Nava Atlas's Blog, page 67
May 22, 2019
Emma Lazarus
Emma Lazarus (July 22, 1849 – November 17, 1887), American poet, translator, and activist. She’s best known for the poem “The New Colossus” (1883), whose lines, “Give me your tired, your poor …” are inscribed at the base of the Statue of Liberty.
As touching and world-famous as this poem has remained, it’s but a tiny portion of her body of work. The life of Emma Lazarus, brief as it would be, was filled with accomplishment, not only as a writer, but as an advocate for Jewish immigrants and refugees.
Emma was part of a large Sephardic Jewish family, the fourth of seven children of a well-to-do merchant and sugar refiner, Moses Lazarus. Her mother’s maiden name was Esther Nathan. Most of her ancestors were from Portugal, though they settled in New York well before the American Revolution. Along with some two dozen other Portuguese Jews, they arrived in New Amsterdam after fleeing the Inquisition from their settlement in Recife, Brazil.
A precocious poet and accomplished translator
When she began writing and translating poetry, Emma was still in her teens. Her father, with whom she enjoyed a close rapport, privately printed her first works in 1866. The following year, at age 18, her first collection, Poems and Translations, was published. Her original poems were written when she was between 14 and 17 years old, and the volume also included translations of poems by Dumas, Hugo, and Schiller, among others. The book was praised by Ralph Waldo Emerson and other notable writers and thinkers.
Her subsequent publications included Admetus and Other Poems (1871), Alide: An Episode in Goethe’s Life (a novel, 1874), and The Spagnoletto; (a play in verse, 1876).
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Jewish causes and the plight of refugeesGeorge Eliot’s 1876 novel, Daniel Deronda, had a profound influence on Emma. The story of a young man’s discovery of his Jewish roots in 1870s England led Emma to think more deeply about her own Jewish identity.
She became outspoken about the plight of Russian Jews, who suffered violent pogroms following the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881. She also became aware of the struggles of Jewish refugees who had fled from the Russian Pale of Settlement to New York, arriving destitute and desperate.
Emma delved into social activism, particularly in the realm of immigrants and refugees. She became involved with Russian Jewish immigrants detained at Castle Garden, and was deeply affected by their experiences. She began to argue for the cause of a Jewish homeland, even before the concept of Zionism began to emerge.
Her work with Jewish immigrants and refugees inspired the writings and poems in Songs of a Semite: The Dance to Death and Other Poems in 1882. It was the first American publication to deal with the struggles of Jewish immigrants and explore Jewish identity.
According to the Guide to the Emma Lazarus papers housed at the American Jewish Historical Society, she also produced:
… a series of fourteen essays printed in 1882 – 1883 in The American Hebrew entitled “Epistles to the Hebrews” was posthumously published in 1900 as a book by the Federation of American Zionists. The essays outlined her Zionist ideas and plans that entailed Jewish centers in both the United States and Palestine.
Emma was one of the founders of Hebrew Technical Institute in New York City. The organization provided vocational training to Jewish immigrants. She also established The Society for the Improvement and Colonization of East European Jews in 1883.
“The New Colossus”
Following a journey to France and England, where she befriended poets Robert Browning and William Morris, Emma received the commission that would forever alter her legacy. She was invited to write a poem for the purpose of raising funds for a pedestal for the Statue of Liberty in 1883.
Though reluctant at first, she finally relented. “The New Colossus,” a sonnet, was first published New York World and The New York Times in 1883. But it wouldn’t be engraved on the Statue of Liberty until 1903, about sixteen years after she had died.
These are the most recited lines (actually the last lines) of the sonnet containing the “lines of world-wide welcome” inscribed at the base of the Statue of Liberty:
Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!
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12 Poems by Emma Lazarus, Creator of The New Colossus
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Emma began to suffer from illness, likely Hodgkin’s lymphoma, in 1884. In 1885, devastated by her father’s death, she traveled to Europe once again, visiting Italy, England, and France. But her condition worsened, and she returned to New York.
She died on November 17, 1887, at the age of 38, and is buried at Congregation Shearith Israel’s Beth Olom Cemetery, Cypress Hills, Queens, New York.
“The New Colossus” would become (and is still) so famous that it has overshadowed much of Emma’s considerable body of work and accomplishments.
