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The Heart of a Woman by Georgia Douglas Johnson (1918 – full text)

Georgia Douglas Johnson (1880 – 1966) was a respected poet and playwright associated with the Harlem Renaissance movement. Following is the full text of her first published collection, The Heart of a Woman  and Other Poems (1918).

The Heart of a Woman  was followed by Bronze (1922) and An Autumn Love Cycle (1928). Many years later she came out with Share My World (1962). With four published collections, it’s quite likely that Georgia was the most widely published of the female poets of her era.

Georgia’s poems were published in numerous periodicals and anthologies, particularly in the 1920s. In her poetry, Georgia addressed issues of race as well as universal themes of love, motherhood, and being a woman in a male-dominated world. 

The Heart of a Woman featured poems that were specific to Georgia’s life, yet universal to the female experience. They spoke of love and hope, as well as of loneliness and disappointments. Her frustration with women’s constrained roles was expressed with grace and subtlety.

The Heart of a Woman (1981), the title of the fourth volume in Maya Angelou‘s seven-part autobiography series that began with I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings, is named for the first, eponymous poem in this collection.

 The Heart of a Woman was published by the Cornhill Company (Boston) and is in the public domain. You can see what it looked like when it was first published on Internet Archive.

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Learn more about Georgia Douglas Johnson
See also: Bronze (1922 – full text)
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The Heart of a Woman and Other Poems
by Georgia Douglas JohnsonContents

Introduction by William Stanley Braithwaite

The Heart of a Woman
Gossamer
The Dreams of the Dreamer
Sympathy
Contemplation
Dead Leaves
Dawn
Elevation
Whither?
Quest
Mate
Emblems
Mirrored
Pent
Pages from Life
Recall
Foredoom
Peace
Despair
Eventide
Gethsemane
Gilead
Impelled
In Quest
Inevitably
Isolation
Joy
Memory
Modulations
Omega
Poetry
Posthumous
Query
Recompense
Repulse
Rhythm
Smothered Fires
Supreme
Sympathy
Tears and Kisses
The Measure
Thrall
Tired
What Need Have I For Memory?
When I Am Dead
Whene’er I Lift My Eyes to Bliss
Where?
Youth

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Introduction by William Stanley Braithwaite

The poems in this book are intensely feminine and for me this means more than anything else that they are deeply human. We are yet scarcely aware, in spite of our boasted twentieth-century progress, of what lies deeply hidden, of mystery and passion, of domestic love and joy and sorrow, of romantic  visions and practical ambitions, in the heart of a woman.

The emancipation of woman is  yet to be wholly accomplished; though  woman has stamped her image on every age of the world’s history, and in the heart of  almost every man since time began, it is only  a little over half of a century since she has either spoke or acted with a sense of freedom.  

During this time she has made little more  than a start to catch up with man in the wonderful things he has to his credit; and yet all that man has to his credit would scarcely have been achieved except for the devotion and love and inspiring comradeship of woman. Here, then, is lifted the veil, in these poignant songs and lyrics. To look upon what is revealed is to give one a sense of  infinite sympathy; to make one kneel in spirit to the marvelous patience, the wonderful endurance, the persistent faith, which are  hidden in this nature.

   The heart of a woman falls back with the night.  
   And enters some alien cage in its plight,  
   And tries to forget it has dreamed of the stars  
   While it breaks, breaks, breaks on the sheltering bars.   
 
sings the poet.
   And the songs of the singer
   Are tones that repeat
   The cry of the heart
   Till it ceases to beat.
 
This verse just quoted is from “The Dreams of the Dreamer,” and with the previous quotation tells us that this woman’s heart is keyed in the plaintive, knows the sorrowful agents of life and experience which knock and enter at the door of dreams.

But women have made the saddest songs of the world, Sappho / no less than Elizabeth Barrett Browning / Ruth the Moabite/ poetess gleaning in the fields of Boaz no less than Amy Levy / the Jewess who broke her heart against the London pavements; and no less does sadness echo its tender and appealing sigh in these songs and lyrics of Georgia Douglas Johnson. But sadness is a kind of felicity with woman, paradoxical as it may seem; and it is so because through this inexplicable felicity they touched, intuitionally caress, reality.
 
So here engaging life at its most reserved sources, whether the form or substance through which it articulates be nature, or the seasons, touch of hands or lips, love, desire, or any of the emotional abstractions which sweep like fire or wind or cooling water through the blood, Mrs. Johnson creates just that reality of woman’s heart and experience with astonishing raptures.

It is a kind of privilege to know so much about the secrets of woman’s nature, a privilege all the more to be cherished when given, as in these poems, with such exquisite utterance, with such a lyric sensibility.
 
— William Stanley Braithwaite, Cambridge, Massachusetts

 

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The Heart of a Woman
The heart of a woman goes forth with the dawn,
As a lone bird, soft winging, so restlessly on,
Afar o’er life’s turrets and vales does it roam
In the wake of those echoes the heart calls home.
 
The heart of a woman falls back with the night,
And enters some alien cage in its plight,
And tries to forget it has dreamed of the stars
While it breaks, breaks, breaks on the sheltering bars.

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Gossamer
The dreams of the dreamer
Are life-drops that pass
 
The break in the heart
To the soul’s hour-glass.
 
The songs of the singer
Are tones that repeat
 
The cry of the heart
‘Till it ceases to beat.

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The Dreams of the Dreamer
The dreams of the dreamer
   Are life-drops that pass
 
The break in the heart
   To the soul’s hour-glass.
 
The songs of the singer
   Are tones that repeat
 
The cry of the heart
   ‘Till it ceases to beat.

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Sympathy
My joy leaps with your ecstasy,
   In sympathy divine;
The smiles that wreathe upon your lips.
   Find sentinels on mine:
 
Your lightest sigh I’m echoing,
   I tremble with your pain,
And all your tears are falling
   In my heart like bitter rain.

. . . . . . . . . . .

 

Contemplation
We stand mute!
No words can paint such fragile imagery,
Those prismic gossamers that roll
Beyond the sky-line of the soul;
We stand mute!

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Dead Leaves
The breaking dead leaves ‘neath my feet
A plaintive melody repeat,
Recalling shattered hopes that lie
As relics of a bygone sky.
 
Again I thread the mazy past,
Back where the mounds are scattered fast –
Oh! foolish tears, why do you start,
To break of dead leaves in the heart?

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Dawn
Trailing night’s sand-sifted stars,
Rainbows sweep, as day unbars.
Fragrant essences of morn,
Bathe humanity — new-born!

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Elevation
There are highways in the soul,
   Heights like pyramids that rise
   Far beyond earth-veiled eyes,
   Sweeping through the barless skies
O’er the line where daylight dies —
There are highways in the soul!

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Whither?
Minutes swiftly throb and pass,
   Shadows cross the dial-glass,
Speeding ever to some call,
   Weary world and shadows, all.
 
Down the closing aisles of day,
   Tramping footsteps die away,
But no tidings thread the gloom,
   From the hushed and silent tomb.

. . . . . . . . . . .

Quest
The phantom happiness I sought
   O’er every crag and moor;
 
I paused at every postern gate,
   And knocked at every door;
 
In vain I searched the land and sea,
   E’en to the inmost core,
 
The curtains of eternal night
   Descend — my search is o’er.

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Mate
Our separate winding ways we trod,
Along the highways, unto God,
Unbonded by the clasp of hand,
Without a vow — we understand.
Estranged for aye, the fusing kiss.
Omnipotent, we bide in this —
They need no trammeling of bars
Whose souls were welded with the stars.

 

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Emblems
A wordless kiss, a stifled sigh,
A trembling lip, a downcast eye,
   “Alas,” they say,
   “A-day, a-day,”
The cruse has failed, the lamp must die!

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Mirrored
When lone and solitaire within your chamber,
   With lamp unlit, as evening shades unroll.
If you reveal the trail your thoughts are taking,
   I then may read the riddle of your soul.
 
For it is then, the tired mind unveiling,
   Drifts stark into the holy after-glow.
Within the hour of quiet meditation.
   The tidal thoughts, like limpid waters, flow.

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Pent
The rain is falling steadily
   Upon the thirsty earth,
While dry-eyed, I remain, and calm
   Amid my own heart’s dearth.
 
Break! break! ye flood-gates of my tears
   All pent in agony,
Rain, rain! upon my scorching soul
   And flood it as the sea! 

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Pages from Life
Not for your tender eyes that shine,
Nor for your red lips pulsing wine,
I love you, dear: your soul divine.
In sweet captivity, holds mine!
. . .
The tender eyes have lost their glow,
The flagons of the lips run low.
The autumn trembles in the air, —
A woman passes solitaire!

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Recall
Winter — aback sweeps the inward eye,
Fleet o’er the trail to a rose-wreathed sky,
Girt by a cordon of dreams I dwell
Deep in the heart of the old-time spell.
 
Almost, the tones of your whispered word,
Almost! the thrill that your dear lips stirred,
Almost!! that wild pulsing throb again —
Almost!!! —
      (‘Tis winter, the falling rain).

. . . . . . . . . . .

      
Foredoom
Her life was dwarfed, and wed to blight,
Her very days were shades of night,
Her every dream was born entombed.
Her soul, a bud, — that never bloomed.

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Peace
I rest me deep within the wood,
   Drawn by its silent call,
Far from the throbbing crowd of men
   On nature’s breast I fall.
 
My couch is sweet with blossoms fair,
   A bed of fragrant dreams,
And soft upon my ear there falls
   The lullaby of streams.
 
The tumult of my heart is stilled,
   Within this sheltered spot.
Deep in the bosom of the wood.
   Forgetting, and — forgot!

 

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Despair
The curtains of twilight are drawn in the west
   And vespers are sweet on the air,
While I, through my leafless, ungarlanded way
   But pause at the gates of despair.
 
Good-bye to the hopes that were never fulfilled,
   Good-bye to the fond dreams that failed.
Good-bye to my dead that has never been born.
   Good-bye to love’s ship that ne’er sailed.

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Eventide
The silence of the brooding night,
Enfolds me with its eerie light;
I lie upon its shadowed breast
A pilgrim, wearying for rest
 
Nightfall! thy sable curtains steep
My very soul in solace deep,
God sends thee with thy soothing balms,
That I may falter to thy arms.

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Gethsemane
Into the garden of sorrow,
Some day we all must roam,
If not to-day, then to-morrow,
Bow ‘neath its purple dome.
Out from the musk-laden banqueting halls,
Doffing our mirth-spangled vestments like thralls,
Softly we wend to Gethsemane,
In the hour that sorrow calls!

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Gilead
Walk within thy own heart’s temple, child, and rest,
What you seek abides forever in thy breast.
Closer than thy folded arm
Is the soul-renewing-balm,
Walk within thy own heart’s temple, child, and rest.

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Impelled
Athwart the sky the great sun sails,
Through aeons thus, the daylight trails,
And man, living breath of the sod
Beholding, in his heart knows God.
 
Throughout the night’s long brooding deep,
Earth’s trustful children die-to-sleep.
But with the whisperings of morn
Awake, unto the day, new-born.
 
The mystery of earth untold,
The great infinite, none behold,
Forge ever new the spiral chain,
Revolving man to God again.

. . . . . . . . . . .

In Quest
With the first blush of morning, my soul is awing,
Away o’er the phantom lands free, wandering,
I seek thee in hamlet, in woodland, and hall.
Till night-shades, enfolding my tired heart, fall.
 
Yet ever and alway, like the thrush in a tree.
My heart lifts its preluding love-song to thee;
I call through the days, through the long weary years.
And slumber at night-fall, refreshed by my tears.

 

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Inevitably
There’s nothing in the world that clings
As does a memory that stings;
While happy hours fade and pass,
Like shadows in a looking-glass.

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Isolation
Alone! yes, evermore alone — isolate each his way,
Though hand is echoing to hand vain sophistries of clay.
Within that veilèd, mystic place where bides the inmost soul,
No twain shall pass while tides shall wax, nor changing seasons roll.
 
Enisled, apart our pilgrimage, despite the arms that twine.
Despite the fusing kiss that wields the magic charm of wine.
Despite the interplay of sigh, the surge of sympathy.
We tread in solitude remote, the trail of destiny!

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Joy
There’s a soft rosy glow o’er the whole world to-day,
There’s a freshness and fragrance that trembles in May,
There’s a lilt in the music that vibrates and thrills
From the uttermost glades to the tops of the hills.
 
Oh! I am so happy, my heart is so light.
The shades and the shadows have vanished from sight,
This wild pulsing gladness throbs like a sweet pain —
O soul of me, drink, ere night falleth again!

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Memory
Love’s roses I gathered, all dewy, in May,
My heart holds the breath of their attar to-day;
And now, while the blasts of the winter winds ring,
I hear not the tempest, I’m dreaming of Spring.

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Modulations
The petals of the faded rose
   Commingle silently,
One with the atoms of the dust,
   One with the chaliced sea. –
 
The essence of my fleeting youth
   Caught in the web of time,
Exhales within the springing flowers
   Or breathes in love sublime.

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Omega
The fragile fabric of our dream
Drifts as a feather down life’s stream
The long defile of empty days
Grim silhouetted, mock my gaze.
 
Though oft escapes the stifled sigh,
A desert ever broods my eye —
Since you have utterly forgot,
God grant that I remember not!

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Poetry
Behold! the living thrilling lines
That course the blood like madd’ning wines,
And leap with scintillating spray
Across the guards of ecstasy.
The flame that lights the lurid spell
Springs from the soul’s artesian well,
Its fairy filament of art
Entwines the fragments of a heart.

 

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Posthumous
Of what avail the tardy showers,
To the famished summer flowers?
All in vain the rain-drops cry,
Dead things never make reply.
 
Life’s belated cup of bliss,
Woo the weary lips to kiss,
When the singing is a sigh.
Pulses quivering, to die.

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Query
Is she the sage who will not sip
The cup love presses to her lip?
Or she who drinks the mad cup dry,
And turns with smiling face — to die?

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Recompense
Roses after rain,
Pleasure after pain,
Happiness will soothe the sigh,
Smiles await the tear-dimmed eye
Bloom will follow blight,
Daylight trails the night,
Life is sweeter
Love is deeper
In the heart’s twilight!

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Repulse
Nobody cares when I am glad,
      I beat upon their hearts in glee,
   “Drink, drink joy’s brimming cup with me,”
   All echoless, my ecstasy —
Nobody cares when I am glad.
 
Nobody cares when I am sad,
      Whene’er I seek compassion’s breast,
   I falter wounded from my quest
   Back! back into my heart, sore prest —
Nobody cares when I am sad.

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Rhythm
Oh, my fancy teems with a world of dreams, —
   They revolve in a glittering fire,
How they twirl and go with the tunes that flow
   On the breath of my soul-strung lyre.

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Smothered Fires
A woman with a burning flame
   Deep covered through the years
With ashes. Ah! she hid it deep,
   And smothered it with tears.
 
Sometimes a baleful light would rise
   From out the dusky bed,
And then the woman hushed it quick
   To slumber on, as dead.
 
At last the weary war was done
   The tapers were alight,
And with a sigh of victory
   She breathed a soft — good-night!

 

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Supreme
The fairest lips are those we kiss,
With greatest ecstasy and bliss;
The brightest eyes, are those that shine,
Unchangingly through changing time;
The greatest love is that we know.
When life is just an afterglow.

