Nava Atlas's Blog, page 59

Testament of Youth by Vera Brittain (1933)

Testament of Youth by Vera Brittain (1893–  1970) has endured as this British author’s best known work. A memoir on how her life, and that of her generation, were forever marked by the losses endured as a result of World War I, it is indeed a touching testament.

Her brother, Edward, and her fiancé, Ronald Leighton were both killed during the war, and she never fully recovered from these tragic losses and placed them poignantly in the context of the horrors of the war.

As a result of the these losses, and the suffering she personally witnessed as a volunteer nurse during the war, led her to become a pacifist. She remained a dedicated member of the peace movement for the rest of her life.

Testament of Youth is now recognized as one of the most iconic memoirs of the twentieth century. Written with the perspective of time, Vera was a published author as well as a wife and mother when she began the book.  She attempted to fictionalize the narrative at first, but it wasn’t working. In a  2013 homage to Testament of Youth on its eighty year anniversary, The Guardian (U.K.) wrote:

“It was only when she decided to write as herself that her authorial voice seemed to flow and the events she had endured were given a poignant immediacy to which readers could relate. In Testament of Youth, the words seemed to pour out of her, a potent mixture of rage and loss, underpinned by lively intelligence and fervent pacifist beliefs.”

The book was an instant success, with all 3,000 printed copies selling out on publication day. Over the next six years, the book sold more than 120,000 copies and earned praise from many writers, including Virginia Woolf, who wrote in her journal that she stayed up all night to finish reading it.

In the U.S., Testament of Youth was a critical and commercial success as well, praised as “heartbreakingly beautiful.” Here is a review from the time of its publication, capturing the flavor of the book and the important story and lessons in its pages.

In recent years, Testament of Youth has been brought back to life a number of television and film adaptations.

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Vera Brittain as a World War I V.A.D. nurse

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A 1933 review of Testament of Youth

From the original review of Testament of Youth in the Salt Lake Tribune, November 12, 1933, by E.E. Hollis:

An autobiographical story of the war generation of England — moving, beautiful, and tragic

Testament of Youth by Vera Brittain is a book whose deep significance can hardly be overestimated. Of importance in its historical aspect, it is also a spiritual record of impelling power. Dealing with the war period, it is unlike any other story of those years.

Vera Brittain was of that generation to whom the war came to interrupt its preparation for life, to blight its budding hopes, and to put a new and ugly face upon its whole world. Her autobiography is a testament to what English youth suffered and lost during the World War I years.

Her story covers the first quarter of the twentieth century and makes startlingly clear the extraordinary changes wrought, in manners and morals, in society and politics. Her childhood as the daughter of the middle class is described briefly.

When the first rumbles of war were heard, Miss Brittain had succeeded, after much difficulty, in overcoming her father’s opposition to college for his “little girl.” She sought to be released from the boredom of “provincial young ladyhood” and was preparing for entrance to Oxford.

Life was opening joyfully; her bent for literature was to be satisfied and also dreams of love were stirring. She had found a most congenial companion in her brother Edward’s school intimate, Ronald Leighton, a brilliant young man.

Miss Brittain went to Oxford, but Edward and Ronald, who were to have started at the same time, were now in uniform. All she had worked so hard to achieve now seemed empty.

Joining the V.A.D.

By the spring of 1915 Miss Brittain had become a V.A.D. (Voluntary Aid Detachment — women who tended to wounded soldiers, of whom it was said later, “no one less than God Almighty could give a correct definition of the job of a V.A.D”), doing unpleasant tasks cheerfully, feeling that in a measure she shared the hardships her lover was enduring in France. She also lived on letters from the front.

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Testament of Youth by Vera Brittain on Amazon*

Losing a brother and a lover

At Christmas 1915 Ronald was to have his leave. On leave at home she waited with great anticipation fro his message, but the message was from his sister Clare, to say that Ronald had died of wounds at a Casualty Clearing station on the eve of his return.

Battling through her “individual hell,” she carried on at the London hospital, and was able to nurse her dearly loved brother, returning with convoys flowing back to the hospital from the battle on the Somme. Months later, Edward was killed in action on the Italian front.

Miss Brittain was sent on foreign service in Malta, in whose glamorous, sunlit beauty her heart wounds found some solace and healing. Later, she learned of the horrors of the general hospital at Etaples, through with passed a ceaseless storm of Tommies during the somber days when the German offensive rolled forward.

Here, too, she watched “the United States physically entering the war … our deliverers at last, marching; a formidable bulwark against the peril looming.”

The agony and falsity of war

All of these strenuous, anguishing experiences make engrossing, if painful, pages; it is through the letters of Ronald, Edward, and Miss Brittain herself, that one realizes the fierce agonies of their generation. It is not intended to minimize them, for this testament of youth is a challenge to forgetting, to the succeeding generation that they shall know what war means.

Miss Brittain insists, “The causes of war are always falsely represented; its honour is dishonest and its glory meretricious.” There is, too, comment on the injustices and follies in the conduct of war, resulting from mature reflection and understanding.

The record carries on through the post-war years, in which a maimed generation of youth struggled gallantly to gather up the broken pieces and rebuild life.

A return to Oxford, and to life

In 1919, the year “dominated by a thoroughly nasty Peace,” Vera Brittain returned to Oxford, accepted yet not welcomed as one of those “immoral” V.A.D.s. The story of her rise and activities as a journalist, lecturer, author, and internationalist, is scarcely less moving and important than the earlier chapters.

Testament of Youth is not one to read for pleasurable pastime, but one that insists on being read. It is alt once beautiful, terrible, and tragic, and written with courage and honesty.

More about Testament of Youth

My Mother Never Got Over the Loss of her Lover
Reader discussion on Goodreads
Testament of Youth: Book of a Lifetime

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The Power of Her Pen: The Story of Groundbreaking Journalist Ethel L. Payne by Lesa Cline-Ransome

The story of Ethel L. Payne (1911 – 1991), the American journalist and correspondent, is a portrait of persistence, passion, and determination. Award-winning author Lesa Cline-Ransome has told her story in an inspiring book for younger readers. We’ll get to that after a brief introduction to Ethel Payne’s life and work.

Ethel grew up in a working-class African-American family in Chicago.  She was a diligent student and avid reader, and showed an early interest in writing.

Pursuing the dream of becoming a reporter was no small feat for a black woman of Ethel’s era. A trailblazer from the start, she set her own path, which began in Washington, D.C. during World War II and in post-war Japan. Her experiences in both places shaped her as a journalist and activist.

Later in life, she said of her storied career: “I’ve been an eyewitness to so many profound things and so many changes … I’ve had a box seat on history, and that’s a rare thing.”

Ethel’s groundbreaking journey paralleled that of Alice Dunnigan, her contemporary and colleague. Like Alice, she was a correspondent for the Chicago Defender and worked as a White House correspondent.

And like Alice, Ethel angered president Eisenhower simply by asking direct questions about civil rights issues. Some newsmen thought that the two women competed for who could ask the toughest questions, but both were just trying to do their jobs well.

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Photo: Washington Post

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After being confronted with questions he didn’t care to answer, Eisenhower made a practice of ignoring both Ethel and Alice, looking past them to call on the mostly white, mostly male press corps. But the two women remained steadfast and true to their mission as journalists, and went on to achieve effective, award-winning careers.

Ethel was often called the “First Lady of the Black Press” for her stance as a civil rights journalist. But the best was yet to come when CBS hired her in 1972, making her the first female African-American political commentator on a national television network.

In an interview conducted late in her life and career, Ethel Payne summed up her life’s mission: “I stick to my firm, unshakeable belief that the black press is an advocacy press, and that I, as a part of that press, can’t afford the luxury of being unbiased … when it come to issues that really affect my people, and I plead guilty, because I think that I am an instrument of change.”

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The Power of Her Pen by Lesa Cline-Ransome

More about The Power of Her Pen on Simon & Schuster

The Power of Her Pen by Lesa Cline-Ransome on Amazon

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Lesa Cline-Ransome tells the story of Ethel Payne in a full-color book with lively illustrations by John Parra. Intended for young readers (though it can be enjoyed by all ages), it’s a wonderful introduction to Ethel’s life and work as one of a small group of African-American women journalists who broke through in the mid-twentieth century.

In a postscript, the author writes that pursuing journalism takes “a certain kind of grit and fearlessness.” She goes on to say that when the mainstream white press ignored stories of importance to the black community, “Ethel used her pen and her voice to report on the Montgomery Bus boycott, Rosa Parks, the plight of unwed mothers, race relations,” and more.

Through words and images, The Power of Her Pen follows Ethel through the challenges — as well as the joys — of being a bright and ambitious black female who sets her sights on journalism. What young reader with similar ambitions wouldn’t be struck by this passage:

“Ethel spend her school days daydreaming of life far beyond her neighborhood — except when she was in English class. There, her teacher, Miss Dixon, encouraged her writing. Her mother encouraged her at home. Ethel wrote during the day, and she read her stories to her family at night. The school wouldn’t let a black student work on the school newspaper, but, after reading Ethel’s writing, it did publish her very first story.”

Ethel came of age during the Great Depression, and after her father died while she was in her teens, money was tighter than ever. Determined to find a path to her dreams, she took writing classes at a local college that offered free tuition.

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Ms. Cline-Ransome guides the reader through Ethel’s rise in reporting, from covering black troops overseas during World War II to circling back to her home city to report for The Chicago Defender. Ethel covered civil rights in the wake of the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education ruling, and was able to triumph after being snubbed by President Eisenhower.

Ethel went on to effectively question presidents Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, and Carter on civil rights matters (and to actually receive answers). We also learn that she marched with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, AL, to protest for voting rights.

The book sums up Ethel Payne’s legacy, and indeed, conveys the importance of journalism in presenting the truth in order to affect change, particularly, in her case, as it pertained to the lives and struggles of African Americans:

“Her reporting highlighted their struggle for justice, equal pay, housing, and education. And, in he role of informing her readers, Ethel created awareness and activism in the fight for people across the globe.”

Lesa Cline-Ransome is the author of many award-winning and critically acclaimed nonfiction books for young readers, including Game Changers: The Story of Venus and Serena Williams; My Story, My Dance: Robert Battle’s Journey to Alvin Ailey; and Before She Was Harriet. She is also the author of the novel Finding Langston, which received a Coretta Scott King Honor Award and five starred reviews. She lives in the Hudson Valley region of New York. Learn more at LesaClineRansome.com.

See also: 10 Pioneering African-American Women Journalists

More about Ethel Payne

Ethel Payne, “First Lady of the Black Press,” Asked Questions No One Else Would”
If This Trailblazing Journalist Hadn’t Been a Black Woman, You Would Know Her Name
Wikipedia
Women’s History

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The Sea, The Sea by Iris Murdoch (1978)

The Sea, the Sea by Iris Murdoch (1919 – 1999) was the prolific British author’s nineteenth novel. Following is a review and analysis from 1978, the year in which it was published.