Emma Lazarus was one of the first successful and vocal Jewish American authors, and her work was admired and praised by her contemporaries. Her advocacy on behalf of Jewish refugees and her case for the creation of a Jewish homeland were also part of what made her short life so impactful.
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Books by and about Emma Lazarus on Amazon
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Here is a portion of a remembrance of Emma Lazarus that appeared in The Century Magazine shortly after her death:
We cannot restrain a feeling of suddenness and incompleteness and a natural pang of wonder and regret for a life so richly and so vitally endowed thus cut off in its prime. But for us, it is not fitting to question or repine, but rather to rejoice in the rare possession that we hold. What is any life, even the most rounded and complete, but a fragment and a hint?
What Emma Lazarus might have accomplished, had she been spared, it is idle and even ungrateful to speculate. What she did accomplish has real and peculiar significance. It is the privilege of a favored few that every fact and circumstance of their individuality shall add lustre and value to what they achieve.
To be born a Jewess was a distinction for Emma Lazarus, and she in turn conferred distinction upon her race. To be born a woman also lends a grace and a subtle magnetism to her influence. Nowhere is there contradiction or incongruity. Her works bear the imprint of her character, and the character of her works; the same directness and honesty, the same limpid purity of tone, and the same atmosphere of things refined and beautiful.
The vulgar, the false, and the ignoble—she scarcely comprehended them, while on every side she was open and ready to take in and respond to whatever can adorn and enrich life. Literature was no mere “profession” for her, which shut out other possibilities; it was only a free, wide horizon and background for culture.
She was passionately devoted to music, which inspired some of her best poems; and during the last years of her life, in hours of intense physical suffering, she found relief and consolation in listening to the strains of Bach and Beethoven.
When she went abroad, painting was revealed to her, and she threw herself with the same ardor and enthusiasm into the study of the great masters; her last work (left unfinished) was a critical analysis of the genius and personality of Rembrandt.
And now at the end we ask: Has the grave really closed over all these gifts? Has that eager, passionate striving ceased, and “is the rest silence?” Who knows? But would we break, if we could, that repose, that silence and mystery and peace everlasting?
More about Emma LazarusOn this site
12 Poems by Emma Lazarus, Creator of The New ColossusMajor Works
Poems and Translations (1867)Admetus and Other Poems (1871)Alide: An Episode in Goethe’s Life (a novel, 1874)The Spagnoletto (a play in verse, 1876)Songs of a Semite (1882) The Poems of Emma Lazarus (1888; posthumous)Biography
Emma Lazarus in Her World: Life and Letters by Bette Roth Young (1995)Liberty’s Poet: Emma Lazarus by Hannia S. Moore (2005)Liberty’s Voice: The Story of Emma Lazarus by Erica Silverman (2011, ages 6 to 8)Emma’s Poem: The Voice of the Statue of Liberty by Linda Glaser (2013, ages 4 to 7)Emma Lazarus (Jewish Encounters Series) by Esther Schor (2017)More information and sources
Wikipedia Statue of Liberty National Monument Poetry Foundation Jewish Women’s Archive Academy of American Poets. . . . . . . . . .
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May 17, 2019
Quotes from Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
How to select quotes from Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf, when almost every sentence in the book is quotable? It’s a tough choice, indeed. The 1925 novel whose narrative is built on the inner consciousness of its characters, particularly Clarissa Dalloway, was groundbreaking in its time. Often called “a novel of one day,” it was almost universally praised for its innovative format. One 1925 review stated:
“Mrs. Woolf makes one aware of one’s own mental experiences in a way no other contemporary writer has ever achieved. Her characters appear upon the scenic screen of Clarissa Dalloway’s consciousness in proportion to her personal reaction to them; and then appear again in a swift soul-probing analysis as they really are.
Clarissa’s charm, her delicate sense of superiority, and naïve speculation upon the problems of others make themselves felt on all with whom she comes in contact. Yet she is loved: one cannot escape her somehow, and, as her returned lover discovers, one can never quite forget her.”
Here is a sampling of quotes from Mrs. Dalloway, though the wiser course would be to read and savor the entire book.
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“She felt very young; at the same time unspeakably aged. She sliced like a knife through everything; at the same time was outside, looking on. She had a perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, out, far out to sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day. Not that she thought herself clever, or much out of the ordinary.”
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“She thought there were no Gods; no one was to blame; and so she evolved this atheist’s religion of doing good for the sake of goodness.”
