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Quotes by Natalie Clifford Barney on Life and Love

Natalie Clifford Barney (1876 – 1972) was an American-born poet and novelist also known for her epigrams and pensées. She was an expat living the high life in early twentieth-century Paris where she presided over a famous literary salon. Here you’ll find a selection of quotes by Natalie Clifford Barney on life and love, from a woman who lived and loved to the fullest.

Though she published ten critically acclaimed books, she seems to be equally remembered for her colorful personal life as one of the movers and shakers of the Parisian lesbian circles of the time. She also used the wealth and privilege she was born into as a means of promoting other talented writers and artists.

She most always wrote in French, saying that it allowed her to fully express her emotions, even though English was her native language. Many of her works were based on her own love affairs and friendships, the best known of which is Amants Féminins ou les Troisième (Women Lovers or the Third Woman). This semi-autobiographical novel was one of very few of Barney’s books that were translated into English.

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“If we keep an open mind, too much is likely to fall into it.”

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“It’s necessary to use suffering. Otherwise, one is used by it.”

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“Lovers should also have their days off.”

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“Novels are longer than life.”

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Natalie Clifford Barney with her longtime lover, Renee Vivien

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“When you’re in love you never really know whether your elation comes from the qualities of the one you love, or if it attributes them to her; whether the light which surrounds her like a halo comes from you, from her, or from the meeting of your sparks.”

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“Fatalism is the lazy man’s way of accepting the inevitable.”

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“When she lowers her eyes she seems to hold all the beauty in the world between her eyelids; when she raises them I see only myself in her gaze.” 

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“Renouncement: the heroism of mediocrity.”

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“My queerness is not a vice, is not deliberate, and harms no one.”

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“Why grab possessions like thieves, or divide them like socialists when you can ignore them like wise men?”

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“Youth is not a question of years: one is young or old from birth.”

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“It is time for dead languages to be quiet.”

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“Time engraves our faces with all the tears we have not shed.”

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“I have sometimes lost friends, but friends have never lost me.” 

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“Paris has always seemed … the only city where you can live and express yourself as you please.” 

Learn more about Natalie Clifford Barney

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“I want to be at once the bow, the arrow, and the target.” 

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“Entrepreneurship is the last refuge of the trouble making individual.”

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“At first, when an idea, a poem, or the desire to write takes hold of you, work is a pleasure, a delight, and your enthusiasm knows no bounds. But later on you work with difficulty, doggedly, desperately. For once you have committed yourself to a particular work, inspiration changes its form and becomes an obsession, like a love-affair… which haunts you night and day! Once at grips with a work, we must master it completely before we can recover our idleness.”

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“To be one’s own master is to be the slave of self.”

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“There are intangible realities which float near us, formless and without words; realities which no one has thought out, and which are excluded for lack of interpreters.”

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“Most virtue is a demand for greater seduction.”

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“How many inner resources one needs to tolerate a life of leisure without fatigue.”

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“The advantage of love at first sight is that it delays a second sight.”

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Natalie Clifford Barney page on Amazon

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Doris Lessing

Doris Lessing, (October 22, 1919 – November 17, 2013) was a British novelist, playwright, poet, short story writer, and biographer. One of the most revered voices in modern literature, she has written intelligently and passionately about politics, parenting, aging, love relationships, and feminism. 

She was born Doris May Tayler in what was then Persia (present-day Iran) to British parents, Captain Alfred Tayler and Emily Maude Tayler. When she was five, her parents moved with her to Rhodesia (what is now Zimbabwe) to farm crops on one thousand acres of land. Observing the strife caused by the British in their colonial rule of the African nation, she developed a strong moral and political compass.

Lessing attended the Dominican Convent High School, a Roman Catholic convent for all girls in the Southern Rhodesian capital of Salisbury (what is now Harare). Afterward, she attended Girls High School in Salisbury and dropped out of school at the age of thirteen. She received no further formal education, though she self-educated from then on.

While still in her teens, she held a number of jobs to piece together a living. She worked at various times as an office worker, nursemaid, and journalist. When at age fifteen she got one of her first jobs as a governess, her employer gave her books on politics and sociology to read. She started writing stories, and not long after, successfully sold two to magazines in South Africa.

 
Early marriages 

Lessing moved to Salisbury in 1937 to work as a telephone operator and met her first husband, Frank Wisdom. She married at age nineteen and soon after had a son, John, born in 1940, and a daughter, Jean, born in 1941. She felt trapped and left the marriage in 1943.

After the divorce, she developed an interest in the Left Book Club. This organization was where she met her second husband, Gottfried Lessing. They married and had their first child, Peter, born in 1946.

The marriage also didn’t last. Three years after the birth of her son, they divorced. During their marriage, she had a love affair with RAF serviceman John Whitehorn, brother of journalist Katherine Whitehorn. He was stationed in Southern Rhodesia and she wrote him about ninety letters between 1943 and 1949. 

 
The start of a writing career

In 1949, Lessing moved to London with her youngest child, leaving her older two children in South Africa with their father. She wanted to pursue her writing career and socialist beliefs. She believed that she couldn’t be a good parent to her children, saying:

“For a long time I felt I had done a very brave thing. There is nothing more boring for an intelligent woman than to spend endless amounts of time with small children. I felt I wasn’t the best person to bring them up. I would have ended up an alcoholic or a frustrated intellectual like my mother.”

Since she was fifteen years old, Lessing sold her stories to various magazines. Her earliest works were African Stories (1948) and Going Home (1949). These semi-autobiographical stories were set in the Africa of her youth, a continent with which she had a love-hate relationship. 

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See also: Brilliant Quotes by Doris Lessing

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The Grass is Singing and The Golden Notebook

With the publication of her first novel, The Grass is Singing (1950), Lessing cemented her foothold as a writer. Semi-autobiographical and somewhat philosophical, the book was an immediate success. Set in Rhodesia, it’s the first of her five-novel series referred to as Children of Violence.

The Golden Notebook (1962) was her breakthrough novel, earning much international attention, especially among feminists. She later became something of an icon and the book is considered a “feminist bible.” The Swedish Academy praised it for being “a pioneering work” that “belongs to the handful of books that informed the twentieth-century view of the male-female relationship.”

Through the eyes of the protagonist, Anna Wulf, The Golden Notebook looks at feminist politics, the writer’s life, and what it means to be female. Anna’s struggles in a patriarchal world struck a chord at a time when second-wave feminism was barley nascent.

 

A noted science fiction writer

Lessing’s foray into science fiction seemed quite a departure from the political and feminist themes of her other novels, but it was all of a piece. She wove the subjects that she was passionate about into her speculative works as well,  notably, the five-book “Canopus in Argos” series.

In Charlie Jane Anders’ 2013 obituary of Doris Lessing in Gizmodo, she wrote:

“Seriously, if you want to write science fiction or fantasy, and you’re interested in learning how to capture the difficult niggly bits of people’s inner lives and their interactions with other people — then you absolutely must read Lessing, both her science fiction and her other stuff. We talk a lot about the importance of world-building in making readers believe in the setting of your story — and Lessing was a master of drawing you into a world and making it feel urgent and real.”

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Lessing is perhaps still best known for The Golden Notebook

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Themes of Doris Lessing’s work

Lessing has over fifty books in various different genres. Her writing focuses on the living conditions, behavioral patterns, and historical developments of the twentieth century. Her most famous novel, The Golden Notebook, focuses on a woman’s life situation, sexuality, political ideas, and daily life. Some of Lessing’s works delve into the future as she portrays civilization’s final hour from the eyes of an extraterrestrial observer. 

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14 Women Who Have Won the Nobel Prize in Literature

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Nobel Prize for Literature

When she won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2007 the jury described her as “that epicist of the female experience, who with skepticism, fire, and visionary power has subjected a divided civilization to scrutiny.”

Lessing was the was the eleventh women and oldest person to receive the award at age eighty-eight. In 2008 The Times put her at number five in the list of “The 50 Greatest British Writers since 1945.”

Doris Lessing long used her platform as an outspoken opponent of apartheid in South Africa, and spoke regularly about the subject. She practiced Sufism, a branch of Islam.

 

Other awards and honors

In 1971, Lessing was awarded the Man Booker Prize for her work Briefing for a Descent into Hell, published in 1971. She was awarded this prize a second time in 1981 for her science fiction novel, The Sirian Experiments (1980). She was later given the same award in 1985 and 2005 for other works. 

In 1977, Lessing declined an Order of British Empire Award, saying the “Empire is non-existent.” 

Lessing was awarded the Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 1974. She was nominated by American author Joyce Carol Oates. She was awarded the prize again in 1998. 

In 1997, Lessing was awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography/Autobiography for her novel, “Walking in the Shade: Volume Two of My Autobiography–1949-1962”. 

In 1999, she was appointed the Companion of Honor for “conspicuous national service.” She was named a Companion of Literature by the Royal Society of Literature.

In 2001, Lessing won the Prince of Asturias Award for Literature. Those who gave her the award stated that she was “the creator of an imaginary, everyday world, and her characters, the offspring of contemporary society, are a faithful reflection of twentieth-century morals.” 

Other awards Lessing received included the Austrian State Prize for European Literature, The David Cohen Prize, Prince of Asturias Award, and The Golden Pen Award.