The story of Charles Arrowby, a self-involved and egotistical retired theater director begins as he is setting about to write his memoir. To focus on this task, he secludes himself in a house, not surprisingly, near the sea. He muses:

“Then I felt too that I might take this opportunity to tie up a few loose ends, only of course loose ends can never be properly tied, one is always producing new ones. Time, like the sea, unties all knots. Judgements on people are never final, they emerge from summings up which at once suggest the need of a reconsideration. Human arrangements are nothing but loose ends and hazy reckoning, whatever art may otherwise pretend in order to console us.”

As he looks back over his life, he encounters his first, adolescent love, now much older and hardly recognizable. This upends his quiet plans as he grows obsessed with her, and sets off some farcical situations.

The Sea, The Sea was critically acclaimed and won the 1978 Booker Prize.

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Learn more about Iris Murdoch

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A 1978 Review of The Sea, The Sea by Iris Murdoch

From the original review of The Sea, The Sea by Iris Murdoch by Lorna Sage in the Observer Sun, London, August 27, 1978:

“Those who want to be saved,” wrote Iris Murdoch in her book on Plato, “should look at the stars and talk philosophy, not write or go to the theatre.”

It’s a fair summary of the plot of this novel. Not the message, of course. She is adept as ever at keeping her philosophy and her fiction in their separate realms, and The Sea, The Sea is inventive, gossipy, and fantastic, not at all preachy.

Nonetheless she has lumbered her characters with some of the more choice (i.e. insoluble, fascinating, humiliating) problems her philosophical alter ego has been exploring lately.

Charles Arrowby, renowned theatre director

The hero, Charles Arrowby, is a retired and celebrated theatre director and, it goes almost without saying, a sentimental cynic and a monster of egotism.

He sets out to write his memoirs from his seaside retreat with a cozy reminiscent sense of achievement — modestly comparing himself to Prospero, abjuring the old magic, etc. — only to be stopped in his tracks by a dreadful and spectacular haunting he has not, for once, engineered.

The life he’d foreseen — the windy, wave-beaten promontory, the sketchy “nature study,” the small gourmet treats (Iris Murdoch does wonders of sneaky characterization by having him gloat over his solitary, greedy, unappetizing menus), the lighthearted pleasure of torturing infatuated ex-mistresses — all begins to disintegrate, as people and nameless things from the past crowd into his field of vision.

A first love reappears

The most embarrassing of his apparitions is a Loch Ness-style sea monster fainting in coils; the most unlikely his first and lost love, now a shy, lumpy 60-year-old who turns out to be living in a twee bungalow round the corner with her equally substantial husband.

Shaken but undefeated (indeed, rather roused by the challenges — this is where the real fun starts), Charles takes them all on, and tries mightily to fashion them into an Arrowby production.

Hartley, the lost love, he casts in the role of an aging Andromeda; himself, of course, as Perseus. Her husband, Ben, is obviously the sea beast, though he can’t swim.

And this is only one of many ingenious ploys; ‘resting’ actor friends who visit out of curiosity, and stay out of malice, get fitted in, too, like sad Gilbert, who thinks he’s in the Tempest plot, and saws wood in great quantities to prove it.

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The Sea, The Sea by Iris Murdoch on Amazon*

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A change of tone from funny to strange

So far, the book is very funny, and exactly conveys the tone and feel of a theatre world where people become, as it were, addicts of illusion, accustomed to manipulate or be manipulated.

When Charles steps decisively over into reality, though, and kidnaps Hartley, the tone changes: he comes up against a level of living, of sheer, mysterious ordinariness he knows nothing about. Her marriage may be stuffy, changeless, tasteless, even unhappy, but it’s real, and Charles can only eavesdrop on it, obscenely, like a Peeping Tom.

At this point, he starts to get the queasy feeling Iris Murdoch’s egotistical characters all dread: “I had lost control of my life and of the lives with which I was meddling … I had awakened some sleeping demon, set going some deadly machine.”

A breathless climax and an epiphany

His personal sorcery suddenly fails to work, the forces of necessity (chaos, the amorphous surrounding sea) take over, in one of those manic, violent, coincidental climaxes that leave the characters (and the reader) breathless. Death, along with marriage, is an inevitable touchstone of reality for Murdoch.

Charles sees for perhaps the first time in his life round the edge of his own fantasizing ego, beyond the picturesque intrigues and passionate delusions that have been the stuff of his personal and professional life. He learns, in short, to look at the stars and talk philosophy.

And this is where Murdoch’s Platonic dialog with herself comes to the foreground. What fascinates her and irritates her more than anything is the wasteful paradox of self-knowledge — the fact that we can truly know ourselves only by the crashing messily not the limits of our freedom.

A melding of fiction and philosophy

This book has a saint, in the unlikely person of Charles’s cousin James, an ex-Army man who discovered Buddhism while engaged in Tibet, and who performs several startling miracles to rescue the others from their nightmare. James, though, is thankfully a minor character, a mere catalyst.

Charles is the hero because his theatrical memoir-scribbling existence is the best (i.e. most problematic) metaphor for how most of us function. By the end, of course, he has mostly mislaid his momentary vision, and is back playing games.

I suppose this is what Iris Murdoch means when she distinguishes between philosophy and fiction — that what the novel does superlatively is mirror our continuing confusion and muddle.

The Sea, The Sea, certainly manages an exhilarating, and occasionally dreadful anarchy. Her habit of inventing golden boys, for instance, and then killing them off as symbols of lost dreams (Beautiful Joe in Henry and Cato; equally beautiful and doomed Titus in this book) is getting to be worrisome in a way that I don’t think has much to do with Plato.

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Quotes from The Sea, The Sea

“The theatre is certainly a place for learning about the brevity of human glory: oh all those wonderful glittering absolutely vanished pantomimes.”

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“I’ve felt as if I didn’t exist, as if I were invisible, miles away from the world, miles away. You can’t imagine how much alone I’ve been all my life.”

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“There was something factitious and brittle and thereby utterly feminine about her charm which made me want to crush her, even to crunch her. She had a slight cast in one eye which gives her gaze a strange concentrated intensity. Her eyes sparkle, almost as if they were actually emitting sparks. She is electric. And she could run faster in very high-heeled shoes than any girl I ever met.”

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“I felt a deep grief that crouched and stayed still as if it was afraid to move.”

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“I ate and drank slowly as one should (cook fast, eat slowly) and without distractions such as (thank heavens) conversation or reading. Indeed eating is so pleasant one should even try to suppress thought. Of course reading and thinking are important but, my God, food is important too.

How fortunate we are to be food-consuming animals. Every meal should be a treat and one ought to bless every day which brings with it a good digestion and the precious gift of hunger.”

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“What a queer gamble our existence is. We decide to do A instead of B and then the two roads diverge utterly and may lead in the end to heaven and to hell. Only later one sees how much and how awfully the fates differ. Yet what were the reasons for the choice? They may have been forgotten. Did one know what one was choosing? Certainly not.”

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“However life, unlike art, has an irritating way of bumping and limping on, undoing conversions, casting doubt on solutions, and generally illustrating the impossibility of living happily or virtuously ever after.”

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Vera Brittain

Vera Brittain (December 29, 1893– March 29, 1970) was a British memoirist, poet, essayist, and novelist whose work and life were forever marked by the losses she endured as a result of World War I. She’s best remembered for her classic memoir, Testament of Youth (1933).

As a young wartime nurse, she tended to wounded soldiers in several countries. Her brother and her fiancé were killed during the war. Brittain never fully recovered from the tragic loss, and the horrors of the war are poignantly depicted in her writings.

The suffering she witnessed inspired her to become a pacifist after the war, and she was an active, dedicated member of the peace movement for the rest of her life.

 

Early Life and Education

Vera Brittain was born in the Staffordshire town of Newcastle-under-Lyme. Her parents, Thomas and Edith Brittain, owned paper mills in the towns of Hadley and Cheddleton.

The family moved to Macclesfield in the Cheshire area when Vera was 18 months of age, and they lived in Buxton, a spa town, when Vera was aged 11 to 13. At the age of 13, Vera attended St. Monica’s, a boarding school in Surrey.

Against her father’s wishes, she majored in English literature at Oxford University, entering at the age of twenty.

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World War I service and tragic losses

While she was an Oxford student in 1915, the university granted her leave to serve as a nurse for those wounded in the war. She was one of the first female students to be granted this type of leave.

Serving as a Voluntary Aid Detachment nurse, she cared for soldiers in Buxton and London before being sent to tend to the wounded in Malta and France.

Brittain’s fiance, Roland Leighton, was tragically killed shortly before Christmas in 1915. While repairing barbed wire in a no-man’s land late one night, he was shot by a German sniper.

Vera’s brother, Edward, was killed in action while serving in Italy in the summer of 1918. Her brother’s close friends, Geoffrey Thurlow and Victor Richardson, also lost their lives during the war. These losses profoundly impacted Brittain, and she would eventually use writing as a vehicle to express her pain.

In a 1916 letter to Edward, Vera wrote, “If the war spares me, it will be my one aim to immortalise in a book the story of us four.” She would go on to do just that, and the book, Testament of Youth, became a British classic.

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Friendship with Winifred Holtby

After the war, Vera Brittain returned to Oxford University and changed her major to history. She formed a close friendship with Winifred Holtby and had aspirations of becoming an established author in London. This deep friendship, cut short by Holtby’s untimely death at age 37, was described in this 2013 homage to Brittain and Holtby’s friendship in The Telegraph (U.K.)

“As writers they were the most decisive influences on each other’s work. It was a relationship, above all, that made significant contributions to the writing of two bestselling masterpieces, which have stood the test of time: Brittain’s memoir of the cataclysmic effect of the First World War on her generation, Testament of Youth, and Holtby’s South Riding, her novel about a Yorkshire community struggling in the grip of the Great Depression of the Thirties.

After Holtby’s death, Brittain memorialized their friendship in a biography of Winifred which, she hoped, would remind people ‘of the glowing, radiant generous, golden creature whom we have lost.’ This friendship has achieved iconic status, as an example of an emotionally and intellectually supportive relationship between two women, of a kind rarely recorded in literature.”

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First publications

In August 1919, Brittain’s first book of poetry was published. Entitled Verses of a V.A.D., it included a poem dedicated to Edward.

The Dark Tide, her first novel, followed in 1923. The work detailed life at Oxford University and was controversial for its discussion of sexism at the institution. Another novel, Anderby Wold, was published that same year.

 

Marriage and family

Vera married the political scientist George Catlin in 1925. The couple had two children. Their son, John, was born in 1927 and became an artist with whom Vera reportedly had a difficult relationship. Shirley, the couple’s daughter, was born in 1930 and became a member of the British parliament.

 

Testament of Youth

In 1933,  Brittain published her memoir, Testament of Youth. Now recognized as one of the most iconic memoirs of the twentieth century, the work tells of the experiences she endured during World War I. Vera’s fiancee, her brother, and her brother’s friends who died are all prominently featured in the book.

