luck

And your lives from your unfinished reach,

If I stole your births and your names,

Your straight baby tears and your games,

Your stilted or lovely loves, your tumults, your marriages, aches,

and your deaths,

If I poisoned the beginnings of your breaths,

Believe that even in my deliberateness I was not deliberate.

Though why should I whine,

Whine that the crime was other than mine?—

Since anyhow you are dead.

Or rather, or instead,

You were never made.

But that too, I am afraid,

Is faulty: oh, what shall I say, how is the truth to be said?

You were born, you had body, you died.

It is just that you never giggled or planned or cried.

Believe me, I loved you all.

Believe me, I knew you, though faintly, and I loved, I loved you

All.

(from Blacks, 1987)

Analysis of The Mother

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We Real Cool

The Pool Players.

Seven at the Golden Shovel.

We real cool. We

Left school. We

Lurk late. We

Strike straight. We

Sing sin. We

Thin gin. We

Jazz June. We

Die soon.

(from The Bean Eaters, 1960)

Analysis of We Real Cool

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To Be in Love

To be in love

Is to touch with a lighter hand.

In yourself you stretch, you are well.

You look at things

Through his eyes.

A cardinal is red.

A sky is blue.

Suddenly you know he knows too.

He is not there but

You know you are tasting together

The winter, or a light spring weather.

His hand to take your hand is overmuch.

Too much to bear.

You cannot look in his eyes

Because your pulse must not say

What must not be said.

When he

Shuts a door —

Is not there—

Your arms are water.

And you are free

With a ghastly freedom.

You are the beautiful half

Of a golden hurt.

You remember and covet his mouth

To touch, to whisper on.

Oh when to declare

Is certain Death!

Oh when to apprize

Is to mesmerize,

To see fall down, the Column of Gold,

Into the commonest ash.

Analysis of To Be in Love

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Poetic Quotes from Maud Martha by Gwendolyn Brooks

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Sadie and Maud

Maud went to college.

Sadie stayed home.

Sadie scraped life

With a fine toothed comb.

She didn’t leave a tangle in

Her comb found every strand.

Sadie was one of the livingest chicks

In all the land.

Sadie bore two babies

Under her maiden name.

Maud and Ma and Papa

Nearly died of shame.

When Sadie said her last so-long

Her girls struck out from home.

(Sadie left as heritage

Her fine-toothed comb.)

Maud, who went to college,

Is a thin brown mouse.

She is living all alone

In this old house.

(from Selected Poems , Harper & Row, 1963)

Analysis of Sadie and Maud

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A Sunset of the City

Already I am no longer looked at with lechery or love.

My daughters and sons have put me away with marbles and dolls,

Are gone from the house.

My husband and lovers are pleasant or somewhat polite

And night is night.

It is a real chill out,

The genuine thing.

I am not deceived, I do not think it is still summer

Because sun stays and birds continue to sing.

It is summer-gone that I see, it is summer-gone.

The sweet flowers indrying and dying down,

The grasses forgetting their blaze and consenting to brown.

It is a real chill out. The fall crisp comes.

I am aware there is winter to heed.

There is no warm house

That is fitted with my need.

I am cold in this cold house this house

Whose washed echoes are tremulous down lost halls.

I am a woman, and dusty, standing among new affairs.

I am a woman who hurries through her prayers.

Tin intimations of a quiet core to be my

Desert and my dear relief

Come: there shall be such islanding from grief,

And small communion with the master shore.

Twang they. And I incline this ear to tin,

Consult a dual dilemma. Whether to dry

In humming pallor or to leap and die.

Somebody muffed it? Somebody wanted to joke.

(from Selected Poems , Harper & Row, 1963)

Analysis of Sunset of the City

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Boy Breaking Glass

Whose broken window is a cry of art   

(success, that winks aware

as elegance, as a treasonable faith)

is raw: is sonic: is old-eyed première.

Our beautiful flaw and terrible ornament.   

Our barbarous and metal little man.

“I shall create! If not a note, a hole.   

If not an overture, a desecration.”

Full of pepper and light

and Salt and night and cargoes.

“Don’t go down the plank

if you see there’s no extension.   