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Sympathy
My joy leaps with your ecstasy,
   In sympathy divine;
The smiles that wreathe upon your lips.
   Find sentinels on mine:
 
Your lightest sigh I’m echoing,
   I tremble with your pain,
And all your tears are falling
   In my heart like bitter rain.

. . . . . . . . . . .

   
Tears and Kisses
There are tears sweet, refreshing like dewdrops that rise,
There are tears far too deep for the lakes of the eyes.
 
There are kisses like thistledown, fitfully sped,
There are kisses that live in the hearts of the dead.

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The Measure
Fierce is the conflict — the battle of eyes,
Sure and unerring, the wordless replies,
Challenges flash from their ambushing caves
Men, by their glances, are masters or slaves.

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Thrall
Fragile, tiny, just a sprite,
Holding me a thrall bedight,
Stronger than a giant’s wand
Serves the word of your command.
 
Out from rushing worlds, though low
Should you whisper, I would know,
And would answer, though the breath
Be the gateway unto death.

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Tired
I’m tired, days and nights to me
Drag on in slow monotony,
With not a single star in sight
To lend a gleam of cheering light.
 
I’m tired, there are none to care
That I am drifting to despair:
O shadows! take me to your breast
For I am tired — I would rest.

 

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What Need Have I For Memory?
What need have I for memory,
   When not a single flower
Has bloomed within life’s desert
   For me, one little hour.
 
What need have I for memory
   Whose burning eyes have met
The corse of unborn happiness
   Winding the trail regret?

. . . . . . . . . . .   

   
When I Am Dead
When I am dead, withhold, I pray, your blooming legacy;
Beneath the willows did I bide, and they should cover me;
I longed for light and fragrance, and I sought them far and near,
O, it would grieve me utterly, to find them on my bier!

. . . . . . . . . . .

  
Whene’er I Lift My Eyes to Bliss
Whene’er I lift my eyes to bliss,
   I stagger blind with pain,
Afar into the folding night
   The silence, and the rain.
 
Whene’er I feel the urge of Spring,
   A throbbing, unknown woe
Enfolds me; I am desolate
   When love is calling low.

. . . . . . . . . . .

Where?
I called you through the silent night
   Across the brooding deep,
I sought you in the shadowland
   From out the world — asleep;
 
No answer echoed to my call,
   And now my way I thread
About the lowly mounds that rise
   Among the silent dead.
 
Though voiceless, you will hear my call,
   Your soul will heed my cry.
Will rise, and mock the prison where
   Your bones recumbent lie.

. . . . . . . . . . .

Youth
The dew is on the grasses, dear,
The blush is on the rose.
And swift across our dial-youth,
A shifting shadow goes.
 
The primrose moments, lush with bliss,
Exhale and fade away,
Life may renew the Autumn time,
But nevermore the May!

  Women Poets of the Harlem Renaissance to Rediscover and Read

The post The Heart of a Woman by Georgia Douglas Johnson (1918 – full text) appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.

10 Contemporary Novels About Bookstores and Libraries

For those of us who love (or make that obsessed with) books, novels about books, bookstores, and libraries are the icing on the cake. Reading about books and bookish people in fictional narratives, might seem odd, but for the devout bibliophile, it makes perfect sense.

Presented here is a selection of contemporary novels whose stories are centered around bookstores or libraries. What could be cozier reading on a chilly day accompanied by a warm drink, a blanket, and a four-legged friend or two?

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The Personal Librarian by Marie Benedict

 

From the publisher: A remarkable novel about J. P. Morgan’s personal librarian, Belle da Costa Greene, the Black American woman who was forced to hide her true identity and pass as white in order to leave a lasting legacy that enriched our nation, from New York Times bestselling authors Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray.

Belle da Costa Greene is hired by J. P. Morgan to curate a collection of rare manuscripts, books, and artwork for his newly built Pierpont Morgan Library. Belle becomes a fixture in New York City society and one of the most powerful people in the art and book world, known for her impeccable taste and shrewd negotiating for critical works as she helps create a world-class collection.

The Personal Librarian tells the story of an extraordinary woman, famous for her intellect, style, and wit, and shares the lengths she must go to—for the protection of her family and her legacy—to preserve her carefully crafted white identity in the racist world in which she lives.

The Personal Librarian on Bookshop.org*
The Personal Librarian on Amazon*

 

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The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald

From the publisher: Set in 1959, Florence Green, a kindhearted widow with a small inheritance, risks everything to open a bookshop—the only bookshop—in the seaside town of Hardborough. By making a success of a business so impractical, she invites the hostility of the town’s less prosperous shopkeepers.

By daring to enlarge her neighbors’ lives, she crosses Mrs. Gamart, the local arts doyenne. Florence’s warehouse leaks, her cellar seeps, and the shop is apparently haunted. Only too late does she begin to suspect the truth: a town that lacks a bookshop isn’t always a town that wants one.

The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald, published in 1978,  was adapted to film in 2017, to mixed reviews by audiences and critics. Devotees of media about bookstores should nevertheless get some enjoyment from it.

The Bookshop on Bookshop.org*
The Bookshop on Amazon*

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The Last Bookshop in London: A Novel of World War II
by Madeline Martin

From the publisher: August 1939 — London prepares for war as enemy forces sweep across Europe. Grace Bennett has always dreamed of moving to the city, but the bunkers and drawn curtains that she finds on her arrival are not what she expected. And she certainly never imagined she’d wind up working at Primrose Hill, a dusty old bookshop nestled in the heart of London.

Through blackouts and air raids as the Blitz intensifies, Grace discovers the power of storytelling to unite her community in ways she never dreamed—a force that triumphs over even the darkest nights of the war. This 2021 publication has become a bestseller and a reader favorite.

The Last Bookshop in London on Bookshop.org*
The Last Bookshop in London on Amazon*

 

 

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The Booklover’s Library by Madeline Martin

From the publisher: A heartwarming story about a mother and daughter in wartime England and the power of books that bring them together, by the bestselling author of The Last Bookshop in London. In Nottingham, England, widow Emma Taylor finds herself in desperate need of a job.

She and her beloved daughter Olivia have always managed just fine on their own, but with the legal restrictions prohibiting widows with children from most employment opportunities, she’s left with only one option: persuading the manageress at Boots’ Booklover’s Library to take a chance on her with a job.

When the threat of war in England becomes a reality, Olivia must be evacuated to the countryside. In the wake of being separated from her daughter, Emma seeks solace in the unlikely friendships she forms with her neighbors and coworkers, and a renewed sense of purpose through the recommendations she provides to the library’s quirky regulars. But the job doesn’t come without its difficulties … As the Blitz intensifies in Nottingham and Emma fights to reunite with her daughter, she must learn to depend on her community and the power of literature more than ever to find hope in the darkest of times.

The Booklover’s Library on Bookshop.org*
The Booklover’s Library on Amazon*

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The Lost Bookshop by Evie Woods

From the publisher: “The thing about books,” she said “is that they help you to imagine a life bigger and better than you could ever dream of.” On a quiet street in Dublin, a lost bookshop is waiting to be found .. For too long, Opaline, Martha and Henry have been the side characters in their own lives.

But when a vanishing bookshop casts its spell, these three unsuspecting strangers will discover that their own stories are every bit as extraordinary as the ones found in the pages of their beloved books. And by unlocking the secrets of the shelves, they find themselves transported to a world of wonder… where nothing is as it seems.

The Lost Bookshop on Bookshop.org*
The Lost Bookshop on Amazon*

 

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The English Bookshop by Janis Wildy

From the publisher: Lucy isn’t ready for a life-changing journey when it comes knocking; she just wants to keep everything the same as the day her stepfather died. Unfortunately, expenses have overtaken her small family business, forcing her to do something quickly to keep it afloat.

When Lucy finds out she has inherited a bookshop in England, she travels to see it, intent on selling the property as soon as possible. But once there she meets a wonderfully kind group of villagers, including a handsome bookseller, who challenge her decision to make a quick sale.

What begins as a way to make money for her business in Seattle becomes an experience that uncovers family secrets and reveals the kindness of strangers. In England, Lucy just might rewrite her past in order to follow her heart.

The English Bookshop on Amazon*

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The Paris Bookseller by Kerri Maher

When bookish young American Sylvia Beach opens Shakespeare and Company on a quiet street in Paris in 1919, she has no idea that she and her new bookstore will change the course of literature itself. Shakespeare and Company is more than a bookstore and lending library: Many of the prominent writers of the Lost Generation, like Ernest Hemingway , consider it a second home. It’s where some of the most important literary friendships of the twentieth century are forged—none more so than the one between Irish writer James Joyce and Sylvia herself. When Joyce’s controversial novel Ulysses is banned, Beach takes a massive risk and publishes it under the auspices of Shakespeare and Company.
 
But the success and notoriety of publishing the most infamous and influential book of the century comes with steep costs. The future of her beloved store itself is threatened when Ulysses‘ success brings other publishers to woo Joyce away. Her most cherished relationships are put to the test as Paris is plunged deeper into the Depression and many expatriate friends return to America. As she faces painful personal and financial crises, Sylvia—a woman who has made it her mission to honor the life-changing impact of books—must decide what Shakespeare and Company truly means to her.  The Paris Bookseller on Bookshop.org*
The Paris Bookseller on Amazon* 

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The Little Paris Bookshop by Nina George

From the publisher: Monsieur Perdu calls himself a literary apothecary. From his floating bookstore in a barge on the Seine, he prescribes novels for the hardships of life. Using his intuitive feel for the exact book a reader needs, Perdu mends broken hearts and souls.

The only person he can’t seem to heal through literature is himself; he’s still haunted by heartbreak after his great love disappeared. She left him with only a letter, which he has never opened.

After Perdu is finally tempted to read the letter, he hauls anchor and departs on a mission to the south of France, hoping to make peace with his loss and discover the end of the story.  Internationally bestselling and filled with warmth and adventure, The Little Paris Bookshop is a love letter to books, meant for anyone who believes in the power of stories to shape people’s lives.

The Little Paris Bookshop on Bookshop.org*
The Little Paris Bookshop on Amazon*

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The Bookshop on the Corner by Jenny Colgan

From the publisher: Nina Redmond is a librarian with a gift for finding the perfect book for her readers. But can she write her own happy-ever-after? In this valentine to readers, librarians, and book-lovers the world over, the New York Times-bestselling author of Little Beach Street Bakery returns with a funny, moving new novel for fans of Nina George’s The Little Paris Bookshop.

Determined to make a new life for herself, Nina moves to a sleepy village many miles away. There she buys a van and transforms it into a bookmobile — a mobile bookshop that she drives from neighborhood to neighborhood, changing one life after another with the power of storytelling. 

Nina discovers there’s plenty of adventure, magic, and soul in a place that’s beginning to feel like home… a place where she just might be able to write her own happy ending. The next book in this series is The Bookshop on the Shore.

The Bookshop on the Corner on Bookshop.org*
The Bookshop on the Corner on Amazon*

 

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The Midnight Library by Matt Haig

From the publisher: Somewhere out beyond the edge of the universe there is a library that contains an infinite number of books, each one the story of another reality. One tells the story of your life as it is, along with another book for the other life you could have lived if you had made a different choice at any point in your life.

While we all wonder how our lives might have been, what if you had the chance to go to the library and see for yourself? Would any of these other lives truly be better?

In The Midnight Library, Matt Haig’s enchanting blockbuster novel, Nora Seed finds herself faced with this decision. Faced with the possibility of changing her life for a new one, following a different career, undoing old breakups, realizing her dreams of becoming a glaciologist; she must search within herself as she travels through the Midnight Library to decide what is truly fulfilling in life, and what makes it worth living in the first place.

The Midnight Library on Bookshop.org*
The Midnight Library on Amazon*

You may also enjoy …
Nonfiction Books About Bookshops, Libraries, and Reading
(illustration above from Bibliophile by Jane Mount)
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*These are Bookshop.org and Amazon affiliate links. If a product is purchased after linking through, Literary Ladies Guide receives a modest commission, which helps us to keep growing.

The post 10 Contemporary Novels About Bookstores and Libraries appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.

Novels About Books and Libraries by Women Writers

For those of us who love — or make that obsessed with —books, novels about books, bookstores, and libraries are the icing on the cake. Reading about books and bookish people in fictional narratives, might seem odd, but for the devout bibliophile, it makes perfect sense.

Presented here is a selection of novels by women writers whose stories that take place in bookstores or libraries. What could be cozier reading on a chilly day accompanied by a warm drink, a blanket, and a four-legged friend or two?

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The Personal Librarian by Marie Benedict

 

From the publisher: A remarkable novel about J. P. Morgan’s personal librarian, Belle da Costa Greene, the Black American woman who was forced to hide her true identity and pass as white in order to leave a lasting legacy that enriched our nation, from New York Times bestselling authors Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray.

Belle da Costa Greene is hired by J. P. Morgan to curate a collection of rare manuscripts, books, and artwork for his newly built Pierpont Morgan Library. Belle becomes a fixture in New York City society and one of the most powerful people in the art and book world, known for her impeccable taste and shrewd negotiating for critical works as she helps create a world-class collection.

The Personal Librarian tells the story of an extraordinary woman, famous for her intellect, style, and wit, and shares the lengths she must go to—for the protection of her family and her legacy—to preserve her carefully crafted white identity in the racist world in which she lives.

The Personal Librarian on Bookshop.org*
The Personal Librarian on Amazon*

 

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The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald

From the publisher: Set in 1959, Florence Green, a kindhearted widow with a small inheritance, risks everything to open a bookshop—the only bookshop—in the seaside town of Hardborough. By making a success of a business so impractical, she invites the hostility of the town’s less prosperous shopkeepers.

By daring to enlarge her neighbors’ lives, she crosses Mrs. Gamart, the local arts doyenne. Florence’s warehouse leaks, her cellar seeps, and the shop is apparently haunted. Only too late does she begin to suspect the truth: a town that lacks a bookshop isn’t always a town that wants one.

The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald, published in 1978,  was adapted to film in 2017, to mixed reviews by audiences and critics. Devotees of media about bookstores should nevertheless get some enjoyment from it.

The Bookshop on Bookshop.org*
The Bookshop on Amazon*

 

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The Last Bookshop in London: A Novel of World War II
by Madeline Martin

From the publisher: August 1939 — London prepares for war as enemy forces sweep across Europe. Grace Bennett has always dreamed of moving to the city, but the bunkers and drawn curtains that she finds on her arrival are not what she expected. And she certainly never imagined she’d wind up working at Primrose Hill, a dusty old bookshop nestled in the heart of London.

Through blackouts and air raids as the Blitz intensifies, Grace discovers the power of storytelling to unite her community in ways she never dreamed—a force that triumphs over even the darkest nights of the war. This 2021 publication has become a bestseller and a reader favorite.

The Last Bookshop in London on Bookshop.org*
The Last Bookshop in London on Amazon*

 

 

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The Booklover’s Library by Madeline Martin

From the publisher: A heartwarming story about a mother and daughter in wartime England and the power of books that bring them together, by the bestselling author of The Last Bookshop in London. In Nottingham, England, widow Emma Taylor finds herself in desperate need of a job.