Typed on a typewriter in the study at her home in Chelsea, Vera worked on the book for seven hours each day while her young children played. At first she attempted to fictionalize the narrative, but without success. It was only when she let it flow as a memoir that it fell into place.

A 2013 homage to Testament of Youth on its eighty year anniversary, The Guardian (U.K.) wrote:

“It was only when she decided to write as herself that her authorial voice seemed to flow and the events she had endured were given a poignant immediacy to which readers could relate. In Testament of Youth, the words seemed to pour out of her, a potent mixture of rage and loss, underpinned by lively intelligence and fervent pacifist beliefs.”

The book was instantly successful, with all 3,000 printed copies selling out on publication day.

Over the next six years, the book sold more than 120,000 copies and earned praise from writer Virginia Woolf, who wrote in her journal that she stayed up all night to finish reading it. After being published in the United States, Testament of Youth was lauded as “heartbreakingly beautiful.”

 

Works after 1930

South Riding, was published in 1936. Her 1940 work, Testament of Friendship, was a tribute to Winifred Holtby, who passed away in 1935.

In 1944, she published Seeds of Chaos, a work that spoke out against World War II. Testament of Experience, another memoir published in 1957, chronicles the years between 1925 to 1950.

Brittain was quite a prolific author of nonfiction in addition to her autobiographical series and a smaller number of novels. One of these was a book about Radclyffe Hall‘s trials. A selection of nonfiction works are listed toward the end of this post.

 

Pacifism

In the 1920s, Brittain was a frequent speaker at events for the League of Nations Union, and she spoke at a peace rally with Dick Sheppard in 1936. In 1937, she joined the Peace Pledge Union and the Anglican Pacifist Fellowship.

In the 1930s, she regularly contributed articles to Peace News, a pacifist magazine. After the outbreak of World War II, she wrote a series entitled Letters to Peacelovers and worked as a fire warden. Brittain later became an editorial board member for Peace News, writing articles against colonialism and apartheid.

 

Later years and legacy

After being injured in a fall in November 1966, Brittain’s health slowly declined. She passed away in Wimbledon at the age of 76 on March 29, 1970. As requested in her will, Vera’s ashes were scattered over her brother’s grave in Italy.

Brittain’s work helped people of later generations understand World War I through her eyes. To this day, her writings inspire others to work for peace.

Testament of Youth, her most famous literary contribution, was made into a feature film in 2014. Plaques mark the locations of her former homes in Newcastle-under-Lyme, Buxton, and London, and a promenade in Hamburg, Germany is named for her.

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Vera Brittain page on Amazon*

More about Vera Brittain

Major Works

Poetry

Verses of a V.A.D.  (1919)
Poems of the War and After  (1934)

Memoir

Testament of Youth: An autobiographical study of the years 1900-1925  (1933)
Testament of Experience: An autobiographical story of the years 1925-1950  (1950)
Testament of Friendship: The Story of Winifred Holtby (1940)

Novels

The Dark Tide  (1923)
Anderby Wold  (1923)
Honourable Estate  (1936)
Born 1925: A Novel of Youth  (1949)

Nonfiction (highly selected)

Women’s Work in Modern England.(1928)
Halcyon; or, The future of monogamy  (1929)
Thrice a Stranger  (1938)
Humiliation with Honour  (1943)
Seeds of Chaos: What mass bombing really means. (1944)
On Becoming a Writer  (1947)
Search after Sunrise. London: Macmillan (1951)
Lady into Woman: A history of women from Victoria to Elizabeth II  (1953)
The Women at Oxford: A fragment of history  (1960)
The Rebel Passion: A short history of some pioneer peacemakers  (1964)
Radclyffe Hall: A case of obscurity  (1969)

More information and sources

All Poetry
Reader discussion of Vera Brattain’s works on Goodreads
Wikipedia
Losing Her First Love Haunted My Mother All Her Life
Papers of Vera Brittain at the Bodleian Library, Oxford University

Biographies and letters

Chronicle of Youth: The War Diary, 1913 – 1917, ed. by Alan Bishop with Terry Smart (1981)
Testament of a Generation: The journalism of Vera Brittain and Winifred Holtby ,

ed. by Paul Berry & Alan Bishop London (1985)
Vera Brittain by Hilary Bailey (1987)
Letters from a Lost Generation, ed. by Alan Bishop and Mark Bostridge (1998)
Vera Brittain: A Life, by Paul Berry and Mark Bostridge (1995, 1996, 2001, 2008)
Vera Brittain: A Feminist Life, by Deborah Gorham, (2000)
Vera Brittain and the First World War, by Mark Bostridge (2014)

Film adaptations

Testament of Youth (2014)

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

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Elizabeth Taylor

Elizabeth Taylor (July 3, 1912 – November 19, 1975) was a British novelist and author of short stories who is generally acknowledged to be underrated — a brilliant writer who deserves to be more widely read. She is not to be confused with the iconic actress with the same name.

Writers as distinct as Antonia Fraser, Barbara Pym and Kingsley Amis admired her work, which are filled with both impassioned and lonely characters.

 

Upbringing and Education

In 1912, she was born Dorothy Betty Coles in Reading England. She wouldn’t begin to refer to herself as Elizabeth until the early 1930s. As a child, she was very close to her mother, Elsie May Fewtrell. Her father, Oliver, was an insurance inspector.

In September 1923, Betty attended Abbey School, a well-known Christian school. Although she would later become an atheist). She struggled with mathematics but received 99% on an English paper, which was the highest mark ever received by an Abbey School student (the one percent deducted to acknowledge that everyone’s handwriting could stand improvement.

Betty officially completed school in Berkshire in July 1930 but actually had finished before the previous Christmas. Even then, at seventeen, she aspired to write. She would write about this later, in a 1951 issue of The Bookclub Magazine: “I wanted to be a novelist, but it is not easy suddenly to be that at 17. I spent a year trying to write, despairing.”

 

Early reading and writing

As a child, the first full-length book Betty read was Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (a book which also had a profound impact on American writer Natalie Babbitt).

She also read (and reread) the Bastable books by E. Nesbit and she enjoyed collecting comic versions of classic stories by Victor Hugo, Jules Verne, and Wilkie Collins.

As an older girl, she read Crime and Punishment, and biographer Nicola Beauman notes that Betty’s Commonplace Book, encompassing 1928 through 1936, also includes other specific works, like The Waves and To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf and Persuasion by Jane Austen.

Other authors were also recorded: Katherine Mansfield, Siegfried Sassoon, William Butler Yeats, Edward Thomas, D. H. Lawrence, Thomas Mann, and Richard Church.

As a young woman, Elizabeth often borrowed books from the Boots Libraries and, after briefly working as a governess elsewhere, she worked as a librarian under their auspices, first in Maidenhead, then in High Wycombe.

After her own work had been published, years later, Elizabeth identified specific authors as having been influential for her development as a novelist and short story writer.

The works of Jane Austen, E.M. Forster, Anton Chekhov, and Virginia Woolf were particularly important, along with Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, and Ivan Turgenev. Throughout her life, she would reread Jane Austen regularly: her Martin Secker set was faded and worn from frequent use.

She also remarked on the work of two contemporary writers: Ivy Compton-Burnett and Elizabeth Bowen.

 

Marriage, family, and love

After Elizabeth moved to Buckinghamshire, an area where the family had often vacationed, she joined the Little Theatre Club; she remained a member and performed, from 1932 to 1935, in High Wycomb.

In later years, literary reviewers and critics would comment on her ability to sketch scenes on the page, which suggests that her theatrical experience also impacted her creative work.

Another member of the troupe was John William Kendall Taylor, the man she would marry on March 11, 1936 in Caxton Hall, Westminster. This year – 1936 – was particularly significant for Elizabeth. She also joined the Communist Party (in response to concerns about rising unemployment rates and the rise of fascism), lost her mother, had a miscarriage, and she met Ray Russell.

With John Taylor, Elizabeth had a son and daughter: Renny and Joanna, in 1937 and 1941 respectively. While married, however, she had an ongoing – but intermittent – romantic involvement with Ray Russell (although he was away, and a prisoner of war, for four years during WWII).

The letters Elizabeth and Ray wrote were a primary source for Nicola Beauman’s biographical research for The Other Elizabeth Taylor (2009).

“I am always disconcerted when I am asked for my life story, for nothing sensational, thank heavens, has ever happened,” Elizabeth explains in a 1953 article for the New York Herald Tribune. 

She elaborates: “I dislike much travel or change of environment and prefer the days (each with its own domestic flavor) to come round almost the same, week after week. Only in such circumstances can I find time or peace in which to write.”

 

First novel and adjusting to the writing life

While her husband was away in the Royal Air Force, Elizabeth wrote At Mrs. Lippincote’s, which was published in 1945. After Patience Ross at A.M. Heath secured a publisher for this debut novel, Elizabeth immediately began to work on her next.

She wrote slowly, in longhand. “When at the end of the war, I first had a novel published,” she outlines in the Herald Tribune article, “I received the proofs in trembling excitement. Now I am filled with anxiety, for I am a poor proof-reader.”

>In 1949, in a letter to novelist Elizabeth Bowen, Elizabeth writes: “My hands become ice at the thought of my book [her fourth, The Wreath of Roses] being published, and I do hope that, like silicosis, it is an occupational disease; though not such a distressing one.”

Anxious or not, Elizabeth would publish seventeen volumes in total: four collections of stories, one children’s book in 1967 (Mossy Trotter), and twelve novels, one posthumous – Blaming (1976).

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Creative inspiration

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

And she speaks about the driving force of characterization in her work, in a letter to Blanche Knopf, her American publisher, in October 1948:

“People are my only adventures and I hope never to have any others; and, though I do not use their characters in my books, their company constantly replenishes me and inspires me. To be allowed to be ‘ordinary’ and live among ‘ordinary’ people (though no one is really that) is the only way that I can write, and I expect that this limits my range; but I have no gift for anything else.”

One exception, however, is Elizabeth’s 1957 novel, Angel, which was inspired by her reading of two biographies of the popular English novelist Marie Corelli, one by Eileen Bigland published in 1953 and the other by Amanda McKittrick Ros published in 1954.

In his 1995 introduction to A View of the Harbour, originally published in 1947 and later reprinted by Virago Books, Peter Kemp also observes the importance of artists in Elizabeth’s works. Particularly in A Wreath of Roses (1949) The Wedding Group (1968), and Blaming (1976), artists play a prominent role.

Artists who capture everyday life

In a 1948 letter to Ella Bellingham-Smith, Elizabeth praises her paintings as viewed in the artist’s first solo exhibition at the Leicester Gallery that year:

“I feel in all you paint, your tenderness, your modesty. I know that that is how children stand, and move, and group themselves. And the weather is constantly changing everything, and each hour of the day has its especial quality.”

As Paul Bailey later describes, in his introduction to Virago’s reissue of The Blush (first published in 1958 and reprinted in 1986): “The quotidian is Elizabeth Taylor’s province, where the ordinary are to be found extraordinary, as she thought they should.”