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“He thought her beautiful, believed her impeccably wise; dreamed of her, wrote poems to her, which, ignoring the subject, she corrected in red ink.”
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“Clarissa had a theory in those days — they had heaps of theories, always theories, as young people have. It was to explain the feeling they had of dissatisfaction; not knowing people; not being known. For how could they know each other? You met every day; then not for six months, or years. It was unsatisfactory, they agreed, how little one knew people.”
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“It is a thousand pities never to say what one feels.”
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“There was touch of the bird about her, of the jay, blue-green, light, vivacious, though she was over fifty, and grown very white since her illness.There she perched, never seeing him, waiting to cross, very upright.“
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“Mrs. Dalloway is always giving parties to cover the silence.”
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“The world wavered and quivered and threatened to burst into flames.”
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“Fear no more, says the heart, committing its burden to some sea, which sighs collectively for all sorrows, and renews, begins, collects, lets fall.”
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“Her life was a tissue of vanity and deceit.”
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Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolfon Amazon
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“Did it matter then, she asked herself, walking towards Bond Street, did it matter that she must inevitably cease completely; all this must go on without her; did she resent it; or did it not become consoling to believe that death ended absolutely?”
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“For in marriage a little license, a little independence there must be between people living together day in and day out in the same house; which Richard gave her, and she him.”
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“With twice his wits, she had to see things through his eyes — one of the tragedies of married life.”
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“A thing there was that mattered; a thing, wreathed about with chatter, defaced, obscured in her own life, let drop every day in corruption, lies, chatter. This he had preserved. Death was defiance. Death was an attempt to communicate; people feeling the impossibility of reaching the centre which, mystically, evaded them; closeness drew apart; rapture faded, one was alone. There was an embrace in death.”
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“But nothing is so strange when one is in love (and what was this except being in love?) as the complete indifference of other people.”
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“Doesn’t one always think of the past, in a garden with men and women lying under the trees? Aren’t they one’s past, all that remains of it, those men and women, those ghosts lying under the trees, … one’s happiness, one’s reality?”
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“This late age of the world’s experience had bred in them all, all men and women, a well of tears. Tears and sorrows; courage and endurance; a perfectly upright and stoical bearing.”
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“Her only gift was knowing people almost by instinct, she thought, walking on. If you put her in a room with someone, up went her back like a cat’s; or she purred.
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“She had influenced him more than any person he had ever known. And always in this way coming before him without his wishing it, cool, ladylike, critical; or ravishing, romantic.”
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“‘Musing among the vegetables?’— was that it? — ‘I prefer men to cauliflowers‘ — was that it? He must have said it at breakfast one morning when she had gone out on to the terrace — Peter Walsh.”
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“Did it matter then, she asked herself, walking towards Bond Street, did it matter that she must inevitably cease completely? All this must go on without her; did she resent it; or did it not become consoling to believe that death ended absolutely?”
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“And of course she enjoyed life immensely. It was her nature to enjoy. Anyhow there was no bitterness in her; none of that sense of moral virtue which is so repulsive in good women. She enjoyed practically everything. If you walked with her in Hyde Park now it was a bed of tulips, now a child in a perambulator, now some absurd little drama she made up on the spur of the moment.”
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“She belonged to a different age, but being so entire, so complete, would always stand up on the horizon, stone-white, eminent, like a lighthouse marking some past stage on this adventurous, long, long voyage, this interminable — this interminable life.”
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You might also enjoy:
Orlando by Virginia Woolf: Gender and Sexuality Through Time
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“That she held herself well was true; and had nice hands and feet; and dressed well, considering that she spent little. But often now this body she wore (she stopped to look at a Dutch picture), this body, with all its capacities, seemed nothing — nothing at all. She had the oddest sense of being herself invisible; unseen; unknown; there being no more marrying, no more having of children now, but only this astonishing and rather solemn progress with the rest of them, up Bond Street, this being Mrs. Dalloway; not even Clarissa any more; this being Mrs. Richard Dalloway.”
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“What is this terror? what is this ecstasy? he thought to himself. What is it that fills me with this extraordinary excitement?
It is Clarissa, he said.
For there she was.”
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May 15, 2019
The “Bachelor Girl” — a Poem by Effie Waller Smith
Born in the rural mountain community of Chloe Creek in Pike County, Kentucky, Effie Waller Smith (1879–1960) was the child of former slaves Sibbie Ratliff and Frank Waller, who ensured that their children were well educated.