 

The death of a beloved writer

Lessing suffered a stroke in the late 1990s and caused her to stop traveling. Though she was unable to go far, she was still able to attend the theatre and opera. It seemed though she was preparing for her death, asking herself, for instance, if she would be around long enough to finish a new book. 

Doris Lessing died on November 17, 2013, at the age of 94 at her home in London. 

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Doris Lessing page on Amazon

More about Doris Lessing

On this site

Dear Literary Ladies: How Do I Become a More Effective Reader?
Brilliant Quotes by Doris Lessing

Major Works

Doris Lessing was incredibly prolific; the list of her work below represents but a fraction of her output, as she wrote a great deal of nonfiction as well.

The Grass is Singing  (1950)
Martha Quest  (1952, the first of  “The Children of Violence” series)
The Golden Notebook   (1962)
Briefing for a Descent into Hell  (1971)
Memoirs of a Survivor (1974)
The Summer Before the Dark  (1973)
The Good Terrorist (1985)
The Fifth Child (1988)
Ben, in the World (2000)
The Sweetest Dream (2001)
The Grandmothers (2004)

Biographies and Autobiographies

Under My Skin: Volume One of My Autobiography, to 1949
Walking In the Shade: Volume Two of My Autobiography – 1949-1962
Doris Lessing: Conversations
Alfred and Emily (a memoir of her parents)

More Information and sources

Wikipedia 
The Nobel Prize in Literature in 2007
Reader discussion of Lessing’s books on Goodreads
My Hero: Doris Lessing by Margaret Drabble
Doris Lessing: Her Last Telegraph Interview 
Lessing’s Visions of the Future  
Lessing Remembered: Provocative, Blunt, Unforgettable

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

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Natalie Clifford Barney

Natalie Clifford Barney (October 31, 1876 – February 2, 1972) was an American-born writer of poems, epigrams, pensées and novels. She made her home in Paris, where she was known more for her literary salon and her colorful personal life than her writing, despite publishing ten critically acclaimed books in her lifetime.

She was “the wild girl of Cincinnati,” the grande dame of the literary salon and Parisian lesbian circles, and used her considerable wealth and influence to promote talented writers and artists from around the world.

Early years and work

Natalie was born to privilege. Her parents, Alice Pike Barney and Albert Clifford Barney, were wealthy through a combination of inheritance and private income, and the family had homes in Cincinnati, Ohio; Washington, DC; and Bar Harbor, Maine.

Natalie grew into a confident child, sociable and outgoing, and was naturally athletic with a particular love for riding horses. She was also beautiful, with a mass of pale blond hair that was often likened to moonbeams, sharp blue eyes, and delicate features.

The family often traveled, and from 1888 Natalie attended the exclusive Les Ruches boarding school in France. She was a good student, but later spurned the option of going to college, stating that she preferred education of her own design. She continued to study French, Greek, violin, and literature, seeking out informal and formal tutors who encouraged her ambitions.

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Settling in Paris

In 1896 she left America to settle in Paris permanently. Writing and socializing were Natalie’s focus during the first years of the new century. She was drawn to shorter forms of writing, particularly poetry and pensées (literally “thoughts” or “fragments”), and always wrote in French, claiming that it was the language in which she could best express her emotion.

Her earlier works are full of love and loss and classical beauty, mostly inspired by her readings of the classical poets — Sappho was a favorite — and her own, already tumultuous, love life.

By 1910 she had published four books: Quelques Portraits – Sonnets de Femmes, Éparpillements, Je Me Souviens, and Actes et Entr’actes. All were published to critical acclaim. However, it was Quelques portraits – sonnets de femmes, a chapbook of love poems to women published in 1900, that garnered the most attention. Reviews ranged from mildly complimentary to gushing (Henri Pene du Bois wrote of Natalie’s “miraculous power to write French verse”), but the fact that they were essentially love letters to women caused great scandal in some circles. Natalie’s father Albert, incensed by a headline that read “Sappho Sings In Washington,” stormed into the publisher’s offices to buy and then destroy the remaining copies and all printing plates. Consequently, the book is incredibly rare today.

Natalie became well-established in the glittering literary and artistic community of the Belle Epoque, and counted Colette, Pierre Loüys, Count Robert de Montesquiou, Lord Alfred Douglas, Jules Cambon, and Remy de Gourmont among her friends.

De Gourmont in particular was a lifelong admirer and promoter of her work. It was he who christened Natalie “The Amazon,” a nickname that would stick. She also continued to write, and Poems & Poèmes: Autres Alliances and Pensées d’une Amazone was published in 1920.

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The years of the salon

Natalie, perhaps taking after her mother, was a natural hostess. She was sociable, lively, and sharply witty. She also knew how to make people feel at ease, when to relinquish the spotlight, and how to promote others. It was this perfect combination of talents — as well as her own artistic and literary accomplishments — that made her Friday literary salon into arguably the most famous in Paris. It began when she moved into a pavillon at 20 rue Jacob, in the heart of the Left Bank, in 1908, but its heyday was the 1920s.

During these years, Friday afternoons were filled with writers and artists from all over the world. They came for the chance to mingle, to introduce and be introduced, to promote their work and hear the work of others, and to eat the famous chocolate cake. Regular attendees included Colette, Djuna Barnes, Ford Madox Ford, Paul Valéry, Ezra Pound, Mina Loy, and André Germain. Others such as Rilke, T.S. Eliot, Nancy Cunard, Somerset Maugham and Peggy Guggenheim dropped in occasionally.

There were definite standards for admission. Intelligence, artistic accomplishment, celebrity, and, in the case of women, beauty and style — any or all of the above were prerequisites for an invitation. Once there, however, the salon was noted for its inclusivity. Natalie was tolerant and open-minded, and people of all nationalities, religions, and sexual persuasions were welcome.

Natalie used the salon as a way of assisting those who were struggling financially, and she gave generously to individuals who she felt were worthy of her input. She also promoted tirelessly, particularly the work of women which, at the time, was generally not taken as seriously.

Her 1927 Académie des Femmes was a response to the all-male bastion of the Académie Française, and harked back to an earlier ambition of establishing a community of women poets on the island of Lesbos. Women writers were honoured with their own Friday at the salon, during which they would read from unpublished works or works in progress. The Académie included Colette, Gertrude Stein, Djuna Barnes, Mina Loy, Elisabeth de Gramont and Lucie Delarue-Mardrus. Although it faded away after 1927, it remained one of Natalie’s greatest achievements.

The salon ran — with a break over the years of the Second World War — almost until Natalie’s death, and was probably her most lasting and best known legacy.

 Love affairs served as inspiration 

Natalie was known for being a lesbian. Even in Paris, where attitudes were relatively tolerant for the time, her complex love life and her refusal to hide it brought her even more attention than the salon, and certainly more than her writing. Her approach can be summed up in her own words: “I am a lesbian. One need not hide it, or boast of it.”

She was also never monogamous, and her long term relationships — first with the poet Renée Vivien, and later with the artist Romaine Brooks and Elisabeth (Lily) de Gramont — were conducted against a continual backdrop of affairs, some more serious than others.

Natalie was as steadfast in friendship as she could be fickle in love, once claiming to be a lazy friend because “once I confer friendship, I never take it back.” Many lovers became close friends — close enough to immortalize Natalie in their works without offense being taken.

Natalie could be clearly seen as the main character in books by Liane de Pougy (Idylle Saphique), Djuna Barnes (Ladies’ Almanack) and Lucie Delarue-Mardrus (L’Ange et les Pervers).

Many of Natalie’s own works were based on her love affairs and friendships, including Aventures de l’Esprit (published in 1929 and containing reflections on her salon friendships) and the astonishing novel Amants Féminins ou les Troisième (translated into English by Chelsea Ray as Women Lovers or the Third Woman, an account of a three-way relationship with Liane de Pougy and Mimi Franchetti that ended in heartbreak for Natalie).

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Natalie Clifford Barney page on Amazon
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The later years of Natalie Clifford Barney

In the years immediately preceding the war, Natalie continued to write and publish her own work, run the salon, and socialize. She also traveled widely, settling into a seasonal routine of spending the winter with Romaine on the Côte d’Azure, the autumn in Romaine’s home above Florence, and taking trips to spas in France and Switzerland in between with Lily.

In 1930, her novel The One Who Is Legion was published — a strange, surreal account of a person who, having committed suicide, is brought back to life as a genderless being with no memory. Natalie herself claimed that it came from “the several selves … their conflicts and harmonies” that she felt she possessed. It was the only work that she published in English.

Natalie saw out the war in Florence with Romaine, and did not return to Paris until 1946. The house at rue Jacob was uninhabitable, and it was a further three years before she could move back in and recommence the Friday salons.

Other post-war projects included reestablishing the Prix Renée Vivien for women poets writing in French; and the private funding of three books which commemorated Dolly Wilde and Lucie Delarue-Mardrus. She also started work on her memoirs, which would later be published in 1960 as Souvenirs Indiscrets.

The amazon’s last Friday

Natalie never stopped writing, and her last book, Traits et Portraits, was published in 1963 when she was eighty-six. Her personal life, too, was no less vibrant. Her long relationship with Romaine finally ended when both were almost 90, at which time Natalie met and fell in love with the much younger Janine Lahovary. Janine would be Natalie’s last love and also her carer in her final years, but the split with Romaine  — who Natalie thought of as the love of her life — devastated Natalie.