Writer Brigid Brophy, in her 1966 collection Don’t Never Forget: Collected Views and Reviews, describes Elizabeth’s uncanny capacity to encapsulate everyday details: “Mrs Taylor’s mastery is such that she can express her characters’ feelings about one another through their exasperation with one another’s children and chows.”

 

A talent for short stories

Elizabeth’s first published work was a short story in Tribune, “For Thine is the Power,” which appeared March 31, 1944. It was accepted by George Orwell, the new literary editor, having been rejected by Reginald Moore at Modern Reading the previous year.

Another story, “Better Not,” had been accepted first, but it was not published until later in 1944 in The Adelphi, edited by John Middleton Murry.

Paul Bailey, who contributed the introductions to many of Virago’s reissues of Elizabeth’s work, describes her particular talent with stories: “The short-story form is one that attracts the swift glance rather than the long, cold stare, and Elizabeth Taylor is one of the great glancers.”

Robert Liddell, who would later write about his friendship with Ivy Compton-Burnett and Elizabeth Taylor in his memoir Elizabeth and Ivy (1986), observes some autobiographical elements in her short stories. He points, for instance, to “The Letter Writers,” a story about Edmund and Emily, who have been corresponding for ten years (as, indeed, Robert and Elizabeth had been, when she wrote this story): letters provide the foundation of their friendship, despite never having met in real life.

Elizabeth’s collections appeared throughout her career: Hester Lilly (1954), The Blush (1958), A Dedicated Man (1965), and The Devastating Boys (1972). Alongside these volumes, Elizabeth also published regularly in The New Yorker, beginning with an excerpt from A View of the Harbour (1947) the year after the novel’s publication. At that time, she worked with Katharine White, and later and until 1969, with William Maxwell.

The last short story she completed was written in the hospital, while she was recovering from a cancer-related surgery: “Madame Olga,, which was published in August 1973 in McCall’s.

Posthumously, Virago published her Collected Stories in 2012: this marked the centenary of her birth and included the stories previously only published in The New Yorker.

Also in 2012, Cambridge Scholars Publishing issued Elizabeth Taylor: A Centenary Celebration, which includes some non-fiction articles, as well as two story fragments (unfinished and unpublished in her lifetime) and some academic studies.

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Peer recognition and community

Novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard first met Elizabeth Taylor as part of the publicity for In a Summer Season (1961). Howard had prepared thirty questions for an eight-minute interview, anticipating that would be more than sufficient, but Elizabeth so quickly dispatched those queries, with ‘yes’ and ‘no’ answers, that Howard’s questions were exhausted in under two minutes.

Elizabeth was notoriously private and respected other writers’ privacy as well. When asked by her American publisher to prepare an article about Ivy Compton-Burnett, Elizabeth compiled a biographical sketch, overlooking the fact that she was given the project because she had become friends with Ivy and, as such, was expected to share personal anecdotes and provide lesser-known details about her.

Elizabeth’s writing was not universally admired, however. During her lifetime, Robert Liddell identified what he referred to as the “Lady-Novelists Anti-Elizabeth League” — said to include Kay Dick, Kathleen Farrell, Kate O’Brien, Pamela Hansford Johnson, Stevie Smith, and Olivia Manning, all of whom disparaged her work.

In 1952, Elizabeth was included in England’s Who’s Who and, in 1966, she was declared a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. In between, her husband’s confectionary business sold, the couple’s son and daughter each married and each had had their first child – Joanna’s in 1964 and Renny’s in 1967, and Elizabeth’s affair with Ray had ended.

In 1971, Elizabeth’s novel Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, along with works by V.S. Naipaul, Derek Robinson, Thomas Kilroy, Mordecai Richler and Doris Lessing).

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Elizabeth Taylor page on Amazon*

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Elizabeth Taylor’s Legacy

In Sam Jordinson’s 2012 article “Rediscovering Elizabeth Taylor – the brilliant novelist” (The Guardian), both Paul Bailey and Elizabeth Jane Howard declare themselves envious of “any reader coming to her for the first time.” Here, Antonia Fraser identifies her “one of the most underrated writers of the 20th century.”

Hilary Mantel said that she is “deft, accomplished and somewhat underrated,” and Rosamund Lehmann describes her as “sophisticated, sensitive and brilliantly amusing”.

Consider, too, Joyce Carol Oates’s comments in theWashington Post in 1972:

“There is a distressing similarity between Taylor’s many stories – an assumption, which sometimes destroys a reader’s enjoyment of her art, that the people she deals with in her fiction are not people, but characters. They are imagined as interior creations, existing within the confines of their particular stories; and they are made to be, and even to feel, inferior.”

But for every dismissal, there is a comment like Kingsley Amis’s in The Statesman in 1971:

“Mrs Taylor is one of those novelists who look homogeneous, as if working within a single mood, and turn out to be varied and wide-ranging. There is a deceptive smoothness in her tone, or tone of voice, as in that of Evelyn Waugh; not a far-fetched comparison, for in the work of both writers the funny and the appalling lie side by side in close amity.”

Elizabeth Taylor continues to find new audiences, thanks to reissues from Virago and NYRB. From 2012 to 2014, BBC selected some of her short stories for broadcast and, more recently, Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont was a Book at Bedtime, read by Eleanor Bron, in 2018.

Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont was also made into a 2005 film (directed by Dan Ireland – from a screenplay by Ruth Sacks Caplin written for television in the 1970s – and starring Joan Plowright). And Angel was filmed in 2007 (directed by François Ozon and starring Romola Garai).

Her stories continue to resonate with readers today.

Contributed by Marcie McCauley, a graduate of the University of Western Ontario and the Humber College Creative Writing Program. She writes and reads (mostly women writers!) in Toronto, Canada. And she chats about it on Buried In Print and @buriedinprint. The Toronto Public Library played a vitally important role in the research for this piece, including assistance from the staff, in particular Leigh Turina and her onsite colleagues. 

More about Elizabeth Taylor

Major Works

Novels

At Mrs. Lippincote’s  (1945)
Palladian  (1946)
A View of the Harbour  (1947)
A Wreath of Roses  (1949)
A Game of Hide and Seek  (1951)
The Sleeping Beauty  (1953)
Angel  (1957)
In a Summer Season  (1961)
The Soul of Kindness  (1964)
Mossy Trotter  (1967; her only children’s book)
The Wedding Group  (1968)
Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont  (1971)
Blaming  (1976; posthumous)

Short story collections

Hester Lilly  (1954)
The Blush and Other Stories  (1958)
A Dedicated Man and Other Stories  (1965)
The Devastating Boys  (1972)
Dangerous Calm  (1995)
Complete Short Stories  (2012)
Elizabeth Taylor: A Centenary Celebration  (2012)
You’ll Enjoy It When You Get There: The Stories of Elizabeth Taylor  (2014)

Biographies

Nicola Beauman, The Other Elizabeth Taylor (Persephone Books 2009)
Elizabeth and Ivy, ed. Robert Liddell (1986)

Film adaptations

Angel (2007)
Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont (2005)

More information and sources

“You May Have Heard of Her” by Christopher R. Beha


“The Other Liz Taylor” by Philip Hensher


“The Other Elizabeth Taylor” by Benjamin Schwarz


“How the Other Elizabeth Taylor Reconciled Family Life and Art” by Namara Smith


Reader discussion of Elizabeth Taylor’s books on Goodreads
Wikipedia

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Charlotte Brontë Before Jane Eyre by Glynnis Fawkes

Knowing how obsessed I am with all things Brontë, my brother thoughtfully gifted me with Charlotte Brontë Before Jane Eyre, a graphic biography  by Glynnis Fawkes.

Charmingly told and skillfully drawn, this book for readers of all ages covers the most famous of the brilliant literary sisters, Charlotte Brontë, from her early years to the moment she sends off the finished manuscript of Jane Eyre to a prospective publisher. Said she: “It’s sent. Now there’s nothing but forlorn hope.”

Of course, the legions of fans of Jane Eyre know how this turned out, though fewer readers know of the trials that beset the Brontë sisters — Charlotte, Emily, and Anne — from their childhoods to their premature deaths. Glynnis Fawkes captures their spirit and sorrows.

What drew Glynnis to Charlotte was similar to what I find compelling about her. In her postscript, Glynnis writes:

“Working on this project allowed me to rediscover a writer whose work I had enjoyed earlier in life, but I wan’t prepared for the love and respect for Charlotte I’ve gained in the course of my research.

Her persistence in pursuing her career against so many odds and facing such heartbreak, her imagination — from her earliest writing about the world of Glass Town to the shades of feeling she captures in Villette — are inspiring across the years. Charlotte’s humor and depth of thought have sustained me in writing and drawing this book.”

See also: Jane Eyre: A 19th-Century Analysis

I was delighted to learn that Alison Bechdel, the iconic graphic novelist best known for Fun Home, is also a Brontë fan. She supplied the introduction to this book. She writes, in part:

“Fawkes’s crisp, engaging drawings bring to life the boisterous camaraderie of the Brontë siblings, the windswept moor, a grim school dormitory, even the notoriously difficult to dramatize activities of reading and writing that Charlotte spent most of her time engaged in. We travel inside the imaginary worlds the children invented and we see the tiny, infinitesimally hand-lettered magazines that Charlotte and her brother collaborated on like mad, Victorian-era ‘zinesters.”

This book is the latest in The Center for Cartoon Studies Presents, a series of biographies (including Satchel Paige, and Annie Sullivan and Helen Keller, and more) for audiences of all ages.  Images of interior pages are reprinted her with permission of the author and publisher, Disney/Hyperion ©2019.

And now, here’s Glynnis Fawkes, the author and artist, describing the process behind creating Charlotte Brontë Before Jane Eyre.:

 

Captivated by the Brontë sisters

I chose to write about the Brontë sisters because I was captivated by their books from when I was young:  My mother read Emily Brontë‘s masterpiece, Wuthering Heights to me when I was about 13. 

Many years later, in my thirties, when I was working on an archaeological excavation in Crete, I read Charlotte’s Villette and felt an immediate connection to the story of an independent woman making her way in a foreign country — despite the differences in time and place. 

When my editor presented a list of subjects for the potential book, the Brontës jumped out at me. The more I read of Charlotte’s early writing, letters, and diaries, the more I appreciated her persistent spirit, sense of drama, and humor. My book centers around Charlotte for the practical reason that she left the most letters and diaries.  

 

Research, sketching, and fact-checking

I began my research for the book by reading several biographies as well as re-reading all of the sisters’ novels and Charlotte’s earlier works. I wrote an outline of the events my book should include. The fact that it had a prescribed count of ninety pages kept the contents under pressure — otherwise it could have been a rambling three-hundred-page tome. 

My editor, James Sturm, helped to shape the book — from the prologue when Charlotte is twenty and receives a letter from poet Laureate Robert Southey telling her, “literature cannot be the business of a woman’s life…” to the ending when Charlotte sends in her manuscript for Jane Eyre: “and the rest is history…”  

Once I’d drawn thumbnail pages (roughly sketched images and hand-written text), I sent them to the publisher, who sent it to Brontë Scholar Juliet Barker for fact checking. She sent back a dozen pages of notes and revisions that I integrated into my draft. 