She attended Kentucky Normal School for Colored Persons, and from 1900 to 1902 she trained as a teacher, then taught for some years. Her verse appeared in local papers, and she published her first collection, Songs of the Months, in 1904. That same year she entered a marriage that did not last long, and she divorced her husband.
In 1908 she married Deputy Sheriff Charles Smith, but this union was also short-lived. In 1909 she published two further collections, Rhymes from the Cumberland and Rosemary and Pansies. She appears to have stopped writing at the age of 38 in 1917, when her sonnet “Autumn Winds” appeared in Harper’s Magazine. She left Kentucky for Wisconsin in 1918.
This brief bio and the following poem, The “Bachelor Girl,” are excerpted from New Daughters of Africa: An International Anthology of Writing by Women of African Descent, edited by Margaret Busby. Copyright © 2019 Reprinted with permission by Amistad, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. The “Bachelor Girl” is hosted on The New York Public Library’s Digital Schomburg African Women Writers of the 19th Century.
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New Daughters of Africa, edited by Margaret Busby
is available on Amazon and wherever books are sold
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From Rhymes from the Cumberland (1909)
She’s no “old maid,” she’s not afraid
To let you know she’s her own “boss,”
She’s easy pleased, she’s not diseased,
She is not nervous, is not cross.
She’s no desire whatever for
Mrs. to precede her name,
The blessedness of singleness
She all her life will proudly claim.
She does not sit around and knit
On baby caps and mittens,
She does not play her time away
With puggy dogs and kittens.
And if a mouse about the house
She sees, she will not jump and scream;
Of handsome beaux and billet doux
The “bachelor girl” does never dream.
She does not puff and frizz and fluff
Her hair, nor squeeze and pad her form.
With painted face, affected grace,
The “bachelor girl” ne’er seeks to charm.
She reads history, biography,
Tales of adventure far and near,
On sea or land, but poetry and
Love stories rarely interest her.
She’s lots of wit, and uses it,
Of “horse sense,” too, she has a store;
The latest news she always knows,
She scans the daily papers o’er.
Of politics and all the tricks
And schemes that politicians use,
She knows full well and she can tell
With eloquence of them her views.
An athlete that’s hard to beat
The “bachelor girl” surely is,
When playing games she makes good aims
And always strictly minds her “biz.”
Amid the hurry and the flurry
Of this life she goes alone,
No matter where you may see her
She seldom has a chaperon.
But when you meet her on the street
At night she has a “32,”
And she can shoot you, bet your boots,
When necessity demands her to.
Her heart is kind and you will find
Her often scattering sunshine bright
Among the poor, and she is sure
To always advocate the right.
On her pater and her mater
For her support she does not lean,
She talks and writes of “Woman’s Rights”
In language forceful and clean.
She does not shirk, but does her work,
Amid the world’s fast hustling whirl,
And come what may, she’s here to stay,
The self-supporting “bachelor girl.”
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Note to readers: Across the web, Effie Waller Smith is sometimes conflated with Effie Lee Newsome (1885 – 1979), a poet associated with the Harlem Renaissance, and the rare existing photo of Newsome is often used incorrectly to identify Smith.
More about Effie Waller Smith Effie Waller Smith: African-American Appalachian Poetry from the Breaks Wikipedia Notable Kentuckian African Americans Database. . . . . . . . . .
You might also enjoy:
6 Fascinating African-American Women Writers of the 19th Century
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May 12, 2019
The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein (1933)
The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein (1933) is actually Stein’s autobiography, written as if in her longtime companion’s voice. Considered one of the most accessible of Stein’s experimental, often ponderous works, it was a commercial and critical success. It is indeed narrated as if Alice is doing the writing, and this comes through in a fresh and vibrant manner.
Some of Gertrude’s colleagues didn’t much care for the book. Some thought it too commercial, as indeed, the author admitted that she cranked it out in six weeks as a way to make money. Ernest Hemingway, to whom Gertrude was a mentor, called it “a damned pitiful book,” and her brother, Leo Stein, who disliked Alice, called it “a farrago of lies.”
The book played with the notion of what an autobiography could be and helped to cement the legacy of its author and, no doubt, Alice B. Toklas as well. Following are two reviews from 1933, the year that this unique book was published.