She and her beloved daughter Olivia have always managed just fine on their own, but with the legal restrictions prohibiting widows with children from most employment opportunities, she’s left with only one option: persuading the manageress at Boots’ Booklover’s Library to take a chance on her with a job.

When the threat of war in England becomes a reality, Olivia must be evacuated to the countryside. In the wake of being separated from her daughter, Emma seeks solace in the unlikely friendships she forms with her neighbors and coworkers, and a renewed sense of purpose through the recommendations she provides to the library’s quirky regulars. But the job doesn’t come without its difficulties … As the Blitz intensifies in Nottingham and Emma fights to reunite with her daughter, she must learn to depend on her community and the power of literature more than ever to find hope in the darkest of times.

The Booklover’s Library on Bookshop.org*
The Booklover’s Library on Amazon*

 

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The Little Paris Bookshop by Nina George

From the publisher: Monsieur Perdu calls himself a literary apothecary. From his floating bookstore in a barge on the Seine, he prescribes novels for the hardships of life. Using his intuitive feel for the exact book a reader needs, Perdu mends broken hearts and souls.

The only person he can’t seem to heal through literature is himself; he’s still haunted by heartbreak after his great love disappeared. She left him with only a letter, which he has never opened.

After Perdu is finally tempted to read the letter, he hauls anchor and departs on a mission to the south of France, hoping to make peace with his loss and discover the end of the story.  Internationally bestselling and filled with warmth and adventure, The Little Paris Bookshop is a love letter to books, meant for anyone who believes in the power of stories to shape people’s lives.

The Little Paris Bookshop on Bookshop.org*
The Little Paris Bookshop on Amazon*

. . . . . . . . .

The Bookshop on the Corner by Jenny Colgan

From the publisher: Nina Redmond is a librarian with a gift for finding the perfect book for her readers. But can she write her own happy-ever-after? In this valentine to readers, librarians, and book-lovers the world over, the New York Times-bestselling author of Little Beach Street Bakery returns with a funny, moving new novel for fans of Nina George’s The Little Paris Bookshop.

Determined to make a new life for herself, Nina moves to a sleepy village many miles away. There she buys a van and transforms it into a bookmobile — a mobile bookshop that she drives from neighborhood to neighborhood, changing one life after another with the power of storytelling. 

Nina discovers there’s plenty of adventure, magic, and soul in a place that’s beginning to feel like home… a place where she just might be able to write her own happy ending. The next book in this series is The Bookshop on the Shore.

The Bookshop on the Corner on Bookshop.org*
The Bookshop on the Corner on Amazon*

 

*These are Bookshop.org and Amazon affiliate links. If a product is purchased after linking through, Literary Ladies Guide receives a modest commission, which helps us to keep growing.

The post Novels About Books and Libraries by Women Writers appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.

A Chosen Sparrow by Vera Caspary (1964)

“You survived. That’s important.”
“But who am I? An insignificant girl with no great talent. Why was I the one to be saved?”
  He smiled a little. “Haven’t you heard that God heeds each sparrow’s fall?”
  So many sparrows fell. Was God watching? Did He count them? Why was I chosen to live?”
 (from A Chosen Sparrow by Vera Caspary, 1964)

This in-depth look at A Chosen Sparrow by Vera Caspary is excerpted from A Girl Named Vera Can Never Tell a Lie: The Fiction of Vera Caspary by Francis Booth ©2022. Reprinted by permission.

In a novel of compelling force the author traces the growth and development of Leni, a Jewish child who grew up in a Nazi prison. Knowing no other life, Leni strives to become like the “normal” people she encounters in her new world of freedom – post-war Vienna: the good citizens who wish to forget, the hypocrites who rationalize guilt, the penitents who try to atone the sins of the Nazis, the neurotics who hope to restore the days of perverse glory.

The very air of Vienna pulsates through the richly ornamented story – the customs, manners and old-world courtesy, and the charming lift of elegant shoulders, which shrug yesterday’s guilt from today’s pleasures.

Enchanted and corrupted by the brittle sentimentality and the splendors of this baroque world, Leni sees herself as the beautiful heroine of the classic fairytale. She seeks compensation in lush romanticism and shuns reality until the time comes when she is confronted by the specter of cruelty she knew in childhood, and the debt of the living (the chosen) to the six million dead. (—Front cover flap of the 1964 edition)

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Those who enjoyed Laura and anticipate another such novel of suspense will find Mrs. Caspary’s latest book far different but just as fascinating. The emphasis here is not entertainment only; the underlying purpose is to point up the disturbing fact that the evils of Nazism are still rampant in Europe today. The author’s imagination has evoked a strange heroine, a combination of the romantically old and the very modern new. (—Chicago Heights Star, April 12, 1964)

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As a novel about the survivor guilt of a Jewish girl growing up in Europe during and just after the time of the Nazis, A Chosen Sparrow by Vera Caspary was preceded among others by Elie Wiesel’s 1956 memoir Night, Olga Lengyel’s Five Chimneys (1959), both about their early lives in Auschwitz and Buchenwald, and by Meyer Levin’s Eva: A Novel of the Holocaust (1959), based on a true story, in which Eva passes for a while as a gentile, working as a maid in the home of an SS officer in Linz but is discovered and sent to Auschwitz.

Eva is set, like A Chosen Sparrow, in wartime and post-war Austria. Vienna-born Jewish writer Ilse Aichinger’s dreamlike Herod’s Children, first published in English in 1963, turns Levin’s and Caspary’s stories about the Jewish girl as outsider on their head: hers is a wartime story of a girl who feels like an outsider because she is not Jewish.

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Learn more about Vera Caspary
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Lonely Ellen meets a group of Jewish children and befriends them; when they are betrayed by an informer and taken to a camp, Ellen begs to go with them but they will not take her. That night she feels abandoned.

“For a moment Ellen forgot her pain. She forgot that she was free against her will; she forgot that they had let her go, out of the camp, back to the freedom of the damned. And she forgot the sad, jeering laughter of her friends – ‘We told you all along that you don’t belong to us.’”

Ellen decides to wear the yellow star that all Jews have been ordered to bear prominently. She pins one to her dress, at first only temporarily, then makes a decision. “She tore the star from her dress with trembling hands. One had to light the way when it was as dark as this, and how better to light it than with a star?

She would not have this forbidden her, not by her grandmother nor the secret police. Quickly, with big, uneven stitches she sewed the star to the left side of her coat.” Running down the street, “the star on her coat gave her wings,” but when she gets to the cake shop with the right money in her hand and the star on her coat they refuse to serve her.

Ellen looked down. Suddenly she knew the price of the cake. She had forgotten it. She had forgotten that people wearing the star weren’t allowed in the stores and still less in a bakery that served coffee and cakes at tables. The price of the cake was the star . . . The star was searing. It burned through the blue sailor coat and drove Ellen’s blood to her cheeks. So one had to choose. One had to choose between one’s star and all other things.

One reviewer called A Chosen Sparrow “at once a novel of psychological suspense, romance and contemporary Gothic horror,” which “lays bare the peaks and valleys of the human heart – and soul.” This makes it seem more like a psycho-thriller than a coming-of-age novel. In fact it is both.

The front cover of the Dell paperback calls it “The sensational new novel of romance and suspense by the author of Laura,” though in fact it contains neither romance nor suspense. So I have chosen to put it here in the Politics chapter because it is in fact a Holocaust novel and a very personal, sincere one at that, though unlike Aichinger, Lengyel and Wiesel, Caspary herself was not directly a victim of the Holocaust.

A Chosen Sparrow begins in Austria in 1940 while it is under Nazi occupation. But although their country was occupied, many ordinary, non-Jewish Austrians were not unhappy with the German presence; thousands had lined the streets to cheer the Nazi troops when their tanks rolled into Vienna in March 1938.

Antisemitism had already been rife for years, Jewish families had been attacked and persecuted, businesses had regularly been vandalized and closed down well before the arrival of the occupying German army.

Not all Jews knew about the antisemitism in Austria. In Meyer Levin’s novel, Eva, who is Polish, has a choice of where to settle after the war; she chooses Austria.

We were asked if we had any preference as to where we would be sent. Anya and I had agreed to ask for Austria. I had thought of Austria only because of the friendly telegraph operator from Linz. Perhaps other Austrians felt as he did. And when I was a child my father had gone, a few times, to Vienna on business, and he had spoken of the Austrians as a decent, cultured people, among the best of the goyim.

When she arrives in Vienna, Eva is impressed, “I had never seen this sight nor such a great city, and in spite of everything I was stirred with a sense of adventure.”

But Eva is soon brought down to earth when she is stripped naked in front of leering men at the reception center and subject to a gynecological examination which proves she is a virgin, a fact that amuses the doctor so much that he calls over several young men to witness the phenomenon. “Ah, this belongs in a museum! A maidenhead, at twenty-two!”

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A Girl Named Vera Can Never Tell a Lie  by Francis Booth
is available on and  other sources of 
downloadable media
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Nearly twenty years after the end of the war, at the age of sixty-five, Caspary has neither forgiven nor forgotten these humiliations of the Jewish people and nor has her heroine/narrator, Leni. A Chosen Sparrow begins: “There is a theory held by good people that evil should be forgotten and only pleasant memories retained.”

Caspary clearly does not hold with this theory: three years later she would publish the cathartic, quasi-confessional The Rosecrest Cell, about her own wartime anti-Nazi activities, things which she had never been able to talk about before for fear of persecution and prosecution.

“Those who made me feel guilty for remembering evil were truly good, but they shamed me into believing it wicked to talk or even think about the degradation I had known in early childhood,” says Leni. Caspary disagrees with these people too and lets Leni think and talk freely. Similarly, Elie Wiesel says in Night:

“For the survivor who chooses to testify, it is clear: his duty is to bear witness for the dead and for the living. He has no right to deprive future generations of a past that belongs to our collective memory.  To forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time. . . For in the end, it is all about memory, its sources and its magnitude, and, of course, its consequences.”

The first sentence of Meyer Levin’s Eva, like the first sentence of A Chosen Sparrow, is also about preserving memory, about the importance of not forgetting the horrors, of making sure that the world will know and never forget.

“Perhaps you will be the one to live,” my mother said. “Then, Eva, if you live, you must write it all down, how you lived, and what happened to all of us, so it will be known. You must write down everything exactly as it was.”

A Chosen Sparrow is clearly going to be a hard read, harder than any prior Caspary novel, and with an entirely different kind of heroine. No previous Caspary heroine, even going back to Rosalia in The White Girl thirty-five years earlier, has been born into such dire circumstances; most have been born into comfortable, educated middle-class lives if not into actual wealth. Certainly none have had horrific childhoods.

And despite the, as it were offstage murders of young women in several previous novels, Caspary has never actually shown us any horrors directly and certainly never even touched upon the Holocaust. She did undertake a deep investigation into Jewish life in Thicker Than Water of 1932, but this was written before the Nazis came to power and none of her novels since then has addressed Jewish identity and history; indeed there are no explicitly Jewish female characters in any Caspary novel apart from Thicker Than Water and the only antisemitism in her work comes from the appalling Kathleen in The White Girl.

So A Chosen Sparrow represents an abrupt change of tone: Caspary’s previous novel had been the carefree, frothy Bachelor in Paradise three years earlier and in the novel before that, Evvie, both central characters come from quite wealthy backgrounds and have very enviable lives until one of them is murdered. And not long before Evvie, Cole Porter had written the music and lyrics for the musical comedy based on Caspary’s story Les Girls, 1957.[5]

But 1964 was the year Caspary’s beloved husband of fifteen years, Igee, whom she had met at the time of Laura, died; she must have been going through dark times.

As we saw in the previous chapter, Isadore Goldsmith had himself been a refugee from the Nazis in the 1930s, having got into trouble for bringing out a German version of All Quiet on the Western Front and importing Mickey Mouse and the decadent films of Jean Renoir.

With a lot of help, Caspary managed to get to London to see Igee during the war. The couple then returned to Europe several times after the war, including the time when, in 1951, two years after they were married and while “American troops were fighting the Reds in Korea,” they left America, at least partly to escape from the Hollywood witch-hunts.

They ended up in Austria, where Igee had both old friends and bad memories. “He had said that he would never go back,” but Caspary “begged to see her husband’s homeland and when he relented he showed me the country as proudly as if he had created the mountains, aquamarine, ultramarine, jade and heliotrope lakes, as if he had designed the onion domes of the village churches, planted the pretty modest flowers of the meadows.”

In an Austrian village called Seewalchen-am-Attersee they found a villa called Amthof, “a mansion built in the seventeenth century as a counting house of the diocese and home for the monks who handled the Church’s funds.” During the war the villa had been occupied by Nazi officers and later had been used to give asylum for people displaced from German-speaking Romania. “The silver, porcelain, paintings and Oriental rugs had been stolen, much of the fine furniture used for firewood.”

While in Austria, Goldsmith was “overcome by nostalgia that dissolved his prejudice” but after some more sightseeing the couple went back to “London and frustration. Two months later we were back at Amthof with scripts and typewriters. We had found our European home.”

Vera wrote happily during her time in Austria, working undisturbed “in my tower room at Amthof with the Attersee beneath my window,” including producing a version of Wedding in Paris. So A Chosen Sparrow is in its way a homage both to her husband’s homeland and to her own happy days there.

A Chosen Sparrow is the only one of Caspary’s novels to be narrated in the first person by the central character herself. Thelma and Evvie are both related in the first person by the best friend of the title character so that we see their experiences filtered through another consciousness.

Laura is mostly narrated by two very different men who have very different relationships to and impressions of Laura so we see her as if refracted through a prism, as we do the mysterious Elizabeth X whose “true” identity we literally do not know; Like Laura, Elizabeth briefly takes over the narration but she has amnesia and she does not know who she is. And in Stranger Than Truth we had a portfolio of overlapping narratives.

But in A Chosen Sparrow, there is no questioning of the nature and status of narrative, no distancing or prism effects: Leni simply tells us what she knows, what she remembers, in a straightforward, affectless, deadpan manner almost as emotionless as the “I am a camera” narratives of nouveaux romanciers like her Jewish contemporary Nathalie Sarraute and of Marguerite Duras, whose husband was imprisoned in Buchenwald, or of the young narrator of Jerzy Kosinski’s harrowing The Painted Bird (1965), who relates the unspeakable, remorseless horrors of wartime Europe with an unblinking eye.

The narrator of A Chosen Sparrow, known as Leni, was named Leonora because at the moment she was born her violinist father was in the orchestra pit at the Vienna Opera playing the overture to Beethoven’s Fidelio, which is about the self-sacrificing Leonore [sic] rescuing her husband from prison; Fidelio premiered in Vienna in 1805.

When Leni is eight years old, the Germans enter Vienna and the family move to Prague where her father continues as a musician. But then the Germans enter Prague too. Leni’s father disappears and her mother will not leave the apartment until he returns. They are captured and, because of a clerical error, sent to a prison rather than a concentration camp.

Her mother dies and Leni, now an orphan, is looked after by some of the many women in the prison who have lost their own children. The Americans arrive, liberate the prison and Leni is sent back to Vienna to live in a large villa with other orphan girls. All this in chapter one.

Leni is then fostered by a poor and dishonest family who are paid to take her in and are only interested in her food coupons; Leni sleeps on the floor in the corridor while they steal, cheat and connive their way through post-war Vienna. The antisemitism in Austria is just as bad as before the war.