She also endured the loss of the house at rue Jacob, having rented it for almost 60 years, when it was suddenly bought and an eviction notice served. Natalie spent her last months in the Hôtel Meurice, overlooking the Tuileries Gardens, increasingly infirm with the effects of old age. She died in February 1972 — on a Friday — at age ninety-five, and was buried in Passy Cemetery in Paris.

Contributed by Elodie Barnes. Elodie is an author, poet and artist with a serious case of wanderlust. She is originally from the UK, but has spent time abroad in Europe, the United States and the Bahamas. When not traveling or working on her current projects — a chapbook of poetry, “The Cabinet of Lost Things,” and a novel based on the life of modernist writer and illustrator Djuna Barnes — she can be found with her nose in a book, daydreaming her way back to 1920s Paris. 

More about Natalie Clifford Barney

Major works

Most of Natalie Barney’s major works were originally published in French:

Quelques Portraits-Sonnets de Femmes (1900)Cinq Petits Dialogues Grecs (1901)Actes et entr’actes (1910)Je me souviens (1910)Eparpillements (1910)Pensées d’une Amazone (1920)Aventures de l’Esprit (1929)Nouvelles Pensées de l’Amazone (1939)Souvenirs Indiscrets (1960)Traits et Portraits (1963)Amants féminins ou la troisième (2013)

English translations

Women Lovers, or the Third WomanA Perilous Adventure: The Best of Natalie Clifford Barney

Biographies

Adventures of the Mind: The Memoirs of Natalie Clifford Barney (1992)Wild Heart, A Life by Suzanne Rodriguez (2003)

More information

Wikipedia Reader discussion on Goodreads Natalie Clifford Barney: Queen of the Paris Lesbians Barney’s setting in Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party A Natalie Barney Garland on the Paris Review

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Empowering Quotes by Ntozake Shange

Ntozake Shange (1948 2018) was an African American playwright, poet, and feminist. She is best remembered for her 1975 Obie Award-winning choreopoem, For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow is Enuf.

Born in Trenton, New Jersey, she was the oldest of four children in an upper-middle-class family. She attended a white school where she endured racial attacks to receive a “quality” education. Shange’s family pushed her to find an artistic outlet which was how she discovered her love for poetry.

Heartbreak and racial attacks were influences in her work, which spans several genres addresssing injustice, violence, and oppression. Though her choreopoems have been criticized for using African American dialect and one-sided attacks on black men, many value her work for its flair and lyricism. Here are empowering quotes by Ntozake Shange, a valiant and unapologetic talent in the world of fiction, poetry and theater.

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Quotes from Sassafras, Cypress & Indigo (1982)

“Where there is a woman there is magic. If there is a moon falling from her mouth, she is a woman who knows her magic, who can share or not share her powers. A woman with a moon falling from her mouth, roses between her legs and tiaras of Spanish moss, this woman is a consort of the spirits.” 

 

“The slaves who were ourselves had known terror intimately, confused sunrise with pain, & accepted indifference as kindness.” 

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“Creation is everything you do. Make something.” 

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Quotes from For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow is Enuf, 1975

 

“Through my tears I found god in myself and I loved her fiercely.” 

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“i usedta live in the world really be in the world free & sweet talkin good mornin & thank-you & nice day uh huh i cant now i cant be nice to nobody nice is such a rip-off regular beauty & a smile in the street is just a set-up” 

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“And this is for Colored girls who have considered suicide, but are moving to the ends of their own rainbows.” 

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“I started writing because there’s an absence of things I was familiar with or that I dreamed about. One of my senses of anger is related to this vacancy — a yearning I had as a teenager … and when I get ready to write, I think I’m trying to fill that.”

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” … with no further assistance & no guidance from you

i am endin this affair

this note is attached to a plant

i’ve been waterin since the day i met you

you may water it

yr damn self” 

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“Ever since I realized there waz someone callt/ 

a colored girl an evil woman a bitch or a nag/ 

i been tryin not to be that & leave bitterness/ 

in somebody else’s cup…” 

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“somebody/ anybody sing a black girl’s song bring her out to know herself to know you but sing her rhythms carin/ struggle/ hard times sing her song of life she’s been dead so long closed in silence so long she doesn’t know the sound of her own voice her infinite beauty she’s half-notes scattered without rhythm/ no tune sing her sighs sing the song of her possibilities sing a righteous gospel let her be born let her be born & handled warmly.” 

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“Being alive and being a woman is all I got, but being colored is a metaphysical dilemma I haven’t conquered yet.”

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“my spirit is too ancient to understand the separation of soul & gender.” 

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Ntozake Shange page on Amazon

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Quotes by Ntozake Shange from other works & interviews

“Right now being born a girl is to be born threatened.” 

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“I write for young girls of color, for girls who don’t even exist yet, so that there is something there for them when they arrive. I can only change how they live, not how they think.” – “Back at You,” Interview with Rebecca Carroll, 1995

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“I’m a firm believer that language and how we use language determines how we act, and how we act then determines our lives and other people’s lives.” – “Shange’s Men: For Colored Girls revisited, and Movement Beyond,” Interview with Neal A. Lester, 1992

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“our dreams draw blood from old sores.” – “Spell number seven,”  1985

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“I am gonna write poems til i die and when i have gotten outta this body i am gonna hang round in the wind and knock over everybody who got their feet on the ground.” –  “Advice,” “Nappy Edges,”  1979

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“When I die, I will not be guilty of having left a generation of girls behind thinking that anyone can tend to their emotional health other than themselves.” 

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“I’m committed to the idea that one of the few things human beings have to offer is the richness of unconscious and conscious emotional responses to being alive … The kind of esteem that’s given to brightness/smartness obliterates average people or slow learners from participating fully in human life, particularly technical and intellectual life. But you cannot exclude any human being from emotional participation.” 

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“Our society allows people to be absolutely neurotic and totally out of touch with their feelings and everyone else’s feelings, and yet be very respectable.” 

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“When words & manners leave you no space for yourself

make

very personal

very clear

& your obstructions will join you or disappear.” 

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“I hit my head against the wall because I don’t want to know all the terrible things that I know about. I don’t want to feel all these wretched things, but they’re in me already. If I don’t get rid of them, I’m not ever going to feel anything else.” 

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“one thing I don’t need is any more apologies i got sorry greetin me at my front door you can keep yrs i don’t know what to do wit em they don’t open doors or bring the sun back they don’t make me happy or get a mornin paper didn’t nobody stop usin my tears to wash cars cuz a sorry.” – “Sorry”

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“in our ordinaryness we are most bizarre.” – “Combat Breathing” 

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“nice is such a rip-off.” – Plays from the New York Shakespeare Festival, 1986

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“Novels allow me to create a whole world.” – “AT HOME WITH/Ntozake Shange; Native Daughter,” Interview with Kimberly J. McClarin, 1994

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

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Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans (1925)

In 1925, Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans: Being a History of a Family’s Progress was published, though the author had finished it many years earlier. It was quite a task to find a publisher for it, and so it languished until the inscrutable author had her first major commercial success with The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas — a memoir that Gertrude Stein (1874 – 1946) not Alice, had actually written.

The Making of Americans is considered a modernist novel covering the history, progress, and genealogy of the fictional Herlsand and Dehning families. It’s written in Stein’s inimitable and experimental style, one that requires much patience, as it is steeped in excruciating detail and heavy repetition. In a March 1934 review of The Making of Americans in The Capital Times, the critic captures the difficulties and pleasures of the novel:

“The style is confusing until you get used to it. The words and sentence structures are simple enough yet the odd phrasing and unique combinations of words, the driving repetitions are upsetting to a reader who is accustomed to having things move along in the orthodox fashion.

Yet if you have patience to stick with it, you’ll begin to realize that by this method Gertrude Stein is able to give the reader a sense of human relationships and emotions which are ordinarily intangible and almost impossible to characterize in straightforward prose.

She has said of her own writing that people may not like it, but that her sentences ‘get under their skin.’ And if you’ll subject yourself to an hour or two of Gertrude Stein you will find that this is true.

Don’t try Tender Buttons or Useful Knowledge, which couldn’t possibly make sense for anyone except the person who wrote them, and even that is dubious, but read Three Lives or The Making of Americans, then try to write anything and you’ll find that the Stein Rhythms and repetitions have gotten into your blood. It’s easy to see why she’s so great an influence upon young writers.”

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Tender Buttons: Experiment in Cubist Poetry, or Literary Prank?
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Excerpt from an analysis of The Making of Americans

The following analysis of The Making of Americans is excerpted in part from Gertrude Stein: Her Life and Work by Elizabeth Sprigge (1957):

“It is a wonderful thing as I was saying and as I am now repeating, it is a wonderful thing how much a thing needs to be in one as a desire in them how much courage any one must have in them to be doing anything if they are a first one.”

There Gertrude Stein sat, making her enormous sentences, a democrat of language, using simple everyday words with a reformer’s urge to emancipate them from the fetters of tradition, association, rhetoric, grammar, and syntax:

She knew them intimately, carried them about with her to caress and meditate upon, “every word I am ever using in writing has for me very existing being,” and each time she found herself using a new one she was disturbed, as when a stranger joins a circle of old friends.

This passion for words was balanced now by her interest in human character, but it could transcend everything. Then words became coins not to be spent in mere meaning, jewels not set for ordinary wear, and she defeated her democratic intention.