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Alice B. Toklas and Gertrude Stein in 1908, the year after they first met
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From the original review in the Chicago Tribune, September 2, 1933: “About six weeks ago Gertrude Stein said, ‘It does not look to me as if you were ever going to write that autobiography. You know what I am going to do? I am going to write it for you. I am going to write it as simply as Defoe did the autobiography of Robinson Crusoe.’ And she has, and this is it.”
For years intelligent readers have known of, if now actually followed, the work of Gertrude Stein. No person with any feel at all for modern American literature has missed Three Lives or the “cuttings from it which have been grafted into the literary work of Ernest Hemingway (to name just one of the writers who have been influenced by Gertrude Stein).
From Three Lives Gertrude Stein went on to a more complicated, less assimilable theory of writing, which culminated in the idea that this is an age of the sentence as opposed to previous ages of the paragraph. Much amused and bitter criticism of its obscurity gave Stein’s work the same sort of fantastic praise and blame that was attached to the work of the modern painters (intent upon expressing ideas rather than facts).
For years, everyone, and by everyone I mean everyone who knows about such things, has been trying to get Stein to write her autobiography. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas is Stein’s unique way of answering that cry without giving up her theories of the new forms of writing.
Alice B. Toklas is “a pretty good housekeeper, and a pretty good gardener, and a pretty good needlewoman, and a pretty good secretary, and a pretty good editor, and a pretty good vet for the dogs,” the book says, “and I have to do them all at once and I found it difficult to add being a pretty good author.” So Gertrude Stein wrote her autobiography for her, choosing, in this manner, to actually write her own.
Miss Toklas has been inseparable from Stein since 1907 and in writing the “autobiography” of her constant companion, Stein has been able, in an amusing form, to detail her own life completely. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas is really the autobiography of Gertrude Stein.
No book I have read recently has given me the sheer pleurae in its writing that this book has. It contains the subtlest undercurrent of humor and satire. It is sharp as the edge of a scalpel. Its sentences are often spike upon which are carried the heads of a whole generation’s foibles, sentiments, critical mistakes, and righteousness. It is wise and it is brilliantly cruel, as truth can be.
If one began quoting sentences, one might quote a third of the book. It is all stimulating to the mind of the reader. He or she need not know the work of the artists and writers who fill its pages. He or she needs only to float in the vividly tangy words and to be refreshed about the importance of creative art.
Not that The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas is a treatise. It is a record set down with such clarity and rich humanity that it becomes itself a work of creative art.
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The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas on Amazon
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From the original review in the Des Moines Register, November 5, 1933: Gertrude Stein, an exponent of surrealism, has exerted a profound influence on the growth of the new art, music, and literature during the great revolution in the arts which came in the twentieth century.
It’s characteristic of her to name this book The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, write it herself, and make it ninety-nine percent Stein. Alice was her devoted secretary and companion for twenty-five years and very likely did know much of the enthusiasms of Gertrude. However, she could not have written this vital document of the salon at 27, Rue de Fleurus, Paris.
How Gertrude Stein must have smiled as she had Alice write: “I may say that only three times in my life have I met a genius and each time a bell within me rang. The three geniuses were Gertrude Stein, Pablo Picasso, and Alfred Whitehead.”
Stein attended Radcliffe and Johns Hopkins, but medicine bored her. So she went to Paris, acquired many pictures that now rank among the great moderns, and wrote Three Lives.
An endless procession of unknown young artists sought inspiration in her essential greatness at this time. Picasso, Matisse, Juan Gris, Maris Laurencin, and others knew her approbation. They in turn liked and believed in her revolutionary writing. Picasso was the favorite of them all and the book is filled with stories of him.
Later, Stein got to know Carl Van Vechten, Lincoln Steffens, Louis Bromfield, Bertrand Russell, Ford Maddox Ford, Sherwood Anderson, Ernest Hemingway, and Scott Fitzgerald. Stein thinks that Fitzgerald will be read long after his contemporaries are forgotten.
Hemingway was a pupil of Anderson and Stein. They later viewed him with some pride and a little shame. He sat at Gertrude Stein’s feet and took “not much” but all he could use. They had much fun over him, saying, “He looks like a modern and smells of the museums.” However, Stein said, “I can’t help it. I have a weakness for Hemingway.”