“The Jews’ll get all the money again, by hook or crook. They always do. Take it away from them and they’ll get it back every time,” says her foster father. And later a self-righteous Viennese tells Leni that she believes “the stories of Jewish persecution were foreign propaganda. None of their friends had ever seen good Jews badly treated. It was only the swindlers, traitors, communists and international moneylenders who were exiled and punished.”

Of course, after the war, there are far fewer Jews in the city, for obvious reasons. In Meyer Levin’s Eva, after the war she and her Jewish friend in Krakow are physically safe but are similarly surrounded by “shiksehs” – non-Jewish girls. Unlike Leni, they decide to integrate rather than separate. “Now the shiksehs got ready for bed, as did we; one after another they dropped to their knees and prayed. We did the same; we had learned the Hail Mary and other prayers by heart, and now we mumbled them with the same murmur as the other girls.”

Leni’s foster mother has “many tricks for getting extra food,” but nothing that Leni can eat, just “pig’s heart or liver, treats she always denied me. It was mortal sin, I was told, for a Jewish child to eat the flesh of swine.” Leni has to eat what she can.

“I ate my ersatz spread and drank my watered wine while my foster mother, eating heartily, promised that such pious deprivation was for the good of my immortal soul. So far as I could understand, the possession of a soul brought nothing but suffering. As a Jew I lived in danger of eternal torment for a sin I had not committed. Because of this my parents had been harassed and chased from Vienna to Prague, my father had disappeared and my mother sent to prison. Now I was deprived of a good Sunday dinner and often during the week forced to eat only potatoes. Why? Naturally I asked questions.”

But Leni only asks the questions of herself. “I had no answers because I did not know the facts and was ashamed to ask questions.” Similarly, Elie Wiesel in Night says, “I pray to the God within me that He will give me the strength to ask Him the right questions.” Leni does not talk to God and does not understand when she is told that “the fact of my having been born a Jew was an act that I had willed before I was conceived.”

Leni’s unspoken questions are not answered, even when she is taken in by a far kinder, middle-class Christian couple with four daughters of their own; the musician father had known Leni’s father. Leni finally has a bed, though she has to share it with the youngest daughter. They become friends.

“Elfy worried about my immortal soul. She was my first and my best friend.” But even Elfy believes that Leni’s people “killed Christ. She had been told this by an older girl at the very door of the church. The accusation hurt. Who were my people? Jews. Was I to blame for something they did . . . if they had done it . . . two thousand years ago? Elfy said I was.”

Elfy’s father gets sick and dies; Leni has to earn money. She finds work as a singer in a cafe where she meets an older, wealthy Prussian, Gerhard Metzger, owner of “one of the oldest and finest castles in the Salzkammergut.” Metzger woos Leni solicitously and buys her presents without expecting anything physical of her. He mainly seems to want her to talk about her time in prison, which she does, though she has never done so before. It is cathartic for her.

“As I spoke the memories crowded back, forgotten faces came to mind. I heard the terror of voices raised in helpless grief, the cries of women marched off, suddenly and without preparation, to certain death.”

. . . . . . . . . .

11 Novels by Vera Caspary
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Leni’s memories pour out as italicized reveries, streams of consciousness bubbling to the surface from her repressed subconscious.

Leni tells Gerhard about the sexual exploitation by the women guards in this all-female prison. “‘I want you tonight,’ they whisper to the youngest and prettiest of the prisoners.” Sometimes at night Leni watches but she does not understand what the women are doing. One guard, “big-stupid,  foul-mouthed,” is rebuffed by Leni’s mother.

“Gretl’s revenge is endless. She cuts the rations of a sick woman trying to stay alive on ten decas of bread a day and one ladleful of potato-skin soup; she spits when Mutti passes or strikes her with the truncheon. To make my poor mother suffer more Gretl beats me or, as brutally, picks me up and presses terrible moist kisses on my mouth.”

But it is not the urbane Gerhard’s wealth or even his kindness that attracts Leni, it is his need for her. “No one had ever expressed a need for Leonora Neumann. I had found a place in the world, a man who needed my sympathy to soothe hidden wounds.” Metzger whips Leni off to Paris and marries her; she wants to get married in Vienna with Elfy as bridesmaid but Gerhard will not hear of it.

Leni leaves without the chance even to say goodbye to her foster family. In Paris, Gerhard proudly shows off his new wife to his sister, visiting from America, salaciously repeating the horrors she has seen. “And he told her in great detail about my life in the prison, repeating with relish the most brutal facts. ‘Beaten!’ He sipped cognac and licked his lips. ‘Starved! Exposed to every sort of vice! Blood and rape! Both by men and women!’

Gerhard is proud of his new possession, his creation even. “One would never think to look at her that she had experienced such horrors. And she will become more elegant when I have taught her a bit more.” It is clear that Gerhard sees himself as Galatea to Leni’s Pygmalion, as in a later novel Chauncey Greenleaf will seem to Elizabeth X.

Coming back to Austria, the couple move in to the nine hundred-and-forty-year-old family castle. Caspary describes it in almost exactly the same words she used to describe the real life Villa Amthof, which was in a village called Seewalchen-am-Attersee; the much larger and more Gothic fictional Schloss Liebhofen is in similarly-named Altbach-am-Sternsee. Like Villa Amthof the castle had been used by the Luftwaffe during the war and now “much of the fine furniture had been burned as fuel, brocades and tapestries were torn, damask stained.

Valuable carpets had been carried off, as well as candelabra, porcelains and silver.” This is almost exactly what Caspary said about Villa Amthof. Leni even sleeps in a tower room, similar to the one Caspary used for writing while she was in Austria. Leni at first wonders whether she has come to Bluebeard’s Castle but it turns out that locked-up former wives are not Gerhard’s secret.

“Bluebeard had shown a peculiar smile when he unlocked the cupboards where the bodies of previous wives were hidden. The companions of my husband’s lonely hours were thus introduced.”

We may be wondering whether Leni has in fact come to somewhere like the château in Roissy from The Story of O where the woman with no name is to be made available for sadistic men. But O was not published in English until 1965, and Gerhard does not in any case have any such intentions towards Leni, even though she may have been prepared to participate if he had.

“Some men beat their wives. My husband showed greater refinement; he also suffered. I was trained in submission, had learned endurance by long practice. It never occurred to me to pack my bag and, like the heroine of a modern novel or film, walk out. I was not such a stupid young thing that I did not find perversity in love that needed such provocation, but I also found certain satisfactions.”

Leni is no Hedda Gabler shooting herself in the temple to avoid a scandal, no Nora from A Doll’s House: “That’s right. Now it is all over. I have put the keys here,” says Nora as she walks out of her own play.

But Leni has not yet discovered all of her husband’s secrets; there are more revelations to come. She meets Victor, an American journalist writing about “Nazi officials in government posts, of recent acts against Jews, anti-Semitic propaganda and the desecration of synagogues.” Leni almost has an affair with Victor but she finds out that he is merely using her to find the truth about her husband’s wartime activities.

Gerhard has told her that during the war he was in the army but he was never a Nazi, was not a senior officer and only worked in an office; but he would say that, wouldn’t he – that’s what they all said. Victor implies that her husband was attached to one of the smaller concentration camps; Leni refuses to believe him and leaves but she is still attracted to him.

The next revelation comes swiftly. Leni has already discovered in the wardrobe a dress that she does not recognize and questions the maid, who is very evasive. Then, coming home early one evening with her friend the cynical, serial divorcee Hansi, Leni hears music upstairs; a waltz is playing.

“I threw open the door without knocking, was immediately aware of the pungent, oriental perfume. Quietly in the doorway I watched the waltz, noted every detail; the black décolleté, the chain with the diamonds set in platinum lozenges, the matching platinum and diamond ear drops which Gerhard sometimes took from the safe for me to wear at important parties, the short crop of dyed chestnut hair, several bracelets from the safe. Satin slippers had pointed toes and thin high heels but the ankles above them were thick and not at all shapely, the ankles of a man.”

Both men are shocked at the intrusion. “Frozen in the waltz while the music trilled on, they could only stare.” Gerhard tries to recover the situation with an icy “I didn’t expect you so early,” as Hansi tries to get Leni out of the room to come home with her. With perfect timing, the old Hungarian family retainer comes into the room.

“Imre limped in with the coffee pot and two cups, brandy and a silver dish with sugared fruit. He knew his master’s tastes, had served him long before a wife had been brought to the house.”

This situation almost prefigures Liliana Cavani’s 1975 film The Night Porter, in which an SS officer who had both gay and masochistic tendencies had taken photographs in a concentration camp during the war and had had an ambiguous sadomasochistic relationship with a female teenage prisoner; they meet later in Vienna and re-establish their bizarre relationship.

The cross dressing man sneers at Leni: “You know why he married a Jew girl, don’t you? Out of spite. He was angry with me.” Leni remembers one night in a restaurant when Gerhard had taken a phone call and come back angry with “the devil’s bitch” but had given her no further explanation; straight afterwards he had proposed to Leni.

“During a marriage proposal a man can hardly confess that he has kept a male mistress. I had been impressed because the rejected bitch had called from Rome.” But Leni realizes now that she is a “bride of spite,” a poor substitute. She could perhaps fight against the attentions of another woman, but not of a man.

Still, Gerhard pleads with Leni to stay, saying he still needs her and will confess everything. He apparently does, telling Leni that during the war he was in love with a senior officer whom he calls Konni, who was stationed near to the Wardenthal concentration camp that Victor had told Leni about.

Rather than being appalled, Leni accepts Gerhard’s story; she takes it as “a confession of perversity, which it was, also truthful so far is that part of the past was concerned.” For Leni this decadent world seems almost romantic, literally looking down on but removed from the reality of the horrors of prison camp; it almost becomes a form of escapism for her. Gerhard’s “boyish blushes made me see it as a love story, twisted and tragic. I suffered as though I were reading a sad novel.”

But Leni still does not really understand why Gerhard married her: surely not simply out of spite? Then, in his private room one night, where the books of photographs are, he talks to Leni about the portrait of his mother on the wall, looking down on them.

“I thought about you. I thought of you together, I often have, Leonora, you and my mother.” So this is why Gerhard, a gay man afraid of disappointing his mother, wanted to marry Leni, “to prove that he could live like other men, take a wife,” so that he could say to the dead woman’s portrait, “you see, mama, I am doing what you always wanted me to. Better the Jew girl than the devil’s bitch.”

Despite his confession, though, Gerhard still seems lost. “‘Help me,’ Gerhardt said and, humbly, several times, ‘I need you.’” What happened to Konni, Leni wants to know. Konni is now dead, Gerhard says; all that is over. I am yours now, if you will have me. “The story should have ended here, like all the tales about the lucky goose girl who comes to live in the castle.”

But, reader, the story is not over; Holocaust stories do not have happy endings. Gerhard has lied about Konni. Victor tells Leni that the man is in fact a war criminal who had been detained by the Americans but escaped.

Later, wandering lost around a part of the castle she has never been in before, Leni comes across Gerhard with two other men, one she knows, the other she assumes is Konni. They are playing cards, living an underground life of prewar decadence.

“Without victims to torment and excite them, without beatings and hangings and odd medical experiments to heighten the temperature of their love, they found other diversions, exquisite dinners, masked balls, mystic rituals, secret night games.”

Leni immediately gets in her car intending to report what she saw. She drives right past the local police station, worried that they might be to under the influence of the people in the castle, and carries on all the way to Vienna where she finds an apparently sympathetic police officer. But Leni then discovers that nothing has been done about her report; the castle servants have of course remained loyal to their master and denied everything.

Leni is even threatened with prosecution for adultery with Victor if she pursues it; the implication is that there is enough sympathy for ex-Nazis in the upper echelons of the Austrian government to keep him and other people like him hidden. Still, Leni does not intend to give up, she sees now why she was chosen, as perhaps Caspary saw why she was chosen to live long enough to write this book and keep the flame of collective Jewish memory burning brightly.

Surely it had been inefficiency or error on the part of some petty official that have saved me from the sealed trains, the concentration camp and death, but I can think of it only as a miracle. For what? Delights and disillusion, starvation and opulence, injustice and good fortune, perverse and garish and contradictory as the tormented saints and merry devils of a baroque church column.

God is life, child. I do not know God, I cannot make a prayer, but I can promise with all the truth that is in me that I will never again forget one brutal moment; and that I will not allow comfort nor complacence nor even compassion to keep me from shouting out against those sentimental, self-pitying murderers.

They try to show penitence in many ways, offer charm, kiss hands, practice skills, lure us with luxuries, urge us in the name of decency and good manners to bury the infamous past. Not me! I am a chosen sparrow. And even one small bird can keep the guilty from peaceful slumber through the haunted nights.

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Contributed by Francis Booth, the author of several books on twentieth-century culture: Amongst Those Left: The British Experimental Novel 1940-1960 (published by Dalkey Archive); Everybody I Can Think of Ever: Meetings That Made the Avant-Garde; Girls in Bloom: Coming of Age in the Mid-Twentieth Century Woman’s Novel; Text Acts: Twentieth-Century Literary Eroticism; Comrades in Art: Revolutionary Art in America 1926-1938; High Collars & Monocles: 1920s Novels by British Female Couples; and A Girl Named Vera Can Never Tell a Lie: The Fiction of Vera Caspary.

Francis has also published several novels: The Code 17 series, set in the Swinging London of the 1960s and featuring aristocratic spy Lady Laura Summers; Young adult fantasy series The Watchers; and Young Adult fantasy novel Mirror Mirror. Francis lives on the South Coast of England. 

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The Secret Gardens of Frances Hodgson Burnett by Angelica Shirley Carpenter

It’s never too soon to introduce young readers to classic authors. Angelica Shirley Carpenter’s The Secret Gardens of Frances Hodgson Burnett, a picture book biography (Bushel & Peck Books, 2024) does so in an immensely engaging way.

Vivid illustrations by Helena Pérez García that burst with colorful expression on every page. Angelica presents the story of Frances Hodgson’s insecure childhood on both sides of the Atlantic.

Marrying Dr. Swan Burnett, having two sons, experiencing triumph as well as hardships and tragedies and writing through it all is part of the fascinating story of this author’s life. Frances’s story is one of perseverance, finding moments of joy in complicated circumstances, and the solace of creative pursuit.

Because her few enduring books are so very famous —The Secret Garden (1911), A Little Princess (1905), and Little Lord Fauntleroy (1886), it’s not well known how incredibly prolific Frances was. She wrote far more books for adults than for children — dozens of novels, and at least thirteen stage plays. But it’s this trio of books for children of all ages that endure, with their timeless messages of kindness, generosity, hope, and healing.

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Learn more about
The Secret Gardens of Frances Hodgson Burnett
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Other things special things about this book include: a brief, fascinating biography of Frances Hodgson Burnett plus a timeline of her life; a selected list of some of her many books for children and and adults; and a bibliography of titles for those who’d like to delve more deeply into her life.

As icing on the cake there’s a letter to young readers from Keri Wilt, the great-great granddaughter of Frances. It’s followed by a set of “keys” to prompt children (and even adults) to gain a deeper understanding of The Secret Garden, a story that works on so many levels.