And sometimes hypnotized herself, for she had, as she said, a great deal of inertia and did sometimes “stay on with her own methods” because of the pleasure they gave her … What an extraordinary mixture Gertrude Stein was of vitality fired by the creative struggle, rebelliousness upsetting the comfortable order of things, and an inertia making her unwilling to more from where she was to change what she was doing.

The Making of Americans, The History of a Family in Progress is a stupendous achievement, packed with riches. The matter and method of presenting it were new and important, but the reader is usually defeated by the sheer quantity of words.

Working from charts and diagrams begun at Radcliffe, she started a history “of every one who ever can or is or was or will be living,” in “a space of time that is always filled with moving” — a conception she considered typically American.

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Gertrude Stein sometime around her college years
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One thinks of the cinema, and though Gertrude Stein had not then seen a film, in Lectures in America thirty years later she observed, “any one is of one’s period and this is our period was undoubtedly the period of the cinema and series production.”

She was aware that she had set herself a tremendous task, but she felt it a charge since she had a key to the “bottom nature of men and women.”

“When I was working with William James,” she explained later, “I completely learned one thing, that science is continuously busy with the complete description of anything with ultimately the complete description of everything.”

So, courageously, she went to it, manipulating language to express the discovery that “every one is always repeating the whole of them.” There could be, she saw, false repeating, when people went on copying their own or somebody else’s kind of repeating because they were too indolent “to really live inside them their repeating,” but true repeating, which she always found in children, truly expressed a person’s “being existing.”

Repetition could irritate even her who loved it, “loving repeating is one way of being” and it could take a very long time to achieve a complete understanding of a character in this way, “to feel the whole of anyone from the beginning to the ending.” But when this happened, the long labor was rewarded.

For this was her aim, as she explained in her lecture “The Gradual Making of Making of Americans,” to “put down a whole human being felt at one and the same time.”

She was continually discovering more things that had to be said about people and restarting was part of the fugal method, many sentences opening with “To begin then again,” or “As I was saying …”

Building with persistent repetition and wonderfully sustained present principles she analyses a large number of men and women “being living,” based on her relatives, governesses, acquaintances — her characters stem from observation, not invention — and records her discoveries. She found, for instance, that “loving is a thing that a great many are doing,” and not helped by Freud, years before D.H. Lawrence, wrote in a new way about sex.

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The Making of Americans by Gertrude Stein on Amazon
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Quoting from The Making of Americans is unsatisfactory as each passage reflects and loses depth without it, but as an example of her findings:

Some men have it in them in their loving to be attacking, some have it in them to let things sink into them, some let themselves wallow in their feelings and get strength in them from the wallowing they have in loving, some in loving are melting strength passes out of the, some in their loving are worn out with the nervous desire in therm, some have it as dissipation in them, some have it as they have eating and sleeping some have it as they have resting, some hav it as a dissipation of them, some have it as a clean attacking, some have it as a simple beginning feeling in them, some have it as the ending always of them, some of them are always old men in their loving.

She perceived that people were not generally please with others’ ways of loving, but it was part of her own “loving being” to like loving. “Slowly in has come to be in me that any way of being a loving one is interesting and not unpleasant to me.”

… Loving, quarreling, eating, sleeping, washing, listening smelling, breathing, making money, and having religion — interminably the ways of being and doing are explored and analyzed. She divides people into dependent and independents and independent dependents, “the first having resisting as the fighting power in them, the second have attacking as their natural way of fighting,” and each have their own kind of sensitiveness, their own strength and weaknesses, stupidity and passion, contentment and melancholy.

She conceives of millions of each type of human being that she describes, and description is for her explanation. All the characters are American, “the old people in a new world, the new people made out of the old … for that is what really is and what I really know.”

It was part of her strength, her sincerity and singleness of mind, to keep to what she really knew and one of the problems was to find a way of making what she knew come out as she know it and “not as remembering.”

“I was faced by the trouble that I had acquired all this knowledge gradually but when I had it I had it completely at one time.” She was bent on expressing the sense of immediacy.

… “Disillusionment in living,” Gertrude Stein wrote later, “is the finding out nobody agrees with you not those that are and were fighting with you,” and she reflects how much desire and how much courage anyone must have to do something new.

More about The Making of Americans by Gertrude Stein Wikipedia Reader discussion on Goodreads A rare recording of Gertrude Stein reading from The Making of Americans

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The Borrowers by Mary Norton (1952)

The Borrowers by Mary Norton (1903 – 1992) is the first volume a classic series of children’s books by this British author. First published in Great Britain in 1952 and in the U.S. in 1954, the Borrowers are perhaps themselves “borrowed” from the tradition of Ireland’s little people. Humans in  miniature who live behind the wainscoting or under the floors of big old houses, they survive by borrowing whatever it is they need, as their name implies.

As Mrs. May muses in the book’s first chapter, what do you think happens to the countless safety pins, pencils, spools of thread, match boxes, and knitting needles that are lost every day? How do they disappear  without a trace?

The fate of these seemingly lost items, Mrs. May proposes, is in the hands of the Borrowers who have made off with them. That’s believable, isn’t it? Or at least, believable enough for a reader to suspend logical belief while reading this book and its charming sequels.

 

A 1954 review of The Borrowers

From the original review in the Gazette and Daily (York, PA), June 25, 1954: The Borrowers, written by Mary Norton, is a captivating tale of little people. There are few Borrowers left, for the rush of modern life doesn’t suit them. They like to live in quiet, out-of-the-way country houses where things move in an orderly, well-established pattern and there’s little chance for surprise.

The Clock family, Pod and Homily and their 13-year-old daughter Arrietty, are the last of the Borrowers who live in such a house in England. The entrance to their home is under the grandfather clock that has stood undisturbed for two hundred years.

The only “human beans” in the house are Great-Aunt Sophy, who has been bedridden for twenty years, Mrs. Driver, the cook, and Crampfurl, the gardener. Their actions are predictable and the Clocks live a routine life until Sophy’s grand-nephew comes there to recuperate from rheumatic fever. He is ten years old and quite unpredictable.

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The Borrowers by Mary Norton on Amazon
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Comfortable quarters

Pod is a successful Borrower, and Homily is a good housekeeper. They have a comfortable home under the kitchen floor, carpeted with red blotting paper, decorated with Queen Victoria postage stamps, furnished with cigar box bedrooms, match box chests of drawers, a pill-box chair and a trinket box settee.

Despite all these comforts, the family is cautious. Arrietty has never been outside. Pod and Homily live in constant fear that they will be seen. Uncle Hendreary was seen, and he and Aunt Lupy had to flee to a badger hole. All other families also have emigrated because they were seen.

One day, Pod is seen by the boy, but the youngster, instead of harming the Borrower, proves to be helpful. Later, Arrietty accompanies Pod on a trip to the outer world. She meets the boy, and they become friends.

For a while, the Clocks live in supreme comfort, with the boy supplying them with new doll’s furniture and other gifts. Mrs. Driver notices the disappearance of many items, and before long, the Borrowers are discovered. How the Clocks escape, with the aid of the boy, completes this intriguing tale.

Medal winner

When The Borrowers was first published in England in 1952, it was awarded Britain’s Library Association Carnegie Medal that year as the best children’s book. The story is one that brings to mind such classics as Alice in Wonderland and The Wind in the Willows.

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Sequels to The Borrowers, and film adaptations

The success of the Borrowers was such that Norton produced several sequels: The Borrowers Afield, The Borrowers Afloat, The Borrowers Aloft, and The Borrowers Avenged.

The first film version of The Borrowers was released in 1997.  It was more accurately described as “loosely based” on the book, rather than an adaptation. It received mixed reviews. Roger Ebert wrote: “The charm comes in the way The Borrowers makes its world look like a timeless story book. If the action and the physical humor are designed to appeal to kids, the look of the film will impress adults who know what to look for.”

A reviewer on Rotten Tomatoes commented: Mary Norton’s children’s books about a family of four-inch-tall people who share accommodations with giant ‘beans (as in ‘human bein’s’) are brought to the screen in beautifully scaled detail, but neither the story nor the characters come alive.”

2010 brought a Japanese manga-style animated version of The Borrowers called The Secret World of Arrietty, with an all-star Western cast.

In 2011, a British television film version of The Borrowers premiered. I suspect we haven’t seen the last of The Borrowers on the large and small screen, so it may be wise to read the books before exploring these or any future film adaptations!

Quotes from The Borrowers by Mary Norton

“Mrs. May looked back at her. “Kate,” she said after a moment, “stories never really end. They can go on and on and on. It’s just that sometimes, at a certain point, one stops telling them.” 

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“Human beans are for Borrowers—like bread’s for butter!” 

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“Everything they had was borrowed; they had nothing of their own at all.  In spite of this, my brother said, they were touchy and conceited, and thought they owned the world.”

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“I don’t think human beans are all that bad —”
“They’re bad and they’re good,” said Pod; “they’re honest and they’re artful- it’s just as it takes them at the moment”

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“She learned a lot and some of the things she learned were hard to accept. She was made to realize once and for all that this earth on which they lived turning about in space did not revolve, as she had believed, for the sake of little people.”

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Ntozake Shange

Ntozake Shange, born Paulette Linda Williams (October 18, 1948 – October 27, 2018), was an African American playwright, poet, and feminist. As a Black feminist, her work often shed light on issues relating to Black power, race, and gender. Among her many powerful works, she’s best known for the Obie Award-winning play, For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow Is Enuf.