The Atlantic wrote of Gertrude Stein: “The English reading world may be divided into two groups — those who understand and applaud Gertrude Stein, and those who don’t. Whatever the reader’s sympathies on this question, there is no disputing the fact that she is one of the remarkable women of our time.”
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You might also enjoy: Tender Buttons by Gertrude Stein:
An Experiment in Cubist Poetry, or Literary Prank?
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“A little artist has all the tragic unhappiness and the sorrows of a great artist and he is not a great artist.”
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“I always say that you cannot tell what a picture really is or what an object really is until you dust it every day and you cannot tell what a book is until you type it or proof-read it. It then does something to you that only reading it never can do.”
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“I like a view but I like to sit with my back turned to it.”
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You should have one absorbing occupation and as for the other things in life for full enjoyment you should only contemplate results. In this way you are bound to feel more about it than those who know a little of how it is done.”
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More about The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas
Wikipedia Reader discussion on Goodreads The Other Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas*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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May 10, 2019
Turning Twelve: Making Room to Grow in The Long Secret by Louise Fitzhugh
“What in the world has happened to Beth Ellen?” Harriet wonders, just a few pages from the end of Louise Fitzhugh’s classic 1964 novel, Harriet the Spy. Harriet is still eleven years old and she sometimes still calls her friend ‘Mouse,’ but Beth Ellen comes into her own as a character in the 1965 novel, The Long Secret.
The Toronto Public Library has eighty-two copies of Harriet the Spy (1964) but only six copies of what was billed as the “Further Adventures of Harriet the Spy” — The Long Secret by Louise Fitzhugh, which was published the following year, and only two copies of Sport (1979).
So it seems that the average reader is more interested in Harriet than her friends. That was true for me as a girl as well; I read Harriet the Spy countless times, but I only read The Long Secret once. Which is strange, because I’ve known Beth Ellen almost as long as I’ve known Harriet.
Re-encountering Beth EllenReaders meet Beth Ellen first in Harriet’s notebook, in Harriet the Spy, back when Harriet had only a single notebook:
“MAYBE BETH ELLEN DOESN’T HAVE ANY PARENTS. I ASKED HER HER MOTHER’S NAME AND SHE COULDN’T REMEMBER. SHE SAID SHE HAD ONLY SEEN HER ONCE AND SHE DIDN’T REMEMBER IT VERY WELL. SHE WEARS STRANGE THINGS LIKE ORANGE SWEATERS AND A BIG BLACK CAR COMES FOR HER ONCE A WEEK AND SHE GOES SOMEPLACE ELSE.”
In The Long Secret, Harriet keeps two notebooks, “the one regularly used for spying and a new one for writing”. And there is so much more to know about Beth Ellen. Also, so much to learn about Harriet, now that readers are in Beth Ellen’s head as often as Harriet’s. Readers are afforded a place in the narrative which provides perspective on both girls.
So, Harriet says to Beth Ellen: “I’m going to be a writer and I have to have something to write, don’t I? I’m not like you, going and looking at people just because I think they’re nice.”
And Beth Ellen thinks about Harriet: “How odd she is, anyway. What possible fun could it be to write everything down all the time? So tiresome.”
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From Beth Ellen’s perspective, Harriet’s consistency is both comforting and frustrating: “Oh, Harriet, thought Beth Ellen, you are always Harriet.”
And there is still a little Mouse in Beth Ellen too: “There was something about the good-natured, bearlike rough-and-tumble of the Jenkins family that made her feel nervous and somewhat frightened. They made her want to hide so they wouldn’t suddenly notice hr and jump on her or make her play some wild outgoing game.”
The Jenkins family lives in Water Mill, New York too. It’s the town of Water Mill which brings Harriet and Beth Ellen together. They do attend the same school in Manhattan, but Harriet is friends with Janie and Sport there.
Harriet is vacationing with her parents and Beth Ellen is there with her grandmother, and although Janie makes an appearance in the story, The Long Secret offers not only a change of scene but a commentary on the change. It deliberately reorients readers and provides another view of one character they thought they knew very well (Harriet) and insight into another character they barely knew (Beth Ellen).
An unpredictable sequel
The Long Secret challenged readers who were accustomed to traditional series, in which the focal point remained predictable. Enid Blyton’s Famous Five and Carolyn Keene’s Nancy Drew series displayed characters in a suspended time, where it was endlessly summer and everyone was too busy solving mysteries to age. In contrast, Louise Fitzhugh’s characters confront change and readers view the shifting landscape from within and without.