At this point, I went for a month-long residency in France, and on my way I took a trip to the Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth, UK. 

Visiting the Brontës’ house, and walking in their footsteps on the moors, made a tremendous difference when it came to evoking their world in the final drawings.

Refining the artwork, and a kinship with Charlotte

Rather than drawing the pages ink, I drew in dark (#6) pencil to achieve a more atmospheric effect. I scanned, cleaned up, and printed out my pencil drawings, then using a light table and watercolor paper, painted an ink wash. 

Next, I scanned these abstract-looking pages and assembled the layers in photoshop.  This is a system I learned from Alison Bechdel — and though it seems labor-intensive, it allows for control of the separate layers: you can play with the contrast of line-drawing and the ink-wash separately. The publisher converted the ink wash to a pale purple.  

I made a comic about taking her to a yoga class — she would have been amazed by it. In pondering the differences between the world the Brontës knew and ours, I drew a series for The New Yorker called 19th-Century Literature with Better Birth Control. 

In creating this book, I gained a feeling of kinship for Charlotte — and in the thick of it I felt like she was with me all the time. 

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Charlotte Brontë Before Jane Eyre on Amazon*

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About Glynnis Fawkes: Glynnis Fawkes is a cartoonist and illustrator living in Burlington, Vermont. With a Fulbright fellowship, she published two books in Cyprus, then worked for about 9 years as illustrator on excavations around the Eastern Mediterranean. 

Her books Greek Diary and Alle Ego won the Society of Illustrators MoCCA Arts Festival Awards in 2016 and 2017, and she has been nominated for an Ignatz Award. Her cartoons have appeared many times on The New Yorker.

Her books Charlotte Bronte Before Jane Eyre (Disney/Hyperion) and Persephone’s Garden (Secret Acres) were published in 2019.  She has received a Vermont State Arts Council Creation Grant and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts Travel fellowship toward the completion of her next book, a middle grade adventure set in Late Bronze Age Greece and Egypt.  Visit her at GlynnisFawkes.com.

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

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A Matter of Prejudice by Kate Chopin (1895) – full text

The short story, “A Matter of Prejudice” by Kate Chopin (1850 – 1904), the American author best remembered for The Awakening (1899), is one of many short works by this prolific author. It was written in 1893, first published in 1895, and included in Chopin’s collection A Night in Acadie (1897).

Much of Chopin’s literary output preceded The Awakening, a novella; the poor reception it received is thought to have discouraged her. It was often vilified by the press, and frequently banned. Decades later it became a feminist classic, and revitalized interest in her other writings.

“A Matter of Prejudice,” like many of Chopin’s works, comments on social mores and issues in late 19th-century Creole culture. It explores the theme of motherhood, as do many of her other stories, this one particularly focusing on the alienation of a mother and her son due to his choice of a wife. Per Seyerstad, a Chopin biographer, noted,

“This story is the only one by Chopin centered on the conflict between the new American and old Creole cultures. It illustrates her developing skill in characterization and irony, especially in its conclusion.”

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The Awakening (1899) – full text

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“A Matter of Prejudice”

Madame Carambeau wanted it strictly understood that she was not to be disturbed by Gustave’s birthday party. They carried her big rocking-chair from the back gallery, that looked out upon the garden where the children were going to play, around to the front gallery, which closely faced the green levee bank and the Mississippi coursing almost flush with the top of it.

The house — an old Spanish one, broad, low and completely encircled by a wide gallery – was far down in the French quarter of New Orleans. It stood upon a square of ground that was covered thick with a semi-tropical growth of plants and flowers. An impenetrable board fence, edged with a formidable row of iron spikes, shielded the garden from the prying glances of the occasional passer-by.

Madame Carambeau’s widowed daughter, Madame Cécile Lalonde, lived with her. This annual party, given to her little son, Gustave, was the one defiant act of Madame Lalonde’s existence. She persisted in it, to her own astonishment and the wonder of those who knew her and her mother.

For old Madame Carambeau was a woman of many prejudices – so many, in fact, that it would be difficult to name them all. She detested dogs, cats, organ-grinders, white servants and children’s noises. She despised Americans, Germans and all people of a different faith from her own. Anything not French had, in her opinion, little right to existence.

She had not spoken to her son Henri for ten years because he had married an American girl from Prytania street. She would not permit green tea to be introduced into her house, and those who could not or would not drink coffee might drink tisane of fleur de Laurier for all she cared.

Nevertheless, the children seemed to be having it all their own way that day, and the organ-grinders were let loose. Old madame, in her retired corner, could hear the screams, the laughter and the music far more distinctly than she liked. She rocked herself noisily, and hummed “Partant pour la Syrie.”

She was straight and slender. Her hair was white, and she wore it in puffs on the temples. Her skin was fair and her eyes blue and cold.

Suddenly she became aware that footsteps were approaching, and threatening to invade her privacy — not only footsteps, but screams! Then two little children, one in hot pursuit of the other, darted wildly around the corner near which she sat.

The child in advance, a pretty little girl, sprang excitedly into Madame Carambeau’s lap, and threw her arms convulsively around the old lady’s neck. Her companion lightly struck her a “last tag,” and ran laughing gleefully away.

The most natural thing for the child to do then would have been to wriggle down from madame’s lap, without a “thank you” or a “by your leave,” after the manner of small and thoughtless children. But she did not do this. She stayed there, panting and fluttering, like a frightened bird.

Madame was greatly annoyed. She moved as if to put the child away from her, and scolded her sharply for being boisterous and rude. The little one, who did not understand French, was not disturbed by the reprimand, and stayed on in madame’s lap. She rested her plump little cheek, that was hot and flushed, against the soft white linen of the old lady’s gown.

Her cheek was very hot and very flushed. It was dry, too, and so were her hands. The child’s breathing was quick and irregular. Madame was not long in detecting these signs of disturbance.

Though she was a creature of prejudice, she was nevertheless a skillful and accomplished nurse, and a connoisseur in all matters pertaining to health. She prided herself upon this talent, and never lost an opportunity of exercising it. She would have treated an organ-grinder with tender consideration if one had presented himself in the character of an invalid.

Madame’s manner toward the little one changed immediately. Her arms and her lap were at once adjusted so as to become the most comfortable of resting places. She rocked very gently to and fro. She fanned the child softly with her palm leaf fan, and sang “Partant pour la Syrie” in a low and agreeable tone.

The child was perfectly content to lie still and prattle a little in that language which madame thought hideous. But the brown eyes were soon swimming in drowsiness, and the little body grew heavy with sleep in madame’s clasp.

When the little girl slept Madame Carambeau arose, and treading carefully and deliberately, entered her room, that opened near at hand upon the gallery. The room was large, airy and inviting, with its cool matting upon the floor, and its heavy, old, polished mahogany furniture. Madame, with the child still in her arms, pulled a bell-cord; then she stood waiting, swaying gently back and forth. Presently an old black woman answered the summons. She wore gold hoops in her ears, and a bright bandanna knotted fantastically on her head.

“Louise, turn down the bed,” commanded madame. “Place that small, soft pillow below the bolster. Here is a poor little unfortunate creature whom Providence must have driven into my arms.” She laid the child carefully down.

“Ah, those Americans! Do they deserve to have children? Understanding as little as they do how to take care of them!” said madame, while Louise was mumbling an accompanying assent that would have been unintelligible to any one unacquainted with the negro patois.

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You might also enjoy: Desirée’s Baby (full text)

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“There, you see, Louise, she is burning up,” remarked madame; “she is consumed. Unfasten the little bodice while I lift her. Ah, talk to me of such parents! So stupid as not to perceive a fever like that coming on, but they must dress their child up like a monkey to go play and dance to the music of organ- grinders.

“Haven’t you better sense, Louise, than to take off a child’s shoe as if you were removing the boot from the leg of a cavalry officer?” Madame would have required fairy fingers to minister to the sick. “Now go to Mamzelle Cécile, and tell her to send me one of those old, soft, thin nightgowns that Gustave wore two summers ago.”

When the woman retired, madame busied herself with concocting a cooling pitcher of orange-flower water, and mixing a fresh supply of eau sédative with which agreeably to sponge the little invalid.

Madame Lalonde came herself with the old, soft nightgown. She was a pretty, blonde, plump little woman, with the deprecatory air of one whose will has become flaccid from want of use. She was mildly distressed at what her mother had done.

“But, mamma! But, mamma, the child’s parents will be sending the carriage for her in a little while. Really, there was no use. Oh dear! oh dear!”

If the bedpost had spoken to Madame Carambeau, she would have paid more attention, for speech from such a source would have been at least surprising if not convincing. Madame Lalonde did not possess the faculty of either surprising or convincing her mother.

“Yes, the little one will be quite comfortable in this,” said the old lady, taking the garment from her daughter’s irresolute hands.

“But, mamma! What shall I say, what shall I do when they send? Oh, dear; oh, dear!”

“That is your business,” replied madame, with lofty indifference. “My concern is solely with a sick child that happens to be under my roof. I think I know my duty at this time of life, Cécile.”

As Madame Lalonde predicted, the carriage soon came, with a stiff English coachman driving it, and a red-checked Irish nurse-maid seated inside. Madame would not even permit the maid to see her little charge. She had an original theory that the Irish voice is distressing to the sick.

Madame Lalonde sent the girl away with a long letter of explanation that must have satisfied the parents; for the child was left undisturbed in Madame Carambeau’s care. She was a sweet child, gentle and affectionate. And, though she cried and fretted a little throughout the night for her mother, she seemed, after all, to take kindly to madame’s gentle nursing. It was not much of a fever that afflicted her, and after two days she was well enough to be sent back to her parents.

Madame, in all her varied experience with the sick, had never before nursed so objectionable a character as an American child. But the trouble was that after the little one went away, she could think of nothing really objectionable against her except the accident of her birth, which was, after all, her misfortune; and her ignorance of the French language, which was not her fault.

But the touch of the caressing baby arms; the pressure of the soft little body in the night; the tones of the voice, and the feeling of the hot lips when the child kissed her, believing herself to be with her mother, were impressions that had sunk through the crust of madame’s prejudice and reached her heart.

She often walked the length of the gallery, looking out across the wide, majestic river. Sometimes she trod the mazes of her garden where the solitude was almost that of a tropical jungle. It was during such moments that the seed began to work in her soul – the seed planted by the innocent and undesigning hands of a little child.

The first shoot that it sent forth was Doubt. Madame plucked it away once or twice. But it sprouted again, and with it Mistrust and Dissatisfaction. Then from the heart of the seed, and amid the shoots of Doubt and Misgiving, came the flower of Truth. It was a very beautiful flower, and it bloomed on Christmas morning.