Born in Trenton, New Jersey, she was the oldest of four children in an upper-middle-class family. Her father, Paul T. Williams, was an Air Force surgeon, and her mother, Eloise Williams, was a psychiatric social worker and an educator. By the age of eight, her family left Trenton and moved to St. Louis, Missouri. In 1956, it was a racially segregated city that would later become one of the major influences in her work.

 A Love for Poetry

Due to the Brown v. Board of Education court decision, the young Paulette Williams attended a white school where she was horrifically exposed to racial attacks in exchange for a “quality” education. Though life at school was challenging, her family pushed her to find her artistic outlet, as they all had a strong interest in the arts.

The Williams family had many admirable guests visit their home, including Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, Chuck Berry, and W.E.B Du Bois. Ultimately, Paulette decided that she loved poetry. While still living in Trenton, she would attend poetry readings with her younger sister, Wanda, who is currently known as the playwright Ifa Bayeza. These poetry readings allowed the sisters to develop an interest in the South and the loss it represented for the Black youth who were forced to migrate to the North with their parents.

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Ntozake Shange (left) and her sister, Ifa Bayeza (right)
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Education 

She returned to Lawrence Township, Mercer County, New Jersey when she was thirteen and graduated from Lawrence High School. After graduating high school, she enrolled at Barnard College in 1966 where she met Thulani Davis, a fellow Barnard student, and would-be poet. The two would then go on to collaborate on numerous works soon after.

In 1970, she graduated cum laude with a degree in American Studies. She continued her education and went on to earn her master’s degree in the same field from the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. Although she was very successful in her studies, she struggled emotionally in her personal life.

 Ntozake Shange comes into being 

She married during her first year of college but the marriage did not last long. She was depressed over her divorce and developed feelings of bitterness and even alienated herself from others. At one point, things got so bad that she even tried to attempt suicide.

She started coming to terms with her feelings of alienation and depression in 1971, pushing her to change her name to Ntozake Shange. In Zulu, a Bantu language of the Zulus from South Africa, Ntozake means “she who comes with her things” and Shange means “who walks like a lion.”

She told Allan Wallach in Newsday that the reason for her name change was due to her belief that she was “living a lie,” saying, “[I was] living in a world that defied reality as most black people, or most white people, understood it–in other words, feeling that there was something that I could do, and then realizing that nobody was expecting me to do anything because I was colored and I was also a female, which was not very easy to deal with.”

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The start of a brilliant career 

After earning her master’s degree, Shange moved back to New York City in 1975 and was acknowledged for being a founding poet of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe. That year, she also produced what would remain her best-known play, For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow is Enuf. The play was first produced Off-Broadway and eventually moved to the Booth Theater on Broadway where it won multiple awards, including the AUDELCO Award, Outer Critics Circle Award, and the Obie Award.

For Colored Girls ... is a  twenty-part choreopoem — a term that Shange coined to describe the groundbreaking and drama-filled play that combined multiple art forms, including poetry, dance, music, and song. The choreopoem was used to portray the harsh reality of the lives of women of color in America.

For Colored Girls ... was published in book form in 1977. That same year, she married musician David Murray, with whom she had a daughter, Savannah Thulani Eloisa, in 1981. The play later went on to be adapted into a film by Tyler Perry in 2010 called For Colored Girls, though it’s quite different than the staged version. Shange wrote other successful plays, such as Spell No. 7 (1979), another choreopoem that delves into the Black experience, and an adaptation of Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children. This work earned her another Obie Award.

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The Enduring Power of For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide /
When the Rainbow is Enuf by Ntozake Shange 

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Productive years

In addition to creating numerous successful choreopoems, Shange became an associate of the Women’s Institute for Freedom of the Press (WIFP) in 1978, an American nonprofit publishing organization that works to increase the communication between women and the public with women-based media.

She taught at the University of Houston in the Creative Writing Program from 1984 to 1986. While there, she wrote the ekphrastic poetry collection called Ridin’ the Moon in Texas: Word Paintings, and was the thesis advisor for poet and playwright Annie Finch. In 2003 she wrote and oversaw the production of Lavender Lizards and Lilac Landmines: Layla’s Dream while also serving as a visiting artist at the University of Florida, Gainesville.

Shange also wrote many individual poems, essays, and short stories that were published in various magazines and anthologies, including The Black Scholar, Ms. Essence Magazine, The Chicago Tribune, VIBE, Yardbird, and others.

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The Black Arts Movement 

The Black Arts Movement, known as BAM, is a subset of the Black Power Movement and has been described as the “radical reordering of the western cultural aesthetic” by Larry Neal. BAM’s key concepts are a “separate symbolism, mythology, critique, and iconology” along with the African American’s need for “self-determination and nationhood.” Many actors, actresses, choreographers, musicians, novelists, artists, and other public figures took part in BAM. Some of the most notable women who participated included Gwendolyn Brooks, Lorraine Hansberry, and Sonia Sanchez.

Described as a “post-Black artist,” Shange’s work was seen as feminist. Concerning the idea that BAM’s art was a “radical reordering of the western cultural aesthetic,” she described her work by saying “A play has a form that has to be finished. A performance piece has an organic form, but it can even flow. And there doesn’t have to be some ultimate climax in it. And there does not have to be a denouement.”

Shange set her writing apart from the usual writing style of the Black Arts Movement by creating a “special aesthetic” for black women “to an extent,” claiming that “the same rhetoric that is used to establish the Black Aesthetic, we must use to establish a women’s aesthetic.” She also went on to say that “the cycles of our lives that have been ignored for centuries in all castes and classes of our people, are to be dealt with now.”

 

Themes in Ntozake Shange’s work 

Shange’s work incorporates a number of genres that address injustice, violence, and oppression. She used African American dialect and has been both criticized and admired for her unique writing style. She has also been applauded for her religious feminism and her stand on race and gender issues. 

Her choreopoems, consisting of poetry, drama, and autobiography, have at times been criticized as one-sided attacks on black men. Though her work has received some backlash, it is also valued for its flair and lyricism. 

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Ntozake Shange page on Amazon

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Awards and Honors; the legacy of Ntozake Shange 

In 1977, Shange was awarded the Off-Broadway Award, Outer Critics Circle Award, Audience Development Committee Award, Village Voice, Mademoiselle Award, and Antoinette Perry, Grammy, and Academy award nominations all for For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow is Enuf. 

In 1978, Shange was awarded the Frank Silvera Writers’ Workshop Award. In 1981, The Los Angeles Times Book Prize was awarded to Shange for her Three Pieces. This year, she also won an Off-Broadway Award for Mother Courage and Her Children. 

In 1992, Shange was awarded the Paul Robeson Achievement Award, the Arts and Cultural Achievement Award, and the National Coalition of 100 Black Women, Inc., Pennsylvania chapter.

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Photo: Marian Curtis/Shutterstock
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The Death of a Legend 

On the night of October 27, 2018, Shange died in her sleep at the age of seventy in an assisted living facility in Bowie, Maryland. Though she was ill and and had suffered strokes in 2004, she was still creating new work and giving readings.

Her sister, Ifa Bayeza, was quoted saying: “It’s a huge loss for the world. I don’t think there’s a day on the planet when there’s not a young woman who discovers herself through the words of my sister.”

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More About Ntozake Shange 

On this site

The Enduring Power of For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide /
When the Rainbow is Enuf by Ntozake Shange 

Major Works 

For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/ When the Rainbow is Enuf (1975)A Photograph: Lovers-in-Motion (1977)Where the Mississippi Meets the Amazon (1977)A Photograph: A Study of Cruelty (1977)Boogie Woogie Landscapes (1979)Spell #7  (1979)Mother Courage and Her Children (1980)Sassafras, Cypress, & Indigo (1982)Three for a Full Moon (1982)Bocas (1982)From Okra to Greens/A Different Kinda Love Story (1983)Betsey Brown (1985)Three views of Mt. Fuji (1987)Daddy Says (1989)Liliane (1994)Whitewash (1994)Some Sing, Some Cry (2010; with Ifa Bayeza)Wild Beauty: New and Selected PoemsIf I Can Cook / You Know God Can (2019; posthumous)

More Information and sources

Wikipedia The Poetry Foundation  Official Ntozake Shange site Browse Biography   Obituary in The New York Times

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

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Romantic Outlaws: The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Her Daughter Mary Shelley

It seems fortuitous that 260th birthdate of Mary Wollstonecraft (1759 – 1797) in 2019 dovetailed closely with the 200th anniversary in 2018 of Mary Shelley’s 1818 masterpiece Frankenstein. There’s a profound connection between these two famous authors; they were, of course, mother and daughter. A book well worth reading about these women is the remarkable biography, Romantic Outlaws: The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley by Charlotte Gordon.

Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley were physically part of each other’s lives only for a few days as Mary Wollstonecraft died ten days after giving birth to Mary due to an infection. Yet the space they filled in each other’s lives was much wider.

All her adult life, Mary Wollstonecraft worked relentlessly to improve the lives of girls and women through her writing (in particular Thoughts On The Education Of Daughters: With Reflections On Female Conduct, In The More Important Duties Of Life and A Vindication Of The Rights Of Woman: With Strictures On Political And Moral Subjects). For a period of time, she ran a school for girls. Furthermore, she tried to secure a future for her sisters.