Kudos to Angelica Shirley Carpenter for her charming text and to Helena Pérez García for her stunning art. Together they have created not only a lovely picture book, but a keepsake. The cover even has a die-cut keyhole, inviting the reader to enter the adventure within.

 

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The Secret Gardens of Frances Hodgson Burnett is available
on Bookshop.org, Amazon, and wherever books are sold
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From the publisher, Bushel & Peck Books: “Frances Hodgson Burnett—best known for writing The Secret Garden, Little Lord Fauntleroy, and The Little Princess—had a difficult life, losing her father when she was very young, moving to a new country in the face of economic turmoil, and suffering the loss of a son and a marriage later in life. But Frances? She could imagine anything, and she used her gifts to transform grief and hardship into beautiful works of literature that lifted the spirits of millions around the world. This is her story.”

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Learn more about Frances Hodgson Burnett
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Praise for The Secret Gardens of Frances Hodgson Burnett by Angelica Shirley Carpenter

“Beauties blossom aplenty in this welcome volume. The Secret Gardens of Frances Hodgson Burnett can’t fail to captivate the minds and hearts of young readers and even, perhaps, plant some seeds there.” —Gregory Maguire, author of Wicked, co-founder of Children’s Literature New England

“The gray drudgery of industrial Manchester, England, contrasts with the vivid floral hues of Burnett’s gardens in stunning illustrations that perfectly pair with the book’s timeless message: ‘hope is never far for those who can imagine.’”—Foreword Reviews, Starred Review

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“Burnett’s own rags-to-riches story is compelling, too. The distinctive illustrations bring her gardens to life on the page through the graceful forms and rich, varied colors of trees, bushes, vines, and flowers….the theme of gardens as a source of beauty and healing is evident throughout this engaging biographical narrative.” —Booklist

“I am delighted to think that this lovely picture book will encourage children (and indeed their parents) to read The Secret Garden, one of the best children’s books ever written.” —Ann Thwaite, prize-winning British biographer, author of Beyond the Secret Garden: The Life of Frances Hodgson Burnett

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See also:
4 Classic Books by Frances Hodgson Burnett
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This post contains Bookshop.org and Amazon affiliate links. If a product is purchased after linking through, Literary Ladies Guide receives a modest commission, which helps us to keep growing.

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How It Feels to Be Colored Me by Zora Neale Hurston (full text)

“How it Feels to Be Colored Me” is an essay by Zora Neale Hurston originally published in the 1928 edition of The World Tomorrow.  She explores her unique experience with race in her customary wry, forthright manner.

Zora makes clear that she speaks only for herself,  as the tone of this essay doesn’t necessarily reflect the more proudly propagandist Black writing that characterized the 1920s New Negro movement (also known as the Harlem Renaissance.

Yet she clearly critiques the rampant segregation and bias that were woven into the fabric of American life, North and South. Following is the full text of “How it Feels to Be Colored Me,” now in the public domain. The only alteration to the text has been to break up long paragraphs, for easier readability on devices.

“How it Feels to Be Colored Me” by Zora Neale Hurston (1928)

I am colored but I offer nothing in the way of extenuating circumstances except the fact that I am the only Negro in the United States whose grandfather on the mother’s side was not an Indian chief.

I remember the very day that I became colored. Up to my thirteenth year I lived in the little Negro town of Eatonville, Florida. It is exclusively a colored town. The only white people I knew passed through the town going to or coming from Orlando. The native whites rode dusty horses, the Northern tourists chugged down the sandy village road in automobiles.

The town knew the Southerners and never stopped cane chewing when they passed. But the Northerners were something else again. They were peered at cautiously from behind curtains by the timid. The more venturesome would come out on the porch to watch them go past and got just as much pleasure out of the tourists as the tourists got out of the village.

The front porch might seem a daring place for the rest of the town, but it was a gallery seat for me. My favorite place was atop the gate-post. Proscenium box for a born first-nighter. Not only did I enjoy the show, but I didn’t mind the actors knowing that I liked it.

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I usually spoke to them in passing. I’d wave at them and when they returned my salute, I would say something like this: “Howdy-do-well-I-thank-you-where-you-go-in’?” Usually automobile or the horse paused at this, and after a queer exchange of compliments, I would probably “go a piece of the way” with them, as we say in farthest Florida.

If one of my family happened to come to the front in time to see me, of course negotiations would be rudely broken off. But even so, it is clear that I was the first “welcome-to-our-state” Floridian, and I hope the Miami Chamber of Commerce will please take notice.

During this period, white people differed from colored to me only in that they rode through town and never lived there. They liked to hear me “speak pieces” and sing and wanted to see me dance the parse-me-la, and gave me generously of their small silver for doing these things, which seemed strange to me for I wanted to do them so much that I needed bribing to stop, only they didn’t know it. The colored people gave no dimes. They deplored any joyful tendencies in me, but I was their Zora nevertheless. I belonged to them, to the nearby hotels, to the county—everybody’s Zora.

But changes came in the family when I was thirteen, and I was sent to school in Jacksonville. I left Eatonville, the town of the oleanders, as Zora. When I disembarked from the river-boat at Jacksonville, she was no more. It seemed that I had suffered a sea change. I was not Zora of Orange County any more, I was now a little colored girl. I found it out in certain ways. In my heart as well as in the mirror, I became a fast brown—warranted not to rub nor run.

But I am not tragically colored. There is no great sorrow dammed up in my soul, nor lurking behind my eyes. I do not mind at all. I do not belong to the sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that nature somehow has given them a lowdown dirty deal and whose feelings are all but about it. Even in the helter-skelter skirmish that is my life, I have seen that the world is to the strong regardless of a little pigmentation more or less. No, I do not weep at the world—I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife.

Someone is always at my elbow reminding me that I am the granddaughter of slaves. It fails to register depression with me. Slavery is sixty years in the past. The operation was successful and the patient is doing well, thank you.

The terrible struggle that made me an American out of a potential slave said “On the line!” The Reconstruction said “Get set!” and the generation before said “Go!” I am off to a flying start and I must not halt in the stretch to look behind and weep. Slavery is the price I paid for civilization, and the choice was not with me. It is a bully adventure and worth all that I have paid through my ancestors for it.

No one on earth ever had a greater chance for glory. The world to be won and nothing to be lost. It is thrilling to think—to know that for any act of mine, I shall get twice as much praise or twice as much blame. It is quite exciting to hold the center of the national stage, with the spectators not knowing whether to laugh or to weep.

The position of my white neighbor is much more difficult. No brown specter pulls up a chair beside me when I sit down to eat. No dark ghost thrusts its leg against mine in bed. The game of keeping what one has is never so exciting as the game of getting.

I do not always feel colored. Even now I often achieve the unconscious Zora of Eatonville before the Hegira. I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background. For instance at Barnard. “Beside the waters of the Hudson” I feel my race. Among the thousand white persons, I am a dark rock surged upon, and overswept, but through it all, I remain myself. When covered by the waters, I am; and the ebb but reveals me again.

Sometimes it is the other way around. A white person is set down in our midst, but the contrast is just as sharp for me. For instance, when I sit in the drafty basement that is The New World Cabaret with a white person, my color comes. We enter chatting about any little nothing that we have in common and are seated by the jazz waiters.

In the abrupt way that jazz orchestras have, this one plunges into a number. It loses no time in circumlocutions, but gets right down to business. It constricts the thorax and splits the heart with its tempo and narcotic harmonies. This orchestra grows rambunctious, rears on its hind legs and attacks the tonal veil with primitive fury, rending it, clawing it until it breaks through to the jungle beyond. I follow those heathen—follow them exultingly.

I dance wildly inside myself; I yell within, I whoop; I shake my assegai above my head, I hurl it true to the mark yeeeeooww! I am in the jungle and living in the jungle way. My face is painted red and yellow and my body is painted blue. My pulse is throbbing like a war drum. I want to slaughter something—give pain, give death to what, I do not know.

But the piece ends. The men of the orchestra wipe their lips and rest their fingers. I creep back slowly to the veneer we call civilization with the last tone and find the white friend sitting motionless in his seat, smoking calmly. “Good music they have here,” he remarks, drumming the table with his fingertips.

Music. The great blobs of purple and red emotion have not touched him. He has only heard what I felt. He is far away and I see him but dimly across the ocean and the continent that have fallen between us. He is so pale with his whiteness then and I am so colored.

At certain times I have no race, I am me. When I set my hat at a certain angle and saunter down Seventh Avenue, Harlem City, feeling as snooty as the lions in front of the Forty-Second Street Library, for instance. So far as my feelings are concerned, Peggy Hopkins Joyce on the Boule Mich with her gorgeous raiment, stately carriage, knees knocking together in a most aristocratic manner, has nothing on me. The cosmic Zora emerges. I belong to no race nor time. I am the eternal feminine with its string of beads.

I have no separate feeling about being an American citizen and colored. I am merely a fragment of the Great Soul that surges within the boundaries. My country, right or wrong.

Sometimes, I feel discriminated against, but it does not make me angry. It merely astonishes me. How can any deny themselves the pleasure of my company? It’s beyond me.

But in the main, I feel like a brown bag of miscellany propped against a wall. Against a wall in company with other bags, white, red and yellow. Pour out the contents, and there is discovered a jumble of small things priceless and worthless. A first-water diamond, an empty spool, bits of broken glass, lengths of string, a key to a door long since crumbled away, a rusty knife-blade, old shoes saved for a road that never was and never will be, a nail bent under the weight of things too heavy for any nail, a dried flower or two still a little fragrant.

In your hand is the brown bag. On the ground before you is the jumble it held—so much like the jumble in the bags could they be emptied that all might be dumped in a single heap and the bags refilled without altering the content of any greatly. A bit of colored glass more or less would not matter. Perhaps that is how the Great Stuffer of Bags filled them in the first place—who knows?

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From New Journalism to Modern Gonzo: Joan Didion, Gail Sheehy & Barbara Ehrenreich

Gonzo journalism is a writing style strongly associated with Tom Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson. However, others have contributed their voice to immersive journalism since the genre’s earliest roots in New Journalism.

Here we’ll explore the work of Joan Didion, Gail Sheehy, and Barbara Ehrenreich in this context as three impactful female gonzo journalists.

Where the author becomes central to the story or investigation is an example of immersive or gonzo journalism.

 

A Brief Introduction to Immersive Journalism

The first use of the term “New Journalism” is credited to Matthew Arnold in 1887, and in more recent times, to Tom Wolfe. Gonzo journalism evolved from there, originating from a 1970s article about the Kentucky Derby published in Scanlan’s Monthly. Since then, immersive nonfiction is another broad, descriptive phrase for this particular journalistic style.

However, some sources have stated that the first use of the word “gonzo” was used by the Boston Globe editor to describe Thompson’s writing style. Collins Dictionary lists the meanings for gonzo as “wild or crazy” or alternatively as “explicitly indicating the writer’s feelings at the time of witnessing the events.”

The phrase “crazy” would also be used to describe any events surrounding the gonzo author or observer, with Thompson noting: “If you’re going to be crazy, you have to get paid for it or else you’re going to be locked up.”

Gonzo, immersive, or investigative journalism sometimes adds responsibility or risk to reporting a story. However, gonzo journalism is never written as deliberate recklessness on the author’s part—there’s always a sense of responsibility even if stories or topics might get “crazy”.

Once the journalist becomes central to their story, you have a possible contender for what might be immersive nonfiction or gonzo journalism. For example, it can be argued that one of its early pioneers was Nellie Bly (1864–1922) who had herself institutionalized so that she could write the now-famous exposé, Ten Days in a Madhouse.

Bly’s writing also took her on a trip around the world in 72 days— she took inspiration from Jules Verne’s Around the World in 80 Days (1872) to see whether it was truly possible. Her real journey beat the fictional one by more than a week.

Modern gonzo journalism and immersive nonfiction have shown no signs of stopping or slowing down. The Gonzo Foundation promotes modern gonzo journalism by preserving Hunter S. Thompson’s legacy and writings.

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Joan Didion

Joan Didion (1934–2021) was one of gonzo journalism’s pioneers. Didion typed out Ernest Hemingway’s works as a writing exercise. This technique was echoed by Hunter S. Thompson, who did the same with F. Scott Fitzgerald’s writing.

She published her debut novel Run River in 1963, though focused much of her work on immersive nonfiction. Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968) is a seminal work that explores California life and the countercultural hippie movement.

Didion’s  essay for The Saturday Evening Post in 1967 described the darker side of Haight-Ashbury counterculture—shooting meth and dropping acid, a sharp contrast to the Summer of Love that was being portrayed in the media.

The nonfiction work Salvador (1983) covered the Salvadorian civil war from first-hand perspective—truly immersive journalism. In 1992, she published another essay collection titled After Henry. 

Her New York Times essay “Why I Write” explored Didion’s motivations: “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see, and what it means.”

Didion’s essay “In Bed” described her struggle with chronic migraines. She wrote: “Four, sometimes five times a month, I spend the day in bed with a migraine headache, insensible to the world around me.”

The Year of Magical Thinking chronicled the grieving process after her husband’s death. Written in 2004, it was published in 2005. Didion’s last book was an essay collection Let Me Tell You What I Mean (2021).

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Gail Sheehy

Gail Sheehy (1936 – 2020) was a pivotal immersive nonfiction writer, journalist, and political essayist. She examined the dark side of city living, often intermingled with her first-person perspective. She wrote for some of creative nonfiction’s most familiar magazines and publications, including Vanity Fair and New York.

Sheehy began writing sales and advertising copy for retailer J.C. Penney. She later became known for serious, hard-hitting feature writing. Like many immersive nonfiction authors, Sheehy’s writing put controversial topics under the spotlight. Famously, Sheehy provided in-depth and never-before-seen coverage of the Kennedy family.

Gail Sheehy wrote a 1969 feature article called Speed City for New York Magazine. Eventually, the idea evolved into the longer work Speed is of the Essence (1971), a book highlighting the evils of drug addiction and methamphetamine.

Redpants and Sugarman later became an explorative 1971 feature article about city prostitution.

The song Sugar Man by Rodriguez (professional mononym of Sixto Diaz Rodriguez) was recorded in 1969—and released in 1970 from the album Cold Fact. The Tom Waits song Downtown Train also makes a passing reference to “redpants and the sugar man” in 1985.

Sheehy’s influence stretched beyond journalism and into popular culture. Her writing continued to follow immersive journalism and gonzo-related writing.

Sheehy joined the Women’s Institute for Freedom of the Press (WIFP) as an associate in 1977. Today, the list contains a worldwide list of female journalists and press staff, including Sena Christian, Kashini Maistry, and Dorothy Abbott.

She continued in her highly detailed political coverage, and some of her focused pieces about Hillary Clinton were collected in the book Hillary’s Choice (1999). Sheehy’s writing evolved as she aged, and her later essays more readily covered aging and grief. Later books included Sex and the Seasoned Woman (2006) and Passages Into Caregiving (2010).

Gail Sheehy’s final work was a memoir—Daring: My Passages: A Memoir (2014). She passed away in 2020 at the age of 83. In her New York Times obituary, Sheehy was described as a “journalist, author, and social observer.”

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Barbara Ehrenreich

Barbara Ehrenreich (1941 – 2022) was an influential news writer, journalist, and creative nonfiction author. She received her PhD in cellular immunology. However, she dedicated her life to social causes and commentary after giving birth to her daughter in a public healthcare clinic in 1970.

The Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) lauds Ehrenreich’s “pen and sarcastic wit,” which became part of her characteristic writing style. Ehrenreich focused much of her writing on social causes, including healthcare, economics, and women’s rights. She became familiar as a columnist whose work turned into more than twenty published books.

In 1978, Ehrenreich published one of her most famous titles: For Her Own Good. This work explored the treatment of women, illustrated with “150 years of expert advice” that put women at a disadvantage in healthcare and science.

Ehrenreich was also known for such nonfiction works as The American Health Empire (1971); Witches, Midwives, and Nurses (1972); and The Snarling Citizen (1995). The Worst Years of Our Lives (1990) collected more of Ehrenreich’s essays, focusing on the progression of female rights—and the lack thereof.

The 2001 nonfiction book Nickeled and Dimed continues the tradition of immersive journalism. In this case, Ehrenreich cast a spotlight on American income by living the actual experience of getting by on minimum-wage jobs, and then documenting the results.

The 2005 book Bait and Switch: The Futile Pursuit of the American Dream was another one of Ehrenreich’s immersive works. For this book, she assumed the role of a corporate employee climbing the company ladder—the description calling it “the shadowy world of the corporate unemployed.”

Bright-Sided (2009) explored the downsides of “positive thinking” and the psychological impact of being told to be happier in the face of financial or social issues. This was a deliberate commentary on “guru-like” thinking, published during the self-help boom.

Her writing focused often on topics like social or economic injustices, and took an insider’s perspective on these issues. Ehrenreich stands out as an important gonzo journalist, because she was never afraid to immerse herself in the story — Living with a Wild God (2014) explored her thoughts on religion as a nonbeliever.

Ehrenreich wrote features for numerous publications, including Vogue, Salon.com, Harper’s Magazine, and The New York Times. Her last book was a collection of essays called Had I Known, published in 2020. Barbara Ehrenreich, called a “myth-busting writer and activist” in an obituary, passed away in 2022.

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Contributed by Alex J. Coyne, a journalist, author, and proofreader. He has written for a variety of publications and websites, with a radar calibrated for gothic, gonzo and the weird. His features, posts, articles and interviews have been published in People Magazine, ATKV Taalgenoot, LitNet, The Citizen, Funds for Writers, and The South African, among other publications.

The post From New Journalism to Modern Gonzo: Joan Didion, Gail Sheehy & Barbara Ehrenreich appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.

Mae V. Cowdery, a Harlem Renaissance Poet to Rediscover

Mae Virginia Cowdery (also known as Mae V. Cowdery; January 10, 1909 – November 2, 1948) is an under-appreciated poetic voice from the Harlem Renaissance era of the 1920s. A selection of her earlier poems is presented here.

Mae was the only child of professional parents who were part of Philadelphia’s Black elite. They instilled in her their values of racial pride, equality, and respect for the arts.

Above right, Mae in 1928 at age nineteen, sporting an androgynous look.

While still a student at the Philadelphia High School for Girls, three of Mae’s poems were published in Black Opals, a prestigious short-lived (1927 – 1928) literary journal of a Philadelphia cultural organization of the same name.

For the fledgling poet, 1927 was a banner year. In addition to publication in Black Opals, she won first prize for her poem “Longings” in an NAACP-sponsored competition. It was published in the association’s journal, The Crisis. She won the Krigwa Prize for “Lamps, ” and “Dusk” was chosen for Ebony and Topaz, an anthology of Black poets published that same year.

Mae attended Pratt Institute in Brooklyn with the aim of studying fashion design. Though she didn’t complete her studies, her sojourn in New York City was an entry into the lively cultural scene in Greenwich Village. Perhaps that’s where she encountered the poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay, whose poetry she admired. She also enjoyed a lively correspondence with Langston Hughes, who greatly encouraged her poetic endeavors.

After her early successes, she continued to have her poems published in journals and anthologies highlighting writers now associated with the Harlem Renaissance.

In 1936, Mae produced a limited edition of 350 copies of We Lift Our Voices: And Other Poems, which was critically well received. And because there were relatively few copies printed, it’s difficult to obtain this book.

Not yet in the public domain, its contents are not freely distributed online. I was fortunate enough to see one of the rare copies in the main branch of the New York Public Library, and the poetry is just beautiful. Hopefully it can become more widely available when it falls into the public domain.

Mae’s bisexual life was an open a secret. Desire for both male and female love objects were expressed in her poetry. “Dusk” (1927), for example, begins: Like you / Letting down your  / Purpled shadowed hair  /To hide the rose and gold  / Of your loveliness … In “Love in These Days” a relationship sours between a woman and a man: Her eyes were hard  /  And his bitter  / As they sat and watched  / The fire fade …

After her sojourn in New York City, Mae returned to Philadelphia, married twice, had a daughter, and her life folded into the city’s Black elite. Society columns depicted her public persona as a young society matron, impeccably attired in dresses and pearls, a contrast to her androgynous portrait at age nineteen shown at the top of this post.

It’s not clear why Mae took her own life at the age of thirty-nine (in 1948). Her obituary made no mention that she was a published poet. Philadelphia-based anthropologist and activist Arthur Huff Fauset (half-brother of Jessie Redmon Fauset) wrote that Mae was “a flame that burned out rapidly … a flash in the pan with great potential who just wouldn’t settle down.” To be fair, we don’t know if she wouldn’t, or simply couldn’t, due to external pressures to conform.

Numbering more than sixty exquisite poems, Mae Cowdery’s body of work is significant, even in comparison to those contemporaries of the Harlem Renaissance era who have remained known. One of the best overviews of her brief life can be found in Aphrodite’s Daughters: Three Modernist Poets of the Harlem Renaissance by Maureen Honey (Rutgers University Press, 2016).

The following is a selection of poems by Mae Virginia Cowdery are in the public domain.

LampsLongingsThe Wind BlowsDuskTimeGoalHidden MoonMy BodyNamelessLove in These DaysA PrayerOf the EarthWant

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Lamps

Bodies are lamps
And their life is the light.
Ivory, Gold, Bronze and Ebony—
Yet all are lamps
And their lives the lights.
Dwelling in the tabernacles
    Of the most high—are lamps.
Lighting the weary pilgrims’ way
    As they travel the dreary night—are lamps.
Swinging aloft in great Cathedrals
    Beaming on rich and poor alike—are lamps.
Flickering fitfully in harlot dives
    Wanton as they that dwell therein— are lamps.
Ivory, Gold, Bronze and Ebony—
Yet all are lamps
And their lives the lights.
Some flames rise high above the horizon
    And urge others to greater power.
Some burn steadfast thru the night
    To welcome the prodigal home.
Others flicker weakly, lacking oil to burn
    And slowly die unnoticed.
What matter how bright the flame
    How weak?
What matter how high it blazes
    How low?
A puff of wind will put it out.
You and I are lamps—Ebony lamps,
Our flame glows red and rages high within
But our ebon shroud becomes a shadow
And our light seems weak and low.
    Break that shadow
    And let the flame illumine heaven
    Or blow wind…blow
    And let our feeble lights go out.

(The Crisis, December 1927. This poem was one of two poems by Mae Cowdery that won first prize in the 1927 poetry competition in The Crisis, along with the next poem, “Longings”)

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Longings

To dance—
In the light of moon,
A platinum moon
Poised like a slender dagger
On the velvet darkness of night.

To dream—
’Neath the bamboo trees
On the sable breast
Of earth—
And listen to the wind.

To croon—
Weird sweet melodies
Round the cabin door
With banjos clinking softly—
And from out the shadow
Hear the beat of tom-toms
Resonant through the years.

To plunge—
My brown body
In a golden pool,
And lazily float on the swell
Watching the rising sun.

To stand—
On a purple mountain
Hidden from earth
By mists of dreams
And tears—

To talk—
With God.

(The Crisis, December 1927)

. . . . . . . . . .

The Wind Blows

The wind blows.
My soul is like a tree
Lifting its face to the sun,
Flinging wide its branches
To catch the falling rain,
   To breathe into itself a fragrance
Of far-off fields of clover,
Of hidden vales of violets,—
The wind blows,—
It is spring!

The wind blows.
My soul is like sand,
Hot, burning sand
That drifts and drifts
Caught by the wind,
Swirling, stinging, swarting,
Silver in the moonlight.
Soft breath of lovers’ feet
Lulled to sleep by the lap of waves,
The wind blows—
It is summer!

The wind blows.
My soul is still
In silent reverie
Hearing sometimes a sigh
As the frost steals over the land
Nipping everywhere.
Earth is dead.
The woods are bare.
The last leaf is gone.
Nipped by death’s bitter frost,
My youth grown grey
Awaits the coming of
The new year.
The wind blows,—
It is winter!

(Opportunity, October 1927)

. . . . . . . . . .

Dusk

Like you 
Letting down your 
Purpled shadowed hair 
To hide the rose and gold 
Of your loveliness 
And your eyes peeping thru 
Like beacon lights 
In the gathering darkness. 

(Ebony and Topaz, 1927)

. . . . . . . . .

Time

I used to sit on a high green hill
And long for you to be like the clouds,
Soft and white……….
And you eyes be like heaven’s blue
And your hair like the tree sifted sun……….
But then I was young, and my eyes yet
Round with wonder.
Now I site by an endless road and watch 
As you come……….swiftly like dusk
Your hair like a starless night
Your eyes like deep violet shadows,
And soft arms cradle me on your sweet
Brown breast……….for I have grown old
And my eyes hold unshed tears,
And my face is lean and hard in daylight’s
Mocking glare.
But with the night
Dusk fingers and lips like dew
Erase each wound of time
And my eyes grow round with wonder 
At your beauty. 

(Black Opals, Christmas 1927)

. . . . . . . . . .

Goal

My words shall drip
Like molten lava
From the towering black volcano,
On the sleeping town
’Neath its summit.
My thoughts shall be
Hot ashes
Burning all in its path.

I shall not stop
Because critics sneer,
Nor stoop to fawning
At man’s mere fancy.

I shall breathe
A clearer freer air
For I shall see the sun
Above the crowd, 

I shall not blush
And make excuse
When a son of Adam,
Who calls himself
“God’s Layman,”
Slashes with scorn
A thing born from
Truth’s womb and nursed
By beauty. It will not
Matter who stoops
To cast the first stone.
Does not my spirit
Soar above these feeble
Minds? thoughts born
From prejudice’s womb
And nursed by tradition? 

I will shatter the wall
Of darkness that rises
From gleaming day
And seeks to hide the sun.
I will turn this wall of 
Darkness (that is night)
Into a thing of beauty.

I will take from the hearts
Of black men–
Prayers their lips 
Are ‘fraid to utter.
And turn their coarseness
Into a beauty of the jungle
Whence they came.

The lava from the black volcano
Shall be words–the ashes–thoughts 
Of all men.

(Black Opals, Spring 1927)

. . . . . . . . . .

Hidden Moon

My thoughts soared up
To the starless sky
And a cloud
Passed over the face
Of the yellow moon.
My thoughts
Are the clouds that hide
The face of the moon,
And yours are
The night wind
That blows away the ugly
Moon clouds. 
(Black Opals, Spring 1927)

. . . . . . . . . .

My Body

My body
Is an ugly thing
Fashioned by God.
My body
Is an empty thing
Made from crumbling sod.

My soul
Is a lovely thing
Fashioned by God.
My soul 
Is a flaming thing
That trampling hordes
Have left untrod. 
(Black Opals, Spring 1927)

. . . . . . . . .

Nameless

How like the restless beating
Of our hearts
Is the surge of the sea;
How like the tumult
Of our souls
Is the lashing of the storm;
How like the yearning
In our song
Is the wind,
How like a prayer
Is night.

(Black Opals, Christmas 1928)

. . . . . . . . . .

Love in These Days

Her eyes were hard
And his bitter
As they sat and watched 
The fire fade
From the ashes of their love.
Then they turned 
And saw the naked autumn wind
Shake the bare autumn trees,
And each one thought
As the cold came in–
……..”It might have been”……..

(Black Opals, June 1928)

. . . . . . . . . . .

A Prayer

I saw a dark boy
     Trudging on the road
(Twas’ a dreary road Blacker than night).
     Oft times he’d stumble
And stagger ‘neath his burden
     But still he kept trudging
Along that dreary road.

I heard a dark boy
     Singing as he passed
Oft times he’d laugh
     But still a tear
Crept thru his song,
     As he kept trudging
Along that weary road.

I saw a long white mist roll down
     And cover all the earth
(There wasn’t even a shadow
     To tell it was night).
And then there came an echo . . . .
 . . . . Footsteps of a dark boy
Still climbing on the way.

A song with its tear
     And then a prayer
From the lips of a dark boy
     Struggling thru the fog.
Oft times I’d hear
     The lashing of a whip
And then a voice would cry to heaven
     “Lord! . . . Lord!
     Have mercy! . . .  mercy!”
And still that bleeding body
     Pushed onward thru the fog .
Song . . .  Tears . . .  Blood . . .  Prayer
     Throbbing thru the mist.
The mist rolled by
     And the sun shone fair,
Fair and golden
     On a dark boy . . . . cold and still
High on a bare bleak tree
     His face upturned to heaven
His soul upraised in song
     “Peace. . . . Peace
     Rest in the Lord.”
Oft times in the twilight
     I can hear him still singing
As he walks in the heavens,
     A song without a tear
A prayer without a plea.
Lord, lift me up to the purple sky
     That lays its hand of stars
Tenderly on my bowed head
     As I kneel high on this barren hill.
My song holds naught but tears
     My prayer is but a plea
Lord take me to the clouds
     To sleep . . . to sleep.

(The Crisis, September 1928)

. . . . . . . . . . .

Of the Earth

A mountain
Is earth’s mouth . . .
She thrusts her lovely
Sun painted lips
To the clouds . . . for heaven’s kiss.

A tree
Is earth’s soul . . .
She raises her verdant
Joyous prayer
To the slowly sinking sun
And to evening’s dew.
She flings her rugged defiance
To hell’s grumbling wrath
And deadly smile;
Then rustles her thanksgiving
To the dawn.

A river
Is earth’s tears . . .
Flowing from her deep brown bosom
To the horizon of
Oblivion . . .
O! Earth, why do you weep? 

(The Carolina Magazine, May 1928)

. . . . . . . . . .

Want

I want to take down with my hands
The silver stars
That grow in heaven’s dark blue meadows
And bury my face in them.

I want to wrap all around me
The silver shedding of the moon
To keep me warm.

I want to sell my soul
To the wind in a song
To keep me from crying in the night.

I want to wake and find
That I have slept the day away,
Only nights are kind now . . . 
With the stars . . . moons . . . winds and me . . . 

(The Crisis, November 1928)

See also:
Women Poets of the Harlem Renaissance to Rediscover and Read

Books on women writers of the Harlem Renaissance  on Bookshop.org *

* This is a Bookshop.org affiliate link. If a product is purchased after linking through, Literary Ladies Guide receives a modest commission, which helps us to keep growin.

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Ellen Glasgow, Southern Writer Worth Rediscovering

Ellen Glasgow (April 22, 1873 – November 21, 1945) was one of the South’s most eminent writers of her day. Today she’s far less known than contemporaries like Edith Wharton and Willa Cather, despite having created an impressive body of work.