As Madame Carambeau and her daughter were about to enter her carriage on that Christmas morning, to be driven to church, the old lady stopped to give an order to her black coachman, François. François had been driving these ladies every Sunday morning to the French Cathedral for so many years – he had forgotten exactly how many, but ever since he had entered their service, when Madame Lalonde was a little girl. His astonishment may therefore be imagined when Madame Carambeau said to him:

“François, to-day you will drive us to one of the American churches.”

“Plait-il, madame?” the negro stammered, doubting the evidence of his hearing.

“I say, you will drive us to one of the American churches. Any one of them,” she added, with a sweep of her hand. “I suppose they are all alike,” and she followed her daughter into the carriage.

Madame Lalonde’s surprise and agitation were painful to see, and they deprived her of the ability to question, even if she had possessed the courage to do so.

François, left to his fancy, drove them to St. Patrick’s Church on Camp street. Madame Lalonde looked and felt like the proverbial fish out of its element as they entered the edifice. Madame Carambeau, on the contrary, looked as if she had been attending St. Patrick’s church all her life. She sat with unruffled calm through the long service and through a lengthy English sermon, of which she did not understand a word.

When the mass was ended and they were about to enter the carriage again, Madame Carambeau turned, as she had done before, to the coachman.

“François,” she said, coolly, “you will now drive us to the residence of my son, M. Henri Carambeau. No doubt Mamzelle Cécile can inform you where it is,” she added, with a sharply penetrating glance that caused Madame Lalonde to wince.

Yes, her daughter Cécile knew, and so did François, for that matter. They drove out St. Charles avenue – very far out. It was like a strange city to old madame, who had not been in the American quarter since the town had taken on this new and splendid growth.

The morning was a delicious one, soft and mild; and the roses were all in bloom. They were not hidden behind spiked fences. Madame appeared not to notice them, or the beautiful and striking residences that lined the avenue along which they drove. She held a bottle of smelling-salts to her nostrils, as though she were passing through the most unsavory instead of the most beautiful quarter of New Orleans.

Henri’s house was a very modern and very handsome one, standing a little distance away from the street. A well-kept lawn, studded with rare and charming plants, surrounded it. The ladies, dismounting, rang the bell, and stood out upon the banquette, waiting for the iron gate to be opened.

A white maid-servant admitted them. Madame did not seem to mind. She handed her a card with all proper ceremony, and followed with her daughter to the house.

Not once did she show a sign of weakness; not even when her son, Henri, came and took her in his arms and sobbed and wept upon her neck as only a warm-hearted Creole could. He was a big, good-looking, honest-faced man, with tender brown eyes like his dead father’s and a firm mouth like his mother’s.

Young Mrs. Carambeau came, too, her sweet, fresh face transfigured with happiness. She led by the hand her little daughter, the “American child” whom madame had nursed so tenderly a month before, never suspecting the little one to be other than an alien to her.

“What a lucky chance was that fever! What a happy accident!” gurgled Madame Lalonde.

“Cécile, it was no accident, I tell you; it was Providence,” spoke madame, reprovingly, and no one contradicted her.

They all drove back together to eat Christmas dinner in the old house by the river. Madame held her little granddaughter upon her lap; her son Henri sat facing her, and beside her was her daughter-in-law.

Henri sat back in the carriage and could not speak. His soul was possessed by a pathetic joy that would not admit of speech. He was going back again to the home where he was born, after a banishment of ten long years.

He would hear again the water beat against the green levee-bank with a sound that was not quite like any other that he could remember. He would sit within the sweet and solemn shadow of the deep and overhanging roof; and roam through the wild, rich solitude of the old garden, where he had played his pranks of boyhood and dreamed his dreams of youth. He would listen to his mother’s voice calling him, “mon fils,” as it had always done before that day he had had to choose between mother and wife. No; he could not speak.

But his wife chatted much and pleasantly — in a French, however, that must have been trying to old madame to listen to.

“I am so sorry, ma mère,” she said, “that our little one does not speak French. It is not my fault, I assure you,” and she flushed and hesitated a little. “It – it was Henri who would not permit it.”

“That is nothing,” replied madame, amiably, drawing the child close to her. “Her grandmother will teach her French; and she will teach her grandmother English. You see, I have no prejudices. I am not like my son. Henri was always a stubborn boy. Heaven only knows how he came by such a character!”

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8 Iconic Poems by Elizabeth Bishop

Elizabeth Bishop (1911 – 1979) the noted American poet, was recognized with numerous awards during the course of her career, including the Pulitzer Prize. Here you’ll find 8 iconic poems by Elizabeth Bishop that are among her best known.

Not a particularly prolific writer, Bishop published only 101 poems during her lifetime. Her literary reputation has grown since her death, with iconic poems like “One Art,” “A Miracle for Breakfast,” “Sestina,” and “The Fish.”

As a poet, Bishop took great care to rewrite and revise her work. She didn’t give the reader much of a glimpse into her own life, but instead, her poems contained intimate observations of the physical world. She often expressed themes of loss and the struggle to find one’s place in the world in universal rather than personal way.

Her poetry stood in contrast to her contemporaries, including Robert Lowell and Anne Sexton, who, among others, were writing confessional poetry. She preferred to avoid personal disclosure in her work.

In his 2015 book, On Elizabeth Bishop, Irish author Colm Tóibín introduced her work:

“Writing, for Elizabeth Bishop, was not self-expression, but there was a self somewhere, and it was insistent in its presence yet tactful and watchful. Bishops writing bore the marks, many of them deliberate, of much re-writing, of things that had been said, but had now been erased, or moved into the shadows.

Things measured and found too simple and obvious, or too loose in their emotional contours, or too philosophical, were removed. Words not true enough were cut away. 

What remained was then of value, but mildly so; it was as much as could be said, given the constraints. This great modesty was also, in its way, a restrained but serious ambition … In the poetics of her uncertainty … there was something hurt and solitary.”

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Learn more about Elizabeth Bishop

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For analysis of the poems of Elizabeth Bishop, in addition to the above slim volume by Colm Tóibín, these critical biographies are enlightening:

Elizabeth Bishop: A Miracle for Breakfast by Megan Marshall (2017)

Elizabeth Bishop: Her Poetics of Loss by Susan McCabe (1994)

Becoming a Poet: Elizabeth Bishop with Marianne Moore and Robert Lowell by David Kalstone (1989)

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The Map

Land lies in water; it is shadowed green.

Shadows, or are they shallows, at its edges

showing the line of long sea-weeded ledges

where weeds hang to the simple blue from green.

Or does the land lean down to lift the sea from under,

drawing it unperturbed around itself?

Along the fine tan sandy shelf

is the land tugging at the sea from under?

The shadow of Newfoundland lies flat and still.

Labrador’s yellow, where the moony Eskimo

has oiled it. We can stroke these lovely bays,

under a glass as if they were expected to blossom,

or as if to provide a clean cage for invisible fish.

The names of seashore towns run out to sea,

the names of cities cross the neighboring mountains

-the printer here experiencing the same excitement

as when emotion too far exceeds its cause.

These peninsulas take the water between thumb and finger

like women feeling for the smoothness of yard-goods.

Mapped waters are more quiet than the land is,

lending the land their waves’ own conformation:

and Norway’s hare runs south in agitation,

profiles investigate the sea, where land is.

Are they assigned, or can the countries pick their colors?

-What suits the character or the native waters best.

Topography displays no favorites; North’s as near as West.

More delicate than the historians’ are the map-makers’ colors.

— From North and South, 1946

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The Fish

I caught a tremendous fish

and held him beside the boat

half out of water, with my hook

fast in a corner of his mouth.

He didn’t fight.

He hadn’t fought at all.

He hung a grunting weight,

battered and venerable

and homely. Here and there

his brown skin hung in strips

like ancient wallpaper,

and its pattern of darker brown

was like wallpaper:

shapes like full-blown roses

stained and lost through age.

He was speckled with barnacles,

fine rosettes of lime,

and infested

with tiny white sea-lice,

and underneath two or three

rags of green weed hung down.

While his gills were breathing in

the terrible oxygen

— the frightening gills,

fresh and crisp with blood,

that can cut so badly —

I thought of the coarse white flesh

packed in like feathers,

the big bones and the little bones,

the dramatic reds and blacks

of his shiny entrails,

and the pink swim-bladder

like a big peony.

I looked into his eyes

which were far larger than mine

but shallower, and yellowed,

the irises backed and packed

with tarnished tinfoil

seen through the lenses

of old scratched isinglass.

They shifted a little, but not

to return my stare.

— It was more like the tipping

of an object toward the light.

I admired his sullen face,

the mechanism of his jaw,

and then I saw

that from his lower lip

— if you could call it a lip

grim, wet, and weaponlike,

hung five old pieces of fish-line,

or four and a wire leader

with the swivel still attached,

with all their five big hooks

grown firmly in his mouth.

A green line, frayed at the end

where he broke it, two heavier lines,

and a fine black thread

still crimped from the strain and snap

when it broke and he got away.

Like medals with their ribbons

frayed and wavering,

a five-haired beard of wisdom

trailing from his aching jaw.

I stared and stared

and victory filled up

the little rented boat,

from the pool of bilge

where oil had spread a rainbow

around the rusted engine

to the bailer rusted orange,

the sun-cracked thwarts,

the oarlocks on their strings,

the gunnels — until everything

was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!

And I let the fish go.

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One Art

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;

so many things seem filled with the intent

to be lost that their loss is no disaster,

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster

of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.

The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:

places, and names, and where it was you meant

to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or

next-to-last, of three loved houses went.

The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,

some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.

I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

— Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture

I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident

the art of losing’s not too hard to master

though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

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A Miracle for Breakfast

At six o’clock we were waiting for coffee,

waiting for coffee and the charitable crumb

that was going to be served from a certain balcony

— like kings of old, or like a miracle.

It was still dark. One foot of the sun

steadied itself on a long ripple in the river.

The first ferry of the day had just crossed the river.

It was so cold we hoped that the coffee

would be very hot, seeing that the sun

was not going to warm us; and that the crumb

would be a loaf each, buttered, by a miracle.

At seven a man stepped out on the balcony.

He stood for a minute alone on the balcony

looking over our heads toward the river.

A servant handed him the makings of a miracle,

consisting of one lone cup of coffee

and one roll, which he proceeded to crumb,

his head, so to speak, in the clouds–along with the sun.

Was the man crazy? What under the sun

was he trying to do, up there on his balcony!

Each man received one rather hard crumb,

which some flicked scornfully into the river,

and, in a cup, one drop of the coffee.

Some of us stood around, waiting for the miracle.

I can tell what I saw next; it was not a miracle.

A beautiful villa stood in the sun

and from its doors came the smell of hot coffee.

In front, a baroque white plaster balcony

added by birds, who nest along the river,

— I saw it with one eye close to the crumb–

and galleries and marble chambers. My crumb

my mansion, made for me by a miracle,

through ages, by insects, birds, and the river

working the stone. Every day, in the sun,

at breakfast time I sit on my balcony

with my feet up, and drink gallons of coffee.

We licked up the crumb and swallowed the coffee.

A window across the river caught the sun

as if the miracle were working, on the wrong balcony.