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Learn more about Mary Wollstonecraft
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Her daughter came into her life when she had opened a new, happier chapter. She had an established position as a writer and was financially independent. She had just entered into a marriage with a man who fully appreciated her as a person and an equal partner. The newly born daughter was part of her hopes for happiness.

Much of Mary Shelley’s life was shaped by her mother’s legacy. She knew of all her mother’s works and wanted to be equally audacious and authentic in her writing as well as personal life. It is to her mother she dedicated her novel Frankenstein: “The memory of my mother has always been the pride and delight of my life.” Charlotte Gordon’s book weaves both of their life stories into one. She finds a way to reconstruct the threads of their relationship, while not losing the uniqueness of their stories.

Both lived in times of great change of their society – Mary Wollstonecraft in the times of American and French Revolution, Mary Shelley of the emerging Romanticism. They were engaged in the most vivid debates of their times and fought for the right of women to shape their destiny.

As a historian and literature researcher, Charlotte Gordon provides a comprehensive background of the period. However, she goes beyond facts and uses her craft as a writer to forge an intimate bond between the reader and the two protagonists. She dives into their writing and letters to understand their motivations. This is especially important to understand their complex relationships with the men in their lives.

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Romantic Outlaws by Charlotte Gordon on Amazon
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First of all, there was the father of Mary Shelley and Mary Wollstonecraft’s husband — William Godwin. He and Mary Wollstonecraft found each other later in life and had to learn to appreciate one another’s qualities. Mary Wollstonecraft had experienced a major disappointment in love and was learning to trust a man again.

As for his daughter, he influenced young Mary’s education and encouraged her to write. However, Mary Shelley experienced a significant estrangement with her father, as he did not accept her choice to elope with a married man — the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, who was ironically a follower of his. For a long time, he also hinted that her writing wasn’t what he expected and that she could do better.

Mary Shelley’s husband, Percy Shelley, was a profound admirer of Mary Wollstonecraft’s work. Their first “date” took place at the most sacred place for Mary Shelley – her mother’s grave. He valued Mary as a person and writer. At the same time, his constant desire to lead a radical and adventuresome life would jeopardize the stability and safety of the young family.

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Learn more about Mary Shelley
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The family relationships were marked by grief. Mary Wollstonecraft was at the peak of her womanhood when she died. She was confident about being a mother and well prepared for birth. Her death was sudden and unexpected.

Mary Shelley lived with a constant burden of guilt that she had been the reason for her mother’s death. Subsequently, she didn’t grow up in a happy household, with conflicting feelings toward her stepmother and her father’s strong expectations. In a sense, she lost both of her parents. Her father pushed her away and after she chose to be with Shelley, and didn’t respond to her attempts at reconciliation. This was perhaps reflected in Frankenstein, whose emotional theme is a cry for love and pain of rejection.

Nevertheless, along with grief, there’s a stream of love and connection which flows between the two women. Mary Shelley drew inspiration and hope from her mother throughout all her life. She was confident that she knew who her mother was and that they shared common values. Both of them believed in education and learning.

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How Mary Shelley Came to Write Frankenstein
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They chose to be courageous and didn’t run away from the consequences of their choices. They wanted to make the world better. Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley set very high standards for their writings, but were also forced to struggle and comprise in the publishing world.

Despite the mixed feelings towards marriage as an institution which carried the stigma of oppressing women, they believed in fidelity in love. Finally, they awaited the birth of their children with joy.

The achievement of contemporary herstory is bringing to light not just women that have been forgotten, but also the relationships between them. Thanks to Charlotte Gordon’s work, we can learn from the relationship between the amazing mother and daughter.

Contributed by Magdalena Macinska.

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“Brass Ankles Speaks”: Alice-Dunbar Nelson on Growing up Multiracial

Alice Dunbar-Nelson (1875 – 1935) used her poetry, essays, and short stories to confront complex issues of being a multiracial woman in America. Active in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, she grappled with the feeling of non-belonging to one racial community nor the other. “Brass Ankles Speaks” is an essay she wrote, undated, presumably in the early 1900s. It was never published during her lifetime. 

Despite her personal  struggles, Alice Dunbar-Nelson devoted her life to fighting for social and racial justice and women’s equality not only through her writing, but as an activist and speaker. 

In an analysis of this controversial piece writing, Bridget Maguire wrote:

Alice Dunbar-Nelson clearly grapples with the complexity of her multiracial appearance in her essay “Brass Ankles Speaks,” a frank and likely controversial essay she never published during her lifetime.  Not only does she wrestle with her ability to pass as white, but she also confirms her inability to control how some black people viewed her.  Due to the light shade of her skin, other blacks sometimes perceived her as an elitist.  Dunbar-Nelson exposes the complicated colorist system within the black community.  

In the beginning of the essay, Dunbar-Nelson proclaims, “I am of the latter class, what E. C. Adams in ‘Nigger to Nigger’ immortalizes in the poem, ‘Brass Ankles.’ White enough to pass for white, but with a darker family background, a real love for the mother race, and no desire to be numbered among the white race”.  Her longing to be perceived as a member of the African American race is hindered by her rejection by some blacks who see her ability to pass and lighter skin color as an indication of conscious, pretentious distinction …

As a child, she faced this impossible acceptance in school where darker classmates bullied her for her lighter, “whiter” appearance … When Dunbar-Nelson began her teaching career in New Orleans, she experienced these same colorist problems and found, to her dissatisfaction, their replication in the Northern cities that she later moved to.

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“Brass Ankles Speaks” by Alice Dunbar-Nelson

The “Race” question is paramount. A cloud of books, articles and pronunciamentos on the subject of the white man or girl who “passes” over to the other side of the racial fence, and either entirely forsakes his or her own race, to live in terror or misery all their days, or else come crawling back to do uplift work among their own people, hovers on the literary horizon.

On the other hand, there is an increasing interest and sentimentality concerning the poor, pitiful black girl, whose life is a torment among her own people, because of their “blue vein” proclivities. It seems but fair and just now for some of the neglected light-skinned colored people, who have not “passed” to rise and speak a word in self-defense.

I am of the latter class, what E. C. Adams in “Nigger to Nigger” immortalizes in the poem, “Brass Ankles.” White enough to pass for white, but with a darker family background, a real love for the mother race, and no desire to be numbered among the white race.

My earliest recollections are miserable ones. I was born in a far Southern city , where complexion did, in a manner of speaking, determine one’s social status. However, the family being poor, I was sent to the public school. It was a heterogeneous mass of children which greeted my frightened eyes on that fateful morning in September, when I timidly took my place in the first grade.

There were not enough seats for all the squirming mass of little ones, so the harassed young, teacher—I have reason to believe now that this was her first school—put me on the platform at her feet. I was so little and scared and homesick that it made no impression on me at the time. But at the luncheon hour I was assailed with shouts of derision—”Yah! Teacher’s pet! Yah! Just cause she’s yaller!” Thus at once was I initiated into the class of the disgraced, which has haunted and tormented my whole life— “Light nigger, with straight hair!”

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See also: A Selection of Poems by Alice Dunbar-Nelson
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This was the beginning of what was for nearly six years a life of terror, horror and torment. For in this monster public school, which daily disgorged about 2500 children, there were all shades and tints and degrees of complexions from velvet black to blonde white. And the line of demarcation was rigidly drawn—not by the fairer children, but by the darker ones.

I had no color sense. In my family we never spoke of it. Indian browns and cafe au laits, were mingled with pale bronze and blonde yellows all in one group of cousins and uncles and aunts and brothers and sisters. For so peculiarly does the Mendelian law work in mixed bloods, that four children of two parents may show four different degrees of mixture, brown, yellow, tan, blonde.

In the school, therefore, I felt at first the same freedom concerning color. So I essayed friendship with Esther. Esther was velvet dark, with great liquid eyes. She could sing, knew lots of forbidden lore, and brought lovely cakes for luncheon.

Therefore I loved Esther, and would have been an intimate friend of hers. But she repulsed me with ribald laughter—”Half white nigger! Go on wid ya kind!”, and drew up a solid phalanx of little dark girls, who thumbed noses at me and chased me away from their ring game on the school playground.

Bitter recollections of hair ribbons jerked off and trampled in the mud. Painful memories of curls yanked back into the ink bottle of the desk behind me, and dripping ink down my carefully washed print frocks. That alone was a tragedy, for clothes came hard, and a dress ruined by ink-dripping curls meant privation for the mother at home.

How I hated those curls! Charlie, the neighbor-boy and I were of an age, a complexion and the same taffy-colored curls. So bitter were his experiences that his mother had his curls cut off. But I was a girl and must wear curls. I wept in envy of Charles, the shorn one. However, long before it was the natural time for curls to be discarded, my mother, for sheer pity, braided my hair in a long heavy plait down my back. Alas! It, too, was ink-soaked, pulled, yanked and twisted.

I was a timid, scared, rabbit sort of a child, but out of desperation I learned to fight. My sister, a few years older, was in an upper grade, through those six, fearsome years. She had learned early to defend herself with well-aimed rocks, ink bottles and a scientific use of sharp finger-nails. She taught me some valuable lessons, and came to my rescue when my nerve had given out. She had something of the spirit of an organizer, too, and had a gang of “yellow niggers” that could do valiant service in the organized warfare between the dark ones and the light ones.

I used to watch the principal of the school, and her fellow teachers with considerable interest as I grew older and the situation unfolded itself to me. As far as I can remember now, they were all mulattoes or very light brown. If their sympathies were with the little fair children, who were so bitterly persecuted, they never gave any evidence.