Each to his grief, each to

his loneliness and fidgety revenge.

Nobody knew where I was and now I am no longer there.”

The only sanity is a cup of tea.

The music is in minors.

Each one other

is having different weather.

“It was you, it was you who threw away my name!

And this is everything I have for me.”

Who has not Congress, lobster, love, luau,

the Regency Room, the Statue of Liberty,

runs. A sloppy amalgamation.

A mistake.

A cliff.

A hymn, a snare, and an exceeding sun.

(from Blacks, Third World Press, 1987)

Analysis of A Boy Breaking Glass

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The Bean Eaters

They eat beans mostly, this old yellow pair.

Dinner is a casual affair.

Plain chipware on a plain and creaking wood,

Tin flatware.

Two who are Mostly Good.

Two who have lived their day,

But keep on putting on their clothes

And putting things away.

And remembering . . .

Remembering, with twinklings and twinges,

As they lean over the beans in their rented back room that

is full of beads and receipts and dolls and cloths,

tobacco crumbs, vases and fringes.

(from The Bean Eaters, 1960)

Analysis of The Bean Eaters

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Gwendolyn Brooks Quotes on Writing and Life

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Jessie Mitchell’s Mother

Into her mother’s bedroom to wash the ballooning body.   

“My mother is jelly-hearted and she has a brain of jelly:   

Sweet, quiver-soft, irrelevant. Not essential.

Only a habit would cry if she should die.

A pleasant sort of fool without the least iron. . . .

Are you better, mother, do you think it will come today?

The stretched yellow rag that was Jessie Mitchell’s mother

Reviewed her. Young, and so thin, and so straight.

So straight! as if nothing could ever bend her.

But poor men would bend her, and doing things with poor men,

Being much in bed, and babies would bend her over,

And the rest of things in life that were for poor women,

Coming to them grinning and pretty with intent to bend and to kill.

Comparisons shattered her heart, ate at her bulwarks:

The shabby and the bright: she, almost hating her daughter,

Crept into an old sly refuge: “Jessie’s black

And her way will be black, and jerkier even than mine.

Mine, in fact, because I was lovely, had flowers

Tucked in the jerks, flowers were here and there . . .”

She revived for the moment settled and dried-up triumphs,

Forced perfume into old petals, pulled up the droop,

Refueled

Triumphant long-exhaled breaths.

Her exquisite yellow youth . . .

(from Selected Poems, Harper & Row, 1963)

Analysis of Jessie Mitchell’s Mother

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A Song In The Front Yard

I’ve stayed in the front yard all my life.

I want a peek at the back

Where it’s rough and untended and hungry weed grows.

A girl gets sick of a rose.

I want to go in the back yard now

And maybe down the alley,

To where the charity children play.

I want a good time today.

They do some wonderful things.

They have some wonderful fun.

My mother sneers, but I say it’s fine

How they don’t have to go in at quarter to nine.

My mother, she tells me that Johnnie Mae

Will grow up to be a bad woman.

That George’ll be taken to Jail soon or late

(On account of last winter he sold our back gate).

But I say it’s fine. Honest, I do.

And I’d like to be a bad woman, too,

And wear the brave stockings of night-black lace

And strut down the streets with paint on my face.

(from Selected Poems, 1963)

Analysis of A Song In The Front Yard

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kitchenette building

We are things of dry hours and the involuntary plan,

Grayed in, and gray. “Dream” makes a giddy sound, not strong

Like “rent,” “feeding a wife,” “satisfying a man.”

But could a dream send up through onion fumes

Its white and violet, fight with fried potatoes

And yesterday’s garbage ripening in the hall,

Flutter, or sing an aria down these rooms

Even if we were willing to let it in,

Had time to warm it, keep it very clean,

Anticipate a message, let it begin?

We wonder. But not well! not for a minute!

Since Number Five is out of the bathroom now,

We think of lukewarm water, hope to get in it.

(from Selected Poems, Harper & Row, 1963)

Analysis of kitchenette building

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Gwendolyn Brooks page on Amazon*

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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 11 Iconic Poems by Gwendolyn Brooks appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.