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In the Waiting Room

In Worcester, Massachusetts,

I went with Aunt Consuelo

to keep her dentist’s appointment

and sat and waited for her

in the dentist’s waiting room.

It was winter. It got dark

early. The waiting room

was full of grown-up people,

arctics and overcoats,

lamps and magazines.

My aunt was inside

what seemed like a long time

and while I waited and read

the National Geographic

(I could read) and carefully

studied the photographs:

the inside of a volcano,

black, and full of ashes;

then it was spilling over

in rivulets of fire.

Osa and Martin Johnson

dressed in riding breeches,

laced boots, and pith helmets.

A dead man slung on a pole

“Long Pig,” the caption said.

Babies with pointed heads

wound round and round with string;

black, naked women with necks

wound round and round with wire

like the necks of light bulbs.

Their breasts were horrifying.

I read it right straight through.

I was too shy to stop.

And then I looked at the cover:

the yellow margins, the date.

Suddenly, from inside,

came an oh! of pain

— Aunt Consuelo’s voice–

not very loud or long.

I wasn’t at all surprised;

even then I knew she was

a foolish, timid woman.

I might have been embarrassed,

but wasn’t. What took me

completely by surprise

was that it was me:

my voice, in my mouth.

Without thinking at all

I was my foolish aunt,

I —we — were falling, falling,

our eyes glued to the cover

of the National Geographic,

February, 1918.

I said to myself: three days

and you’ll be seven years old.

I was saying it to stop

the sensation of falling off

the round, turning world.

into cold, blue-black space.

But I felt: you are an I,

you are an Elizabeth,

you are one of them.

Why should you be one, too?

I scarcely dared to look

to see what it was I was.

I gave a sidelong glance

–I couldn’t look any higher–

at shadowy gray knees,

trousers and skirts and boots

and different pairs of hands

lying under the lamps.

I knew that nothing stranger

had ever happened, that nothing

stranger could ever happen.

Why should I be my aunt,

or me, or anyone?

What similarities

boots, hands, the family voice

I felt in my throat, or even

the National Geographic

and those awful hanging breasts

held us all together

or made us all just one?

How I didn’t know any

word for it how “unlikely” . . .

How had I come to be here,

like them, and overhear

a cry of pain that could have

got loud and worse but hadn’t?

The waiting room was bright

and too hot. It was sliding

beneath a big black wave,

another, and another.

Then I was back in it.

The War was on. Outside,

in Worcester, Massachusetts,

were night and slush and cold,

and it was still the fifth

of February, 1918.

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I Am in Need of Music

I am in need of music that would flow

Over my fretful, feeling fingertips,

Over my bitter-tainted, trembling lips,

With melody, deep, clear, and liquid-slow.

Oh, for the healing swaying, old and low,

Of some song sung to rest the tired dead,

A song to fall like water on my head,

And over quivering limbs, dream flushed to glow!

There is a magic made by melody:

A spell of rest, and quiet breath, and cool

Heart, that sinks through fading colors deep

To the subaqueous stillness of the sea,

And floats forever in a moon-green pool,

Held in the arms of rhythm and of sleep.

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Sestina

September rain falls on the house.

In the failing light, the old grandmother

sits in the kitchen with the child

beside the Little Marvel Stove,

reading the jokes from the almanac,

laughing and talking to hide her tears.

She thinks that her equinoctial tears

and the rain that beats on the roof of the house

were both foretold by the almanac,

but only known to a grandmother.

The iron kettle sings on the stove.

She cuts some bread and says to the child,

It’s time for tea now; but the child

is watching the teakettle’s small hard tears

dance like mad on the hot black stove,

the way the rain must dance on the house.

Tidying up, the old grandmother

hangs up the clever almanac

on its string. Birdlike, the almanac

hovers half open above the child,

hovers above the old grandmother

and her teacup full of dark brown tears.

She shivers and says she thinks the house

feels chilly, and puts more wood in the stove.

It was to be, says the Marvel Stove.

I know what I know, says the almanac.

With crayons the child draws a rigid house

and a winding pathway. Then the child

puts in a man with buttons like tears

and shows it proudly to the grandmother.

But secretly, while the grandmother

busies herself about the stove,

the little moons fall down like tears

from between the pages of the almanac

into the flower bed the child

has carefully placed in the front of the house.

Time to plant tears, says the almanac.

The grandmother sings to the marvelous stove

and the child draws another inscrutable house.

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Elizabeth Bishop page on Amazon*

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Florida

The state with the prettiest name,

the state that floats in brackish water,

held together by mangrove roots

that bear while living oysters in clusters,

and when dead strew white swamps with skeletons,

dotted as if bombarded, with green hummocks

like ancient cannon-balls sprouting grass.

The state full of long S-shaped birds, blue and white,

and unseen hysterical birds who rush up the scale

every time in a tantrum.

Tanagers embarrassed by their flashiness,

and pelicans whose delight it is to clown;

who coast for fun on the strong tidal currents

in and out among the mangrove islands

and stand on the sand-bars drying their damp gold wings

on sun-lit evenings.

Enormous turtles, helpless and mild,

die and leave their barnacled shells on the beaches,

and their large white skulls with round eye-sockets

twice the size of a man’s.

The palm trees clatter in the stiff breeze

like the bills of the pelicans. The tropical rain comes down

to freshen the tide-looped strings of fading shells:

Job’s Tear, the Chinese Alphabet, the scarce Junonia,

parti-colored pectins and Ladies’ Ears,

arranged as on a gray rag of rotted calico,

the buried Indian Princess’s skirt;

with these the monotonous, endless, sagging coast-line

is delicately ornamented.

Thirty or more buzzards are drifting down, down, down,

over something they have spotted in the swamp,

in circles like stirred-up flakes of sediment

sinking through water.

Smoke from woods-fires filters fine blue solvents.

On stumps and dead trees the charring is like black velvet.

The mosquitoes

go hunting to the tune of their ferocious obbligatos.

After dark, the fireflies map the heavens in the marsh

until the moon rises.

Cold white, not bright, the moonlight is coarse-meshed,

and the careless, corrupt state is all black specks

too far apart, and ugly whites; the poorest

post-card of itself.

After dark, the pools seem to have slipped away.

The alligator, who has five distinct calls:

friendliness, love, mating, war, and a warning–

whimpers and speaks in the throat

of the Indian Princess.

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Grazia Deledda

Grazia Maria Cosima Damiana Deledda (September 1871 – August 15, 1936), more commonly known as Grazia Deledda, was an Italian writer best known for being the first Italian woman to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature (1926).

She was praised “for her idealistically inspired writings which with plastic clarity picture the life on her native island and with depth and sympathy deal with human problems in general.”

 
Early life

Deledda was born in Nuoro, Sardinia, the second-largest island in the Mediterranean sea. Her parents,  Giovanni Antonio Deledda and Francesca Cambosu Pereleddu, were a respectable middle-class couple. They started educating Deledda in literature at a very young age.

After attending elementary school, she stopped formerly attending school at the age of eleven, as a guest of one of her relatives started to privately tutor her. It wasn’t long before she discovered her passion for writing, and she continued to independently study literature after being inspired by Sardinian peasants and their challenging lives.

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The start of a writing career 

Deladda’s first published work was Nell’azzurro, published in 1890. She also he published several pieces in L’Ultima Moda when the fashion magazine was still publishing prose and poetry.

Deledda was only twenty-one years old when she wrote and published her first novel, Fiori di Sardegna (Flowers of Sardinia), in 1892. Four years after she published her first novel, Paesaggi Sardi was published in 1896.

Her work shed light on the harsh realities in the lives of individuals, and wove in imaginary and autobiographical elements. Her writing reflected her critical views of social values and norms and how they victimized ordinary people.

Deladda’s family grew unsupportive of Deledda’s writing. She was unfazed by their lack of support, and continued to produce works reflecting her beliefs, no matter how controversial.  

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Family life and rise to fame 

Deledda met Palmiro Madesani, a functionary of the Ministry of Finance, in Cagliari in October of 1899. The two married in 1900 and moved to Rome.

After the publication of Anime Oneste in 1895, II vecchio della montagna in 1900, and the many works she collaborated on with magazines such as La Sardegna, Piccola Rivista, and Nuova Antologia, her work began to gain recognition.

While her writing career was taking off, she had two sons, Franz and Sardus, and lived a rather quiet life. She worked efficiently, as on average, she published a novel per year.

In 1903, Deledda published her most successful work to date. Elias Portolu officially established her career as a writer. She began successfully writing novels and theatrical works, such as Cenere (1904), L’edera (1908), Sino al confine (1910), Colombi e sparvieri (1912), and more.

Cenere, was actually the inspiration for a silent movie with Eleonora Duse, a well-known Italian stage actress. It happened to be the only time that Duse appeared in a film.

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14 Women Who Won the Nobel Prize in Literature

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The Nobel Prize in Literature 

In 1926, Deledda made history as the first Italian recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature after being nominated by Henrick Schuck, a member of the Swedish Academy. When learning that she would be awarded the prestigious prize, Deledda’s response was “Gia!” (“Already!”)

Almost exactly one year after Benito Mussolini dropped the charade of constitutional rule in favor of fascism, Deledda received the Nobel Prize. He insisted on giving her a portrait of himself and signed it with “profound admiration.” In the midst of her heightened fame, many journalists and  photographers visited her home, hoping to learn more about this prolific writer.

Deledda was deeply passionate about writing and was strict about dedicating a few hours of writing to her routine. Her daily schedule was exactly the same throughout the entire week. She started her day with a late breakfast, read for a few hours, had lunch and a nap, and ended her day with a few hours of writing.

She was extremely fond of her pet crow, Checcha. He often became agitated with the huge crowd of photographers and visitors constantly stopping by Deledda’s home. She would often be quoted as saying “If Checcha has had enough, so have I.”

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Staying positive through hard times 

Deledda continued writing as she grew older. In her later yers, she created two collections of short stories titled  La Casa del Poeta and Sole d’Estate. Her work often expressed a positive view of life despite her own suffering from painful illnesses.

She didn’t allow the her work to touch on her personal suffering, and instead, focused on the beauty that life had to offer. Most of her later works describe mankind and her faith in God in beautiful terms.

Deledda’s work reflected on the life, customs, and traditions of the Sardinian people and used geographical descriptions and  detail in her work. Many of her characters are social outcasts who struggle with loneliness, much like the Sardinian peasants that inspired her passion for writing as a young girl.

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Themes in Deledda’s work

In Deledda’s novels, there are connections between people and places and between feelings and the environment. One can often recognize the influence of verism, the artistic preference for everyday subject matter, as opposed to the heroic or legendary.

Her work also depicts decadentism, an Italian artistic style based on the Decadent movement in the arts in nineteenth-century France and England, especially the works of Gabriele D’Annunzio.

Deledda’s themes of women’s pain and suffering rather than on their autonomy, didn’t help to gain her much recognition as a feminist writer.