Ellen’s output included novels, collections of short stories and poems, a treatise on how to write fiction, and an autobiography. She was also the recipient of the Pulitzer Prize in 1942. Today, if she is remembered for anything, it’s more for her influence than her literary talent. 

It’s well worth rediscovering this often overlooked writer.

 

Early years

Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow was born in Richmond, Virginia to Francis Thomas and Anne Jane Gholson Glasgow. Her father, of Scotch-Irish descent, was from the Shenandoah Valley and studied at Washington and Lee College. Her mother was from an upper-crust family in Cumberland County with many illustrious ancestors.     

The dynamics of family life had an enormous influence on the young Ellen. Her mother, who gave birth to ten children, suffered from nerves and depression. Her father, a rough, blunt man who had affairs, ran Tredegar Iron Works, which supplied most of the munitions during the Civil War.   

Ellen’s parents decided her health was fragile and she was too headstrong for school, so she was educated at home. Lucky for this smart, curious, young lady, she had access to her father’s library and read voraciously: history, literature, and philosophy.

Over the years she was influenced by thinkers like Freud, Schopenhauer, and Darwin. Asserting her independence, she told her parents she would not make her debut, a right of passage for aristocratic southern young ladies.

Ellen was twenty when her mother died. This had a profound impact on her, and she never fully forgave her father for his ill-treatment of her mother.  

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Reshaping the literature of the South

Ellen Glasgow’s writing sparked a reshaping of the literature of the South. Her novels studied the changing culture and the roles of men and women, leaving behind the sentimental stories of olden times: the plantation houses surrounded by magnolias in the distance, the slaves toiling in the fields, all with the backdrop of the Civil War and Reconstruction.

Most of her books, set in Virginia,  were social histories of the region as it changed from an agrarian to an industrial society and women’s roles transformed; she can be considered an early feminist who certainly resented the strictures placed on her by society. 

Ellen left a generous body of work: some twenty novels; books of short stories and poems; essays; articles; and a memoir and collection of letters published posthumously. See her full bibliography.

In 1940 Ellen was awarded the Howells Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 1942, she was awarded the Pulitzer for her novel, In This Our Life. By then, she was aging, suffering from poor health, and winding down as a writer. In This Our Life was released as a 1942 film directed by John Huston, starring Bette Davis and Olivia de Havilland.  

A memorable quote from In This Our Life: “Why do all of us, every last one, have to go through hell to find out what we really want?”

The Encyclopedia of Southern Culture cites seven novels as her best efforts. The Deliverance (1904) depicts class conflict after the Civil War; her trilogy about women: Virginia (1913), Life and Gabriella (1916), and Barren Ground (1925) – stories about strong females who rebel against their roles in society. Further, she wrote three comedies of manners: The Romantic Comedians (1926), They Stooped to Folly (1929), and The  Shelter of Life (1932). 

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The 1942 film adaptation of
Ellen Glasgow’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel

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Troubles in life and love

In life, suffering can often lead to a heavy heart, a soulful depth of experience, and — good writing. Ellen Glasgow had more than her share of troubles. In addition to having little respect for her father and losing her beloved mother at such an impressionable age, she was a sickly child who battled debilitating deafness during her adult years. She lost her favorite sister Cary to cancer and later, her brother Frank and brother-in-law George McCormack (Cary’s husband) to suicide. 

In her twenties, she had an affair with a married man we only know as Gerald B., who later died. Ellen’s love life continued to be unlucky. For years she was quietly engaged to handsome Richmond attorney Henry Watkins Anderson, who was deeply involved with The Red Cross during World War II.

Anderson was assigned to the Red Cross Commission in the Balkans, where he began an affair with the beautiful Queen Marie of Romania (who also happened to be married). After some time, when Anderson returned to Richmond, he was still smitten with the Queen and couldn’t stop talking about her. Despairing, Ellen overdosed on sleeping pills one night. Yet she survived, and out of the ashes of misery came creativity. She kept writing and her reputation grew.  

 

Animal advocacy

Ellen had a great passion for social justice and was also very involved in animal advocacy. One of her charities was the Richmond SPCA. She encouraged many prominent citizens like Douglas Southall Freeman and James Branch Cabell to donate and get involved, and she was president of the board for twenty-one years, right up until her death; she was the driving force behind opening the city’s first shelter. 

According to the SPCA website, Ellen bequeathed the bulk of her estate and the rights to her work to this organization which gave them the seed for their endowment. All this was left in honor of her Sealyham Terrier Jeremy. 

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Ellen Glasgow’s legacy

Ellen had a wealth of interesting friends, including Allen Tate, James Branch Cabell, and H.L. Mencken. Her friend Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings was writing her biography but died before its completion.

This erudite, well-traveled, glass-ceiling-breaker was known for her grand entertaining at her Greek Revival mansion at 1 West Main in downtown Richmond. Once she even had a party for Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas while they were on their American tour. 

(An interesting note, in 2024, her house went up for sale for $1.395 million — 11,000 square feet, with all the beautiful historical details intact) 

Biographer Susan Goodman described Ellen Glasgow’s style as poetic realism. She influenced writers like Eudora Welty, Robert Penn Warren, and William Faulkner. Here’s hoping that a reconsideration of her works spreads beyond literary buffs and researchers. 

Ellen Glasgow died in her sleep on November 21, 1945, likely from heart disease. She is buried in Richmond’s historic Hollywood Cemetery with her beloved Jeremy alongside. Her epitaph reads: “Tomorrow to Fresh Woods and Pastures New.”

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Contributed by Tyler Scott, who has been writing essays and articles since the early 1980s for various magazines and newspapers.  In 2014 she published her novel The Excellent Advice of a Few Famous Painters. She lives in Blackstone, Virginia where she and her husband renovated a Queen Anne Revival house and enjoy small town life. Visit her at Pour the Coffee, Time to Write.

Further reading and sourcesGoodman, Susan.  Ellen Glasgow, A Biography. Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1998Reagan, Wilson and Freeis, William.  Documenting the American South, Encyclopedia of Southern Culture.  University of North Carolina Press, 1989: Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow, 1873-1945 Mambrol, Nassullah. Analysis of Ellen Glasgow’s Novels – Literary Theory and Criticism . June 2, 2018.  Berke, Amy. Bleil, Robert, Cofer, Jordan. Davis, Doug, Ellen Glasgow, American Literature After 1865, Chapter 76,  Pressbooks:  Ellen Glasgow (1873 – 1945) – American Literatures After 1865 Schwarting, Paulette. Ellen Glasgow’s Broken Heart | Virginia Museum of History & Culture Encyclopedia Britannica, Ellen Glasgow, American Author, Oct. 30, 2024.Starr, Robin, Richmond SPCA blog. June 8, 2011:  120 Years of History: Accomplishments of the early 1900’s and the leadership of Ellen Glasgow (Richmond SPCA Blog)

 

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Anarchism: What it Really Stands for by Emma Goldman (1911)

Emma Goldman (1869 – 1940) was a noted political activist and promoter of the anarchist philosophy. She was best known for her role in the development oof its theories in the early twentieth century.

As such, “Anarchism: What it Really Stands For” is a 1911 essay that crystalizes her views. Anarchism, in brief, argues against all forms of authority the abolishment of institutions of government, advocating for replacing them with stateless societies.

Goldman’s views seem particularly resonant — and relevant — in this age of government overreach into privacy and personal freedom.

In 1906, Goldman founded the Mother Earth Journal, serving as its editor and writing as a frequent contributor. The essay that follows  was originally published as a pamphlet (priced ten cents) by Mother Earth Publishing Association, in 1911. It is in the public domain.

 

Anarchism: What it Really Stands for by Emma Goldman

The history of human growth and development is at the same time the history of the terrible struggle of every new idea heralding the approach of a brighter dawn. In its tenacious hold on tradition, the Old has never hesitated to make use of the foulest and crudest means to stay the advent of the New, in whatever form or period the latter may have asserted itself.

Nor need we retrace our steps into the distant past to realize the enormity of opposition, difficulties, and hardships placed in the path of every progressive idea. The rack, the thumbscrew, and the knout are still with us; so are the convict’s garb and the social wrath, all conspiring against the spirit that is serenely marching on.

Anarchism could not hope to escape the fate of all other ideas of innovation. Indeed, as the most revolutionary and uncompromising innovator, Anarchism must needs meet with the combined ignorance and venom of the world it aims to reconstruct.

To deal even remotely with all that is being said and done against Anarchism would necessitate the writing of a whole volume. I shall therefore meet only two of the principal objections. In so doing, I shall attempt to elucidate what Anarchism really stands for.

The strange phenomenon of the opposition to Anarchism is that it brings to light the relation be tween so-called intelligence and ignorance. And yet this is not so very strange when we consider the relativity of all things.

The ignorant mass has in its favor that it makes no pretense of knowledge or tolerance. Acting, as it always does, by mere impulse, its reasons are like those of a child. “Why?” “Because.” Yet the opposition of the uneducated to Anarchism deserves the same consideration as that of the intelligent man.

What, then, are the objections? First, Anarchism is impractical, though a beautiful ideal. Second, Anarchism stands for violence and destruction, hence it must be repudiated as vile and dangerous. Both the intelligent man and the ignorant mass judge not from a thorough knowledge of the subject, but either from hearsay or false interpretation.

. . . . . . . . . . . 

Emma Goldman (International Institute of Social History)
. . . . . . . . . . .

A practical scheme, says Oscar Wilde, is either one already in existence, or a scheme that could be carried out under the existing conditions; but it is exactly the existing conditions that one objects to, and any scheme that could accept these conditions is wrong and foolish.

The true criterion of the practical, therefore, is not whether the latter can keep intact the wrong or foolish; rather is it whether the scheme has vitality enough to leave the stagnant waters of the old, and build, as well as sustain, new life. In the light of this conception, Anarchism is indeed practical. More than any other idea, it is helping to do away with the wrong and foolish; more than any other idea, it is building and sustaining new life.

The emotions of the ignorant man are continuously kept at a pitch by the most blood-curdling stories about Anarchism. Not a thing too outrageous to be employed against this philosophy and its exponents. Therefore Anarchism represents to the unthinking what the proverbial bad man does to the child,—a black monster bent on swallowing everything; in short, destruction and violence.

Destruction and violence! How is the ordinary man to know that the most violent element in society is ignorance; that its power of destruction is the very thing Anarchism is combating?

Nor is he aware that Anarchism, whose roots, as it were, are part of nature’s forces, destroys, not healthful tissue, but parasitic growths that feed on the life’s essence of society. It is merely clearing the soil from weeds and sagebrush, that it may eventually bear healthy fruit.

Someone has said that it requires less mental effort to condemn than to think. The widespread mental indolence, so prevalent in society, proves this to be only too true.

Rather than to go to the bottom of any given idea, to examine into its origin and meaning, most people will either condemn it altogether, or rely on some superficial or prejudicial definition of non-essentials.

Anarchism urges man to think, to investigate, to analyze every proposition; but that the brain capacity of the average reader be not taxed too much, I also shall begin with a definition, and then elaborate on the latter.

ANARCHISM: The philosophy of a new social order based on liberty unrestricted by man-made law; the theory that all forms of government rest on violence, and are therefore wrong and harmful, as well as unnecessary.

The new social order rests, of course, on the materialistic basis of life; but while all Anarchists agree that the main evil today is an economic one, they maintain that the solution of that evil can be brought about only through the consideration of every phase of life,—individual, as well as the collective; the internal, as well as the external phases.

A thorough perusal of the history of human development will disclose two elements in bitter conflict with each other; elements that are only now beginning to be understood, not as foreign to each other, but as closely related and truly harmonious, if only placed in proper environment: the individual and social instincts.

The individual and society have waged a relentless and bloody battle for ages, each striving for supremacy, because each was blind to the value and importance of the other. The individual and social instincts,—the one a most potent factor for individual endeavor, for growth, aspiration, self-realization; the other an equally potent factor for mutual helpfulness and social well-being.

The explanation of the storm raging within the individual, and between him and his surroundings, is not far to seek. The primitive man, unable to understand his being, much less the unity of all life, felt himself absolutely dependent on blind, hidden forces ever ready to mock and taunt him.

Out of that attitude grew the religious concepts of man as a mere speck of dust dependent on superior powers on high, who can only be appeased by complete surrender. All the early sagas rest on that idea, which continues to be the leit-motif of the biblical tales dealing with the relation of man to God, to the State, to society.

Again and again the same motif, man is nothing, the powers are everything. Thus Jehovah would only endure man on condition of complete surrender. Man can have all the glories of the earth, but he must not become conscious of himself. The State, society, and moral laws all sing the same refrain: Man can have all the glories of the earth, but he must not become conscious of himself.

Anarchism is the only philosophy which brings to man the consciousness of himself; which maintains that God, the State, and society are non-existent, that their promises are null and void, since they can be fulfilled only through man’s subordination.

Anarchism is therefore the teacher of the unity of life; not merely in nature, but in man. There is no conflict between the individual and the social instincts, any more than there is between the heart and the lungs: the one the receptacle of a precious life essence, the other the repository of the element that keeps the essence pure and strong.

The individual is the heart of society, conserving the essence of social life; society is the lungs which are distributing the element to keep the life essence—that is, the individual—pure and strong.

“The one thing of value in the world,” says Emerson, “is the active soul; this every man contains within him. The soul active sees absolute truth and utters truth and creates.” In other words, the individual instinct is the thing of value in the world. It is the true soul that sees and creates the truth alive, out of which is to come a still greater truth, the re-born social soul.

Anarchism is the great liberator of man from the phantoms that have held him captive; it is the arbiter and pacifier of the two forces for individual and social harmony. To accomplish that unity, Anarchism has declared war on the pernicious influences which have so far prevented the harmonious blending of individual and social instincts, the individual and society.

Religion, the dominion of the human mind; Property, the dominion of human needs; and Government, the dominion of human conduct, represent the stronghold of man’s enslavement and all the horrors it entails.

Religion! How it dominates man’s mind, how it humiliates and degrades his soul. God is everything, man is nothing, says religion. But out of that nothing God has created a kingdom so despotic, so tyrannical, so cruel, so terribly exacting that naught but gloom and tears and blood have ruled the world since gods began.

Anarchism rouses man to rebellion against this black monster. Break your mental fetters, says Anarchism to man, for not until you think and judge for yourself will you get rid of the dominion of darkness, the greatest obstacle to all progress.

Property, the dominion of man’s needs, the denial of the right to satisfy his needs. Time was when property claimed a divine right, when it came to man with the same refrain, even as religion, “Sacrifice! Abnegate! Submit!”

The spirit of Anarchism has lifted man from his prostrate position. He now stands erect, with his face toward the light. He has learned to see the insatiable, devouring, devastating nature of property, and he is preparing to strike the monster dead.

“Property is robbery,” said the great French Anarchist, Proudhon. Yes, but without risk and danger to the robber. Monopolizing the accumulated efforts of man, property has robbed him of his birthright, and has turned him loose a pauper and an outcast.

Property has not even the time-worn excuse that man does not create enough to satisfy all needs. The A B C student of economics knows that the productivity of labor within the last few decades far exceeds normal demand a hundredfold. But what are normal demands to an abnormal institution?

The only demand that property recognizes is its own gluttonous appetite for greater wealth, because wealth means power: the power to subdue, to crush, to exploit, the power to enslave, to outrage, to degrade.