The principal punished the belligerents with an impartiality that was heart-breaking. Years afterward, I learned that she had told my mother and the mothers of other girls of our class and complexion that she understood and appreciated our sorrows and troubles, but if she gave any evidence of sympathy, or in any way placed the punishment where she knew it rightfully belonged, the parents of the darker children would march in a body to the Board of Education, and protest against her as being unfit for the job.

Time went on, and a long spell of illness took me out of the school. That too, was due to color prejudice. There wasn’t a small-pox scare, and the Board of Health ordered one of those wholesale vaccinations that are sometimes worse than the disease.

My mother sent a note to the principal asking her not to have me vaccinate. on the day selected, but that she would take me to the family physician that night, and send the certificate to school in the morning. The principal read the note, shook her head, looked at me sorrowfully, “You should have stayed at home today, ” was her terse comment.

So I was dragged, screaming and protesting to have my arm scratched with a scalpel instead of a vaccine point. Terror and rage helped the infection which followed, and for a long while my life was despaired of. It seemed certain that I would lose my arm. Somehow, I did not, and when I was well enough, about eighteen months later, to think of education, my mother sent me to a private school.

The bitterness that had been ingrained in me through those six fateful years, from six to twelve years of age, stayed. The new school was one of those American Missionary Schools founded shortly after the war, as an experiment in Negro education. Later, these same schools became the aristocratic educational institutions of the race.

Though the fee was only a nominal one, it was successful in keeping out many a proletariat. Thus gradually, all over the South these very schools which were founded in a missionary spirit by the descendants of abolitionists for the hordes of knowledge-seeking freedmen, became in the second and third generations, the exclusive stamping grounds of the descendants of those who were never slaves, or of the aristocrats among freedmen.

And because here I found boys and girls like myself, fair, light brown, with educated parents, descendants of office holders under the reconstruction regime or of free antebellum Negroes, with traditions—therefore was I happy until the end of my high and normal school career.

Except for Eddie. I loved Eddie. He represented to me the unattainable, for he was in the college department, and he won prizes in oratory and debate and one day smiled at me understandingly when I was only a high school freshman. I walked on air for days. But Eddie was of a deep darkness, and refused to allow me to love him. With stern dignity he checked my fluttering advances. He would not demean himself by walking with a mere golden butterfly; far rather would he walk alone, he told me. It broke my heart for nearly a month.

Out in life, I found myself confronted, as did most of my friends and associates, with the same problems which had confronted the principal of that public school. I became a public school teacher. There were little dark children in my school.

I had to watch them tormenting the little fair children, and not lift my hand to protect them, at the risk of a severe reprimand from my principal or supervisor, induced by complaints from parents. I had to endure in hot, shamed silence the innuendos constantly printed in the weekly colored newspaper—a sort of local Smart Set—against the fair teachers, every time one was seen with a new coat or hat. How could they afford to dress so well? was the constant query.

Light colored girls, it was well known, were the legitimate prey of white men. Were not the members of the Board of Education helping out the meagre salaries of the better looking teachers? What price shame? Protest? The editor was a black man and owed allegiance to no proprietary, His daughter had failed to pass the teachers’ examination; she had failed in the normal school; she had failed in the high school. She was really stupid. But her father would not believe it. There were some darker girls who had made brilliant records in in school; were brilliant teachers. He shut his eyes to their prowess and vented his spleen upon the light ones who had succeeded.

After teaching a year or two, I had saved enough to embark upon my cherished ambition—to go to college, and so I came North. Here I found a condition just as bitter, but more subtle. You come up against a dead wall of hate and prejudice and misunderstanding, and you cannot tell what causes it.

During the summer session I had lived with a colored family in the town. The room was uncomfortable, the food not good, and the prices as high as in the school. Therefore, when I decided to return for the winter, I applied for and secured a place in one of the college cottages. This branded me at once among the colored students.

I was said to be “passing,” though nothing was further from my mind—especially as there were no race restrictions in the dormitories. I tried to make friends among the colored girl students—all of whom that year were brown. Success came only after the hardest kind of hard work, and it was only a truce. I had to batter down a wall, which had doubtless been erected by my erstwhile dark-skinned landlady.

I had registered from my own religious creed. The rector of the white church in town called at once, made me welcome, and asked me to connect myself with his church. I waited three weeks for the colored minister to make a like overture. I would have preferred the colored church, for I had always taken an active part in our little church at home among my own people.

But no gesture was made, so I went to the white church. Then an entertainment was given at the colored church. I saw a flier for the first time on the day of the affair, with my name down for a recitation. Naturally, I did not go on such slight notice, and forever afterwards was branded among the colored townspeople as a “half white strainer, with no love for the Race.”

And yet, in spite of all the tragedy of my childhood and young womanhood, I had not been able to develop that color sense. When I say this to my darker friends, they simply laugh at me. They may like me personally; they may even become my very good friends; but there is always a barrier, a veil—nay, rather a vitrified glass wall, which I can neither break down, batter down, nor pierce. I have to see dear friends turn from a talk with me, to exchange a glance of comprehension and understanding one with another which I, nor anyone of my complexion, can ever hope to share.

In the course of my peregrinations, after college days, I came to teach in a small city on the Middle Atlantic Seaboard. A little city where hate is a refined art, where bitterness is rife, and where prejudice is a thing so vital and potent that it makes all other emotions seem pale and insignificant.

I shall never forget the day that I was introduced by the principal to the faculty of the high school where I was to teach. There were two other faces like mine in the group of thirty. The two who looked like me, exchanged glances of pity—the others measured me with cold contempt and grim derision. A sweat broke out on me. I knew what I was up against and an icy hand clutched my heart. I felt I could never break this down; this unreasoning prejudice against my mere personal appearance.

With the children it was the same. The day I walked into my classroom, I head a whisper run through the aisles, “Half white nigger!” For a moment I was transplanted to that first day at school twenty odd years ago.

The agony of that first semester! The nerve-racking terror of never knowing where there would be an outbreak of unreasoning prejudice among those dark children, venting itself in a spiteful remark, and undoing in a moment what I had spent weeks to create.

The heart-breaking rebuffs when I tried to be cordial with my fellow-teachers; the curt refusals to walk home with me, or to go to church or places of amusement. The scathing denunciations of irate parents when their children did not get the undeserved marks they wanted. I was accused of everything except infanticide. Mine had been the experiences of the other two teachers, I was told.

The principal protected as far as he could, but what can a busy man do against a whole community? If I had a dollar for every bitter, scalding, hopeless tear that I shed that first school year, I should be independently wealthy. It was only sheer grit and determination not to be beaten that kept me from throwing up the job and going back home.

Small wonder, then, that the few lighter persons in the community drew together; we were literally thrown upon each other, whether we liked or not. But when we began going about together and spending our time in each other’s society, a howl went up. We were organizing a “blue vein” society. We were mistresses of white men. We were Lesbians. We hated black folk and plotted against them. As a matter of fact, we had no other recourse but to cling together.

Much water has passed under the bridge since those days, and I have lived in many other communities. Save for size, virulence, and local conditions, the situation duplicates itself. Once I planned a pageant in one community. “You’ll never put it over,” my friends adjured me; “You haven’t enough pull with the darker people.”

But I planned my committees always to be headed up by black or brown men or women, who in turn selected their aides, thus relieving me of all responsibility. It went over big, in spite of misfits on committees. But had I actually placed thereon men and women of real ability, who could have handled the situation more efficiently, the whole thing would have fallen to the ground if they were light in color.

I have served on boards and committees of schools, institutions, projects. I have seen the chairmen, or those with appointing power, look at me apologetically, and name someone whom they knew and I knew was unfit for a place, where I could have best helped and worked. But they did not dare be accused of partiality on account of color.

I have had my offers of help in charity affairs refused, or if accepted grudgingly, credit withheld or services forgotten. I have been turned down by my own race far more often than many a brown-skinned person has been similarly treated by the white race. I have been snubbed and ostracized with subtle cruelties that I am safe to assert have hardly been duplicated by the experiences of dark people in their dealings with Caucasians. I say more cruel, for I have been foolishly optimistic enough to expect sympathy, understanding and help from my own people—and that I receive rarely outside of individuals of my own or allied complexion.

As if there is not enough stupid cruelty among my own, I have had to suffer at the hands of white people because of my likeness to them. On two occasions when I was seeking a position, I was rejected because I was “too white,” and not typically racial enough for the particular job.

Once when I was employed in a traveling position during the war, I came into headquarters from a particularly exhausting trip through the South. There I had twice been put off Jim Crow cars, because the conductor insisted that I was a white woman, and three times refused food in the dining-car, because the colored waiters, “tipped off” the white stewards. When I reached headquarters I found three of my best so-called brown skinned friends protesting against sending me out to work among my own people because I looked too much like white.

Once I “passed” and got a job in a department store in a large city. But one of the colored employees “spotted” me, for we always know each other, and reported that I was colored, and I was fired in the middle of the day. The joke was that I had applied for a job in the stock room where all the employees are colored, and the head of the placing bureau told me that was no place for me—”Only colored girls work there,” so he placed me in the book department, and then fired me because I had “deceived” him.

I have had my friends meet me downtown in city streets and turn their heads away, so positive that I do not want to speak to them. Sometimes I have to go out of my way and pluck at their sleeves to force them to speak. If I do not, then it is reported around that I “pass” when I am downtown—and sad is my case among my own kind then.