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Grazia Deledda page on Amazon*

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Death and legacy of Grazia Deledda 

Deledda died of breast cancer in Rome in 1936, at the age of sixty-four. Just before her death, she was able to complete her final novel, La Chiesa della Solitudine (1936), a semi-autobiographical story about a young Italian woman who learns she has breast cancer. After her death, her completed manuscript of the novel Cosima was discovered and published in 1937

Her work has since been praised by Luigi Capuana and Giovanni Verga, as well as many other writers and critics. Her birthplace and childhood home located in Nuoro was created into a museum in the writer’s honor called Museo Deleddiano di Nuoro, consisting of ten rooms used to reconstruct stages of her life.

To this day, Deledda remains the only Italian woman to have won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

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Major works 

From Stella D’Oriente and Nell’azzurro, both published in 1890, through a number of posthumously published works, it would be unwieldy to list all of Deledda’s works here. See a complete listing of her works on Wikipedia.

Biographies 

A Self-Made Woman: Biography of Nobel-Prize-Winner Grazia Deledda by Carolyn Balducci (1975)
Grazia Deledda: A Legendary Life (Troubador Italian Studies) by Martha King (2005) 

More Information 

Wikipedia
The Famous People
Britannica 
The Nobel Prize 
With Profound Admiration: Grazia Deledda, Nobel Laureate

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Skyler Isabella Gomez is a 2019 SUNY New Paltz graduate with a degree in Public Relations and a minor in Black Studies. Her passions include connecting with her Latin roots by researching and writing about legendary Latina authors.

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Elizabeth Bishop

Elizabeth Bishop (February 8, 1911 – October 6, 1979) was a noted American poet. Born in Worcester, Massachusetts, Bishop won numerous awards during the course of her career, including the Pulitzer Prize, and her reputation as a significant American poet has only grown since her death. Her most iconic poems include “The Fish,” “One Art,” “A Miracle for Breakfast,” and “Sestina.”

Bishop wasn’t a particularly prolific poet, preferring to spend long periods of time revising her work; she wrote just over one hundred poems. Her poetry is characterized by keen observations of the physical world and a serene yet searching attitude. Many of her poems grapple with themes of loss and the struggle to find one’s place in the world. 

 

Early life and education

Elizabeth Bishop’s experiences of loss began early. Her father died when she was an infant; her mother suffered from severe mental illness and was committed to an institution when Bishop was five. She was raised by her maternal grandparents in Nova Scotia for several years before being taken in by her paternal grandparents, who brought her back to Massachusetts.

Bishop was unhappy living with her grandparents. Recognizing her sadness, they sent her to live with her mother’s oldest sister. Bishop’s aunt was the first to expose her to poetry, especially the Victorian poets, including Alfred, Lord Tennyson, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

Because her grandparents were wealthy and paid for her education, Bishop was able to attend the elite Walnut Hill School, where she studied music. It was at Walnut Hill that her first poems were published in a student magazine.

Bishop then attended Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York, studying music with the intention of becoming a composer. Performance anxiety redirected her toward a degree in English. As the editor-in-chief of Vassar’s yearbook, Bishop and a group of friends — including her classmate, future novelist Mary McCarthy — founded the literary magazine Con Spirito. Though short-lived, it was able to compete with Vassar’s established magazine. Bishop graduated with a bachelor’s degree in 1934.

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1934 Vassar College yearbook portrait

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Literary friendships and correspondences

While Bishop studied English, a librarian introduced her to the poet Marianne Moore. The two corresponded extensively, and Moore became Bishop’s mentor and lifelong friend. She helped publish Bishop’s poetry in the anthology Trial Balances, in which established poets promoted new and unknown poets. Their friendship lasted until Moore’s death in 1972.

In 1947, poet and critic Randall Jarrell introduced Bishop to Robert Lowell, and they became close friends. Bishop and Lowell often wrote poems inspired by the other’s work. Lowell’s famous “Skunk Hour,” for example, was inspired by Bishop’s “The Armadillo,” and Bishop’s “North Haven” paid homage to Lowell after his death.

Bishop had numerous correspondents over her lifetime. She found letter-writing a joyous activity and an extension of her poetry. Over five hundred of her letters to Moore, Lowell, and others have been collected in the volume One Art: Letters.

 

World travels and a poet’s beginnings

With an inheritance from her deceased father’s estate, Bishop was able to travel widely after graduating from Vassar. She first lived in New York City for several years, and then visited Italy, Ireland, France, Spain, and North Africa. Bishop described many of the places she lived in her poems, such as in “Questions of Travel” and “Over 2000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance.”

In 1938, Bishop purchased a home in Key West, Florida with a friend from Vassar. There, she began work on her first poetry collection, North and South. The book was published in 1946; it won the Houghton Mifflin prize for poetry.

1951 brought Bishop the opportunity to embark on deeply impactful travels. With a travel fellowship of $2,500 she was awarded by Bryn Mawr College, she circumnavigated South America by boat. Bishop arrived in Santos, Brazil in November of 1951; she intended to stay for only two weeks, but instead stayed for fifteen years.

 

Life and love in Brazil

Bishop’s relationship with architect Lota de Macedo Soares is what kept her in Brazil. When Bishop was sick during her initial two-week visit, Soares nursed her back to health, effectively winning over the poet. Soares was descended from a prominent and political family; though not trained as a designer or architect, she worked as both. The couple lived together in Pétropolis, near Rio de Janeiro.

Though it began blissfully, the women’s relationship deteriorated after about fourteen years. Their later years together were marked by recurring bouts of Bishop’s alcoholism and Soares’s depression, making both were prone to start volatile fights.

Bishop moved back to New York to teach in 1966. Her alcoholism eventually led to infidelity. Soares visited Bishop in 1967; on the first day of their reunion, she took her own life, possibly due to stress from work and the couple’s failing relationship.   

Bishop wasn’t forthcoming about the nature of her relationship with Soares, and she never came out as a lesbian. Much of what’s known about their relationship comes from Bishop’s letters to professor Samuel Ashley Brown. Their relationship was memorialized in the book Flores Raras e Banalíssimas (in English, Rare and Commonplace Flowers) by Carmen Lucia de Oliveira, and the 2013 film Reaching for the Moon.

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Building a literary identity

While living in Brazil, Bishop published her second collection of poems, North and South — A Cold Spring. The collection appeared in 1955 and included her first book, plus eighteen additional poems that made up the Cold Spring section. Bishop won the Pulitzer Prize for this volume the following year.

It would be another ten years before Bishop published any new poems. Her next book was 1965’s Questions of Travel, and many of the poems in this collection were inspired by her life in Brazil, such as “Arrival at Santos” and “The Riverman.”

Bishop’s contemporaries, including Robert Lowell and Anne Sexton, among others, were writing confessional poetry, but she avoided personal disclosure in her work. Preferring a more objective style, the narrative voices in her poems are often distant from the subject matter, describing their observations in precise yet impersonal detail. In the March 6, 2017 issue of The New Yorker, an article titled “Elizabeth Bishop’s Art of Losing” (reviewing A Miracle for Breakfast: The Art of Elizabeth Bishop, a biography of the poet by Megan Marshall) bears out this general assessment of her work:

“Except perhaps for her mentor, Marianne Moore, it is hard to name a poet whose work so thoroughly disinvites private scrutiny. Admirers of Bishop’s early work Moore, Robert Lowell, Randall Jarrell—praised its cool objectivity, its calm impersonality, what Moore described as its ‘rational considering quality’ (hardly the usual praise for poetry), its ‘deferences and vigilances.’ What the young poet deferred to was poetic form and an increasingly old-fashioned sense of manners and discretion. She was vigilant in giving nothing of herself away.”

Bishop’s next major publication was her Collected Poems, published in1969. The volume included her previously published poetry, plus eight new poems. It won the National Book Award. The following book and the last to be published in Bishop’s life, Geography III, contains many of her most anthologized poems, such as “One Art” and “In the Waiting Room.”

Bishop continued to reject confessional poetry when this collection came out in 1977, but some sparse personal details began to surface, hinting at her mother’s illness and her grief after losing Soares. Bishop won the Neustadt International Prize for Literature for Geography III, which no woman had won before and no American has won since.

 

Not a “Woman Poet”

Bishop had a fraught relationship with how gender and sexuality related to her career as a poet. She refused the labels “female poet” or “lesbian poet,” preferring her work to speak for itself rather than be overshadowed by her gender or sexual orientation.

Being an intensely private person, Bishop was never involved in the women’s movement and shared intimate details of her life with few people. As a result, those around her thought she was hostile to the women’s movement. However, Bishop stated in a 1978 interview with The Paris Review that although she refused to be published in women-only anthologies, she did consider herself a feminist.

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Elizabeth Bishop page on Amazon*

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Awards, accolades, and later years

When her father’s inheritance began dwindle in the 1970s, Bishop started lecturing at various universities. She taught at Harvard for several years, then at New York University, and finally the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

During her lifetime, she may not have been famous per se, but her work was recognized and well rewarded. Starting in 1945 with the Houghton Mifflin award for her first collection, she went on to win a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Shelley Memorial Award, an Academy of American Poets Fellowship, the National Book Award for Poetry, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and many others, not the least of which was the Pulitzer Prize mentioned earlier.

In 1979, Bishop died of a cerebral aneurysm in her apartment in Boston, at the age of 68. Her partner of some eight years, Alice Methfessel, became her literary executor. 

Ultimately, Elizabeth Bishop achieved what she had hoped for — a reputation as a great American poet, who just happened to be a woman.

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More about Elizabeth Bishop

Major Works

North & South ( 1946)
Poems: North & South / A Cold Spring  (1955)
A Cold Spring  (1956)
Questions of Travel  (1965)
The Complete Poems  (1969)
Geography III  (1976)
The Complete Poems: 1927–1979  (1983)
Poems, Prose and Letters by Elizabeth Bishop (2008) 
Poems  (2011)

Biography, letters, and criticism

The Collected Prose  (1984)
One Art: Letters (1994)
Exchanging Hats: Elizabeth Bishop Paintings, (1996)
Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell (2008) 
Conversations with Elizabeth Bishop  (1996)
A Miracle for Breakfast: The Art of Elizabeth Bishop by Megan Marshall (2017)
Love Unknown: The Life and Worlds of Elizabeth Bishop by Thomas Travisano (2019)

Documentary

Welcome to this House (2015)

More information and sources

Wikipedia
Poets
Poetry Foundation
A Conversation with Elizabeth Bishop
Alone with Elizabeth Bishop
It’s Always a Good Time to Revisit the Brilliance of Elizabeth Bishop

Visit and research

Elizabeth Bishop House and Society of Nova Scotia
The Elizabeth Bishop Papers at Vassar College

Contributed by Johanna Shaw. Johanna Shaw is a writer currently pursuing an M.A. in English at the University at Albany, SUNY. Her essays have appeared in bioStories, Trolley, Gravel, and Glass Mountain. When not writing or studying, Johanna can be found playing Chopin nocturnes at her piano, obsessing over literary modernism, or somewhere deep within a used bookstore.

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