America is particularly boastful of her great power, her enormous national wealth. Poor America, of what avail is all her wealth, if the individuals comprising the nation are wretchedly poor? If they live in squalor, in filth, in crime, with hope and joy gone, a homeless, soilless army of human prey.

It is generally conceded that unless the returns of any business venture exceed the cost, bankruptcy is inevitable. But those engaged in the business of producing wealth have not yet learned even this simple lesson.

Every year the cost of production in human life is growing larger (50,000 killed, 100,000 wounded in America last year); the returns to the masses, who help to create wealth, are ever getting smaller.

Yet America continues to be blind to the inevitable bankruptcy of our business of production. Nor is this the only crime of the latter. Still more fatal is the crime of turning the producer into a mere particle of a machine, with less will and decision than his master of steel and iron.

Man is being robbed not merely of the products of his labor, but of the power of free initiative, of originality, and the interest in, or desire for, the things he is making.

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Real wealth consists in things of utility and beauty, in things that help to create strong, beautiful bodies and surroundings inspiring to live in. But if man is doomed to wind cotton around a spool, or dig coal, or build roads for thirty years of his life, there can be no talk of wealth.

What he gives to the world is only gray and hideous things, reflecting a dull and hideous existence,—too weak to live, too cowardly to die. Strange to say, there are people who extol this deadening method of centralized production as the proudest achievement of our age.

They fail utterly to realize that if we are to continue in machine subserviency, our slavery is more complete than was our bondage to the King. They do not want to know that centralization is not only the death knell of liberty, but also of health and beauty, of art and science, all these being impossible in a clock like, mechanical atmosphere.

Anarchism cannot but repudiate such a method of production: its goal is the freest possible expression of all the latent powers of the individual. Oscar Wilde defines a perfect personality as “one who develops under perfect conditions, who is not wounded, maimed, or in danger.”

A perfect personality, then, is only possible in a state of society where man is free to choose the mode of work, the conditions of work, and the freedom to work.

One to whom the making of a table, the building of a house, or the tilling of the soil, is what the painting is to the artist and the discovery to the scientist—the result of inspiration, of intense longing, and deep interest in work as a creative force.

That being the ideal of Anarchism, its economic arrangements must consist of voluntary productive and distributive associations, gradually developing into free communism, as the best means of producing with the least waste of human energy. Anarchism, however, also recognizes the right of the individual, or numbers of individuals, to arrange at all times for other forms of work, in harmony with their tastes and desires.

Such free display of human energy being possible only under complete individual and social freedom. Anarchism directs its forces against the third and greatest foe of all social equality; namely, the State, organized authority, or statutory law,—the dominion of human conduct.

Just as religion has fettered the human mind, and as property, or the monopoly of things, has subdued and stifled man’s needs, so has the State enslaved his spirit, dictating every phase of conduct.

“All government in essence,” says [Ralph Waldo] Emerson, “is tyranny.” It matters not whether it is government by divine right or majority rule. In every instance its aim is the absolute subordination of the individual.

Referring to the American government, the greatest American Anarchist, [Henry] David Thoreau, said: “Government, what is it but a tradition, though a recent one, endeavoring to transmit itself unimpaired to posterity, but each instance losing its integrity; it has not the vitality and force of a single living man. Law never made man a whit more just; and by means of their respect for it, even the well disposed are daily made agents of injustice.”

Indeed, the keynote of government is injustice. With the arrogance and self-sufficiency of the King who could do no wrong, governments ordain, judge, condemn, and punish the most insignificant offenses, while maintaining themselves by the greatest of all offenses, the annihilation of individual liberty.

Thus Ouida is right when she maintains that “the State only aims at instilling those qualities in its public by which its demands are obeyed, and its exchequer is filled. Its highest attainment is the reduction of mankind to clockwork. In its atmosphere all those finer and more delicate liberties, which require treatment and spacious expansion, inevitably dry up and perish.

The State requires a taxpaying machine in which there is no hitch, an exchequer in which there is never a deficit, and a public, monotonous, obedient, colorless, spiritless, moving humbly like a flock of sheep along a straight high road between two walls.”

Yet even a flock of sheep would resist the chicanery of the State, if it were not for the corruptive, tyrannical, and oppressive methods it employs to serve its purposes.

Therefore Bakunin repudiates the State as synonymous with the surrender of the liberty of the individual or small minorities—the destruction of social relationship, the curtailment, or complete denial even, of life itself, for its own aggrandizement.

The State is the altar of political freedom and, like the religious altar, it is maintained for the purpose of human sacrifice.

In fact, there is hardly a modern thinker who does not agree that government, organized authority, or the State, is necessary only to maintain or protect property and monopoly. It has proven efficient in that function only.

Even George Bernard Shaw, who hopes for the miraculous from the State under Fabianism, nevertheless admits that “it is at present a huge machine for robbing and slave-driving of the poor by brute force.” This being the case, it is hard to see why the clever prefacer wishes to uphold the State after poverty shall have ceased to exist.

Unfortunately there are still a number of people who continue in the fatal belief that government rests on natural laws, that it maintains social order and harmony, that it diminishes crime, and that it prevents the lazy man from fleecing his fellows. I shall therefore examine these contentions.

A natural law is that factor in man which asserts itself freely and spontaneously without any external force, in harmony with the requirements of nature. For instance, the demand for nutrition, for sex gratification, for light, air, and exercise, is a natural law. But its expression needs not the machinery of government, needs not the club, the gun, the handcuff, or the prison.

To obey such laws, if we may call it obedience, requires only spontaneity and free opportunity. That governments do not maintain themselves through such harmonious factors is proven by the terrible array of violence, force, and coercion all governments use in order to live. Thus Blackstone is right when he says, “Human laws are invalid, because they are contrary to the laws of nature.”

Unless it be the order of Warsaw after the slaughter of thousands of people, it is difficult to ascribe to governments any capacity for order or social harmony. Order derived through submission and maintained by terror is not much of a safe guaranty; yet that is the only “order” that governments have ever maintained.

True social harmony grows naturally out of solidarity of interests. In a society where those who always work never have anything, while those who never work enjoy everything, solidarity of interests is non-existent; hence social harmony is but a myth.

The only way organized authority meets this grave situation is by extending still greater privileges to those who have already monopolized the earth, and by still further enslaving the disinherited masses. Thus the entire arsenal of government—laws, police, soldiers, the courts, legislatures, prisons,—is strenuously engaged in “harmonizing” the most antagonistic elements in society.

The most absurd apology for authority and law is that they serve to diminish crime. Aside from the fact that the State is itself the greatest criminal, breaking every written and natural law, stealing in the form of taxes, killing in the form of war and capital punishment, it has come to an absolute standstill in coping with crime. It has failed utterly to destroy or even minimize the horrible scourge of its own creation.

Crime is naught but misdirected energy. So long as every institution of today, economic, political, social, and moral, conspires to misdirect human energy into wrong channels; so long as most people are out of place doing the things they hate to do, living a life they loathe to live, crime will be inevitable, and all the laws on the statutes can only in crease, but never do away with, crime.

What does society, as it exists today, know of the process of despair, the poverty, the horrors, the fearful struggle the human soul must pass on its way to crime and degradation. Who that knows this terrible process can fail to see the truth in these words of Peter Kropotkin:

“Those who will hold the balance between the benefits thus attributed to law and punishment and the degrading effect of the latter on humanity; those who will estimate the torrent of depravity poured abroad in human society by the informer, favored by the Judge even, and paid for in clinking cash by governments, under the pretext of aiding to unmask crime; those who will go within prison walls and there see what human beings become when deprived of liberty, when subjected to the care of brutal keepers, to coarse, cruel words, to a thousand stinging, piercing humiliations, will agree with us that the entire apparatus of prison and punishment is an abomination which ought to be brought to an end.”

The deterrent influence of law on the lazy man is too absurd to merit consideration. If society were only relieved of the waste and expense of keeping a lazy class, and the equally great expense of the paraphernalia of protection this lazy class requires, the social tables would contain an abundance for all, including even the occasional lazy individual.

Besides, it is well to consider that laziness results either from special privileges, or physical and mental abnormalities. Our present insane system of production fosters both, and the most astounding phenomenon is that people should want to work at all now.

Anarchism aims to strip labor of its deadening, dulling aspect, of its gloom and compulsion. It aims to make work an instrument of joy, of strength, of color, of real harmony, so that the poorest sort of a man should find in work both recreation and hope.

To achieve such an arrangement of life, government, with its unjust, arbitrary, repressive measures, must be done away with. At best it has but imposed one single mode of life upon all, without regard to individual and social variations and needs.

In destroying government and statutory laws, Anarchism proposes to rescue the self-respect and independence of the individual from all restraint and invasion by authority. Only in freedom can man grow to his full stature.

Only in freedom will he learn to think and move, and give the very best in him. Only in freedom will he realize the true force of the social bonds which knit men together, and which are the true foundation of a normal social life.

But what about human nature? Can it be changed? And if not, will it endure under Anarchism?

Poor human nature, what horrible crimes have been committed in thy name! Every fool, from king to policeman, from the flat-headed parson to the visionless dabbler in science, presumes to speak authoritatively of human nature. The greater the mental charlatan, the more definite his insistence on the wickedness and weaknesses of human nature. Yet, how can any one speak of it today, with every soul in a prison, with every heart fettered, wounded, and maimed?

John Burroughs has stated that experimental study of animals in captivity is absolutely useless. Their character, their habits, their appetites undergo a complete transformation when torn from their soil in field and forest. With human nature caged in a narrow space, whipped daily into submission, how can we speak of its potentialities?

Freedom, expansion, opportunity, and, above all, peace and repose, alone can teach us the real dominant factors of human nature and all its wonderful possibilities.

Anarchism, then, really stands for the liberation of the human mind from the dominion of religion; the liberation of the human body from the dominion of property; liberation from the shackles and restraint of government.

Anarchism stands for a social order based on the free grouping of individuals for the purpose of producing real social wealth; an order that will guarantee to every human being free access to the earth and full enjoyment of the necessities of life, according to individual desires, tastes, and inclinations.

This is not a wild fancy or an aberration of the mind. It is the conclusion arrived at by hosts of intellectual men and women the world over; a conclusion resulting from the close and studious observation of the tendencies of modern society: individual liberty and economic equality, the twin forces for the birth of what is fine and true in man.

As to methods. Anarchism is not, as some may suppose, a theory of the future to be realized through divine inspiration. It is a living force in the affairs of our life, constantly creating new conditions. The methods of Anarchism therefore do not comprise an iron-clad program to be carried out under all circumstances.

Methods must grow out of the economic needs of each place and clime, and of the intellectual and temperamental requirements of the individual. The serene, calm character of a Tolstoy will wish different methods for social reconstruction than the intense, overflowing personality of a Michael Bakunin or a Peter Kropotkin.

Equally so it must be apparent that the economic and political needs of Russia will dictate more drastic measures than would England or America. Anarchism does not stand for military drill and uniformity; it does, however, stand for the spirit of revolt, in whatever form, against everything that hinders human growth. All Anarchists agree in that, as they also agree in their opposition to the political machinery as a means of bringing about the great social change.

“All voting,” says Thoreau, “is a sort of gaming, like checkers, or backgammon, a playing with right and wrong; its obligation never exceeds that of expediency. Even voting for the right thing is doing nothing for it. A wise man will not leave the right to the mercy of chance, nor wish it to prevail through the power of the majority.”

A close examination of the machinery of politics and its achievements will bear out the logic of Thoreau.

What does the history of parliamentarism show? Nothing but failure and defeat, not even a single reform to ameliorate the economic and social stress of the people. Laws have been passed and enactments made for the improvement and protection of labor.

Thus it was proven only last year that Illinois, with the most rigid laws for mine protection, had the greatest mine disasters. In States where child labor laws prevail, child exploitation is at its highest, and though with us the workers enjoy full political opportunities, capitalism has reached the most brazen zenith.

Even were the workers able to have their own representatives, for which our good Socialist politicians are clamoring, what chances are there for their honesty and good faith?

One has but to bear in mind the process of politics to realize that its path of good intentions is full of pitfalls: wire-pulling, intriguing, flattering, lying, cheating; in fact, chicanery of every description, whereby the political aspirant can achieve success.

Added to that is a complete demoralization of character and conviction, until nothing is left that would make one hope for anything from such a human derelict. Time and time again the people were foolish enough to trust, believe, and support with their last farthing aspiring politicians, only to find themselves betrayed and cheated.

It may be claimed that men of integrity would not become corrupt in the political grinding mill. Perhaps not; but such men would be absolutely helpless to exert the slightest influence in behalf of labor, as indeed has been shown in numerous instances.

The State is the economic master of its servants. Good men, if such there be, would either remain true to their political faith and lose their economic support, or they would cling to their economic master and be utterly unable to do the slightest good. The political arena leaves one no alternative, one must either be a dunce or a rogue.

The political superstition is still holding sway over the hearts and minds of the masses, but the true lovers of liberty will have no more to do with it. Instead, they believe with Stirner that man has as much liberty as he is willing to take.

Anarchism therefore stands for direct action, the open defiance of, and resistance to, all laws and restrictions, economic, social, and moral. But defiance and resistance are illegal. Therein lies the salvation of man. Everything illegal necessitates integrity, self-reliance, and courage. In short, it calls for free, independent spirits, for “men who are men, and who have a bone in their backs which you cannot pass your hand through.”

Universal suffrage itself owes its existence to direct action. If not for the spirit of rebellion, of the defiance on the part of the American revolutionary fathers, their posterity would still wear the King’s coat. If not for the direct action of a John Brown and his comrades, America would still trade in the flesh of the black man.

True, the trade in white flesh is still going on; but that, too, will have to be abolished by direct action. Trade unionism, the economic arena of the modern gladiator, owes its existence to direct action. It is but recently that law and government have attempted to crush the trade union movement, and condemned the exponents of man’s right to organize to prison as conspirators.

Had they sought to assert their cause through begging, pleading, and compromise, trade unionism would today be a negligible quantity. In France, in Spain, in Italy, in Russia, nay even in England (witness the growing rebellion of English labor unions) direct, revolutionary, economic action has become so strong a force in the battle for industrial liberty as to make the world realize the tremendous importance of labor’s power.

The General Strike, the supreme expression of the economic consciousness of the workers, was ridiculed in America but a short time ago. Today every great strike, in order to win, must realize the importance of the solidaric general protest.

Direct action, having proved effective along economic lines, is equally potent in the environment of the individual. There a hundred forces encroach upon his being, and only persistent resistance to them will finally set him free. Direct action against the authority in the shop, direct action against the authority of the law, direct action against the invasive, meddlesome authority of our moral code, is the logical, consistent method of Anarchism.

Will it not lead to a revolution? Indeed, it will. No real social change has ever come about without a revolution. People are either not familiar with their history, or they have not yet learned that revolution is but thought carried into action.

Anarchism, the great leaven of thought, is today permeating every phase of human endeavor. Science, art, literature, the drama, the effort for economic betterment, in fact every individual and social opposition to the existing disorder of things, is illumined by the spiritual light of Anarchism.

It is the philosophy of the sovereignty of the individual. It is the theory of social harmony. It is the great, surging, living truth that is reconstructing the world, and that will usher in the Dawn.

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