There are a thousand subtleties of refined cruelty which every fair colored person must suffer at the hands of his or her own people. And every fair colored woman or man, girl or boy who reads this knows that I have not exaggerated. If it be true that thousands of us pass over into the white group each year, it is due not only to the wish for economic ease and convenience, but often to the bitterness of one’s own kind. It is not to be wondered at that lighter skinned Negroes cling together in their respective communities. It is not so much that they dislike the darker brethren, but the darker brethren DO NOT LIKE THEM.

So I raise my tiny voice in all this hub-bub of “Race” clamor; all this wishy-washy sentimentalism about the persecuted black ones of the race, and their inability to get on with their own kind. As in Haiti, as in Africa, the bitterness and prejudice have always come from the blacks to the yellows. They have been the greatest sufferers, because they have had, perforce, to suffer in silence. To complain would be only to bring upon themselves another storm of abuse and fury.

The “yaller niggers,” the “Brass Ankles” must bear the hatred of their own and the prejudice of the white race. If they do not choose to go over to the other side—and tens of thousands feel, like myself, that there is no gain socially in so doing, though there may be some economic convenience—then they are forced to draw together in a common cause against their blood brothers who visit upon them hatred and persecution.

Originally published on Modern American Poetry.

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Alice Dunbar-Nelson

Alice Dunbar-Nelson (July 19, 1875 – September 18, 1935) was an American poet, essayist, short story writer, journalist, activist, and teacher. Sometimes known as Alice Moore Dunbar-Nelson, she advocated for the rights of women and African-Americans and was considered one of the premier poets of the Harlem Renaissance era.

Born Alice Ruth Moore in New Orleans, she was of Creole heritage, blending African-American, Creole, European, and Native American roots. Her mixed ancestry would give her a broad perspective on race as she matured, while she personally struggled with the issue of belonging.

Her father, Joseph Moore, a freed slave, was a merchant marine, and her mother, Patrica Wright, was a seamstress. Her family was considered middle class, so she was able to benefit from growing up in a diverse city, fairly free from the constraints of Jim Crow laws.

Alice graduated from Straight University (now Dillard University) in 1892. This was notable for its time, as less than 1% of all Americans were college graduates, let alone women and people of color. Her first job was as a teacher in New Orleans’ public school system. Subsequently, she worked in a variety of occupations, most notably in journalism as an editor and columnist.

 

Early publications 

Violets and Other Tales, her first book, was a collection of poetry, essays, and short stories. Just twenty at the time of its publication in 1895, Alice’s writings were already flavored with feminism and social justice.

The noted poet Paul Laurence Dunbar began writing to Alice after seeing a photo of her with a poem she had published in an issue of Monthly Review in 1897. They conducted their relationship mainly via correspondence and married secretly in 1898 in New York City. The couple then moved to Washington, D.C.

Critics have noted the uneven quality of the writings, though some of the pieces showed her promise as a writer. She wasn’t easy to pigeonhole, which made publishing her work a challenge. Sheila Smith McCoy wrote:

Dunbar-Nelson continued to write and, in 1899, published The Goodness of St. Rocque and Other Stories, which included a revision of “Titee” (one with a happier ending), “Little Miss Sophie,” and “A Carnival Jangle.” Aside from the ending of “Titee,” the revisions of these stories heralded the problems that she faced with later manuscripts.

Publishers, eager for dialect stories such as those that made Paul Laurence Dunbar famous, opted for versions of these stories in which the characters spoke with pronounced creole dialects. Dunbar-Nelson’s published fiction dealt exclusively with creole and anglicized characters; difference was characterized not in terms of race, but ethnicity.

Many of her manuscripts and typescripts, both short stories and dramas, were rejected when Dunbar-Nelson explored the themes of racism, the color line, and oppression. This, coupled with the fact that Violets and St. Rocque, published so early in her career, were, until recently, the only published collections of her work, have made it difficult for both readers and critics to access Dunbar-Nelson’s work.

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A selection of Alice Dunbar-Nelson’s poetry
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Three marriages and a teaching career

What began as a romantic liaison with Paul Dunbar soon turned into a disastrous marriage. Dunbar was in poor health, an alcoholic, and suffered from a form of tuberculosis. He physically abused Alice and nearly beat her to death in 1902, after which she left him. Alice was bisexual, and it has been posited by Lillian Fadiman, author of Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth-Century America, among others, that Dunbar was angered by her affairs.

After their parting, Alice moved to Wilmington, Delaware. She never saw Paul again, and despite the acrimonious ending, never formally divorced him and continued to publish under the name Alice Dunbar. There, she resumed her career in education, teaching in a high school as well as at the State College for Colored Students (Delaware State College) and Howard University. Paul Dunbar died in 1906.

Alice married Henry Arthur Callis, a physician, in 1910. This marriage, too, was short-lived. In 1916, she married Robert J. Nelson, a civil rights activist, who may have been the catalyst, at least in part, for her increasing involvement with social justice issues, primarily racial equality and women’s rights. This marriage endured, and Alice continued to have intimate relationships with women as well.

Alice, like her husband, became politically active, and in the early 1920s, campaigned for the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill (which was ultimately unsuccessful, because of a racist congress). She also helped establish several schools for African-American girls.

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Books by and about Alice Dunbar-Nelson on Amazon
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A poet, essayist, and columnist

While teaching in Wilmington, Alice continued to publish poetry and essays and served as an editor for African-American periodicals and anthologies. Her poems were widely published in The Crisis (NAACP), Ebony, Topaz, and Opportunity (Urban League) in the late ‘teens and through the 1920s.

This was a remarkably productive period. Alice was right in the thick of the creative flowering of the Harlem Renaissance era, though she didn’t live in New York City, where much of the action was taking place.

Alice was also committed to journalism in the 1920s, contributing highly regarded columns, articles, and essays to several prominent Black newspapers as well as magazines and academic journals. She was also, during this time, a sought-after lecturer and speaker. While she achieved an unusual degree of success in journalism, it was no easy path for a woman of color, and she wrote honestly the obstacles she faced.

In her searingly honest essays in which she also recounted the challenges of growing up mixed-race in Louisiana. She explored these themes along with the varied and complex issues faced by women of color in both her essays and in her body of short stories. In “Brass Ankles Speaks,” for example, she wrote about multiracial people bearing “the hatred of their own and the prejudice of the white race.”

As her reputation grew, she continued to explore sexism, racism, work, sexuality, and family in the various genres in which she wrote.

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Alice Dunbar-Nelson’s Legacy

Gloria T. Hull, editor of The Works of Alice Dunbar-Nelson (Oxford University Press, 1988), wrote of her subject:

“One senses in practically everything that Alice Dunbar-Nelson wrote a driving desire to pull together the multiple strands of her complex personality and poetics …

What she was able to achieve in prose outweighs her poetic accomplishments although, ironically, being taken as a poet has helped immensely to keep her reputation alive. Dunbar-Nelson was not driven to write poems and did not focus on the genre …

By and large, Dunbar-Nelson’s poetry is what it appears to be—competent treatments of conventional lyric themes in traditional forms and styles. Her signature poem, “Violets,” is the apogee of this type. A few others stand out for various reasons. “I Sit and Sew,” wherein a woman chafes at her domestic role during wartime, seems feminist in spirit.

“You! Inez!” appears to be a rare eruption in verse of Dunbar-Nelson’s lesbian feelings. “Communion” and “Music” were probably (like “Violets”) selections in a no longer extant Dream Book commemorating her illicit affair with Emmett J. Scott, Jr. “To Madame Curie” and “Cano—I Sing” are strikingly well-executed … “The Proletariat Speaks” reminds one of her consciousness about difference and class contrasts.

Dunbar-Nelson, in her way, helped to create a black short-story tradition for a reading public conditioned to expect only plantation and minstrel stereotypes. Her strategy for escaping these odious expectations was to eschew black characters and culture and to write, instead, charming Creole sketches that solidified her in the then-popular, ‘female-suitable’ local color mode.”

Later in life, Alice moved to Philadelphia with her husband when he went to work for the Pennsylvania Athletic Commission.  Her health began to decline, and she died in a Philadelphia hospital on September 18, 1935, at the age of sixty.

More about Alice Dunbar-Nelson

On this site

A Selection of Poems by Alice Dunbar-Nelson

Major works

Violets and Other Tales (1895)The Goodness of St. Rocque and Other Stories (1899)Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence (1914; in the capacity of editor)Mine Eyes Have Seen, (1918; one-act play)“From a Woman’s Point of View” (later, ”Une Femme Dit”; column for the  Pittsburgh Courier , 1926)“I Sit and I Sew,” “Snow in October,” and “Sonnet,” in Caroling Dusk:
An Anthology of Verse by Negro Poets (1927)“As in a Looking Glass” (1926–1930; column for Washington Eagle newspaper)”So It Seems to Alice Dunbar-Nelson” (1930; column for the Pittsburgh Courier)

Biographies and critical anthologies

Give Us Each Day: The Diary of Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Gloria T. Hull, editor (1984)The Works of Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Gloria T. Hull, editor (1988)

More information and sources

Wikipedia Poetry Foundation Modern American Poetry Alice Ruth Moore Dunbar-Nelson on BlackPast Biography of Alice Dunbar-Nelson on ThoughtCo.

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