Change is uncomfortable and uncertainty is threatening, as Beth Ellen’s questions about menstruation reveal: “Isn’t that right? Aren’t there little rocks that come down and make you bleed and hurt you?” Beth Ellen is twelve and so is Janie, whose scientific knowledge upstages this interpretation of events which Beth Ellen’s grandmother has offered in lieu of facts.
Janie explains that the Victorians who raised Beth Ellen’s grandmother “thought that telling her this was better than telling her the truth.”
Janie opts for the truth and her talk of uterine linings and Fallopian tubes provides some decisive answers but also introduces other challenging questions. Do biological distinctions dictate different life choices for women? Is there a price to be paid for these differences, a price which extends beyond a few days each month to how women occupy the rest of their lives? And how can children make sense of things when the adults in their lives are not equipped to answer difficult questions?
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The Long Secret by Louise Fitzhugh on Amazon
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What are children to do when the adults in their lives are unable or unwilling to tell the truth. Harriet wonders: “Isn’t there some way to force parents to tell the truth? They’re always telling us to tell the truth and then they lie in their teeth.”
What are children to do when they realize that the adults in their lives are making it up as they go along. “I just mean that I have made up my own set of ethics and don’t take them from any organized religion,” explains Harriet’s father.
And what does a writer do for her characters when faced with a question that doesn’t have an answer. Harriet struggles with this dilemma when she writes a story about a mystery in Water Mill: “BUT HOW CAN I HAVE HIM SOLVE IT WHEN I CAN’T EVEN SOLVE IT?”
On the surface, Harriet is preoccupied with a specific mystery: who is leaving notes with quotations from the Bible for town people. (This is a delightful reversal of what occurs in Harriet the Spy, where a serious problem revolves around something that Harriet has written, when everybody realizes what she has written; here, the problem revolves around things that are written which appear to have no author. In one instance, readers know who is judging and, in the other instance, readers do not know: in both cases, people’s feelings are hurt.)
Beneath the surface, all the characters are preoccupied with questions that seem unanswerable. What do we do when our parents (and other adults) are absent or disappointing? What do we do when we realize that our parents are just ordinary people? What do we do with unanswerable questions?
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The Long Secret does contain some answers, however. And not only about how menstruation works and how one can create their own system of ethics outside of organized religion.
Readers also learn more about that “someplace else”, that place where Beth Ellen went in Harriet the Spy, and that everyone has a “someplace else” even if not everyone gets to see it. Perhaps more importantly, readers learn how to find security in an ever-changing world: “She felt a rush of love, a safety and a joy in the simple warm routine of bed, […] of her own room, of herself.”
And perhaps most importantly, readers learn that change might be hard, and lies might be frightening, but change is good: something to prepare for, something to anticipate, something to welcome. “I will be different in the morning, she thought with a feeling close to contentment, and rolled over on her side into sleep.”
Whether in Manhattan or Water Mill, Louise Fitzhugh leaves a space for readers to locate themselves in her story. And the comfort of story? It simultaneously takes you someplace else and roots you where you are: it reminds you that being yourself is not always easy but always essential.
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Contributed by Marcie McCauley, a graduate of the University of Western Ontario and the Humber College Creative Writing Program. She writes and reads (mostly women writers!) in Toronto, Canada. And she chats about it on Buried In Print and @buriedinprint.
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May 9, 2019
Playing Town: Revisiting Louise Fitzhugh’s Harriet the Spy
Marcie McCauley reflects on revisiting Harriet the Spy, the 1964 classic by Louse Fitzhugh, and how the story continues to resonate and inspire her as a working writer.
See, first you take off your coat and hang it on the back of a library chair, use it to mark a comfortable seat as your place to return to with a stack of books. Then you fetch the ones you remember most fondly. You can’t have too many at one time or the librarians are annoyed. I usually have ten.*
This is how you play Library, based on Harriet’s technique for playing Town as she explains it to her friend, Sport.
The way Harriet describes the rules in Harriet the Spy is as familiar to me as the smell of this 1964 hardcover. “See, first you make up the name of the town. Then you write down the names of all the people who live in it. You can’t have too many at one time or it gets too hard. I usually have twenty-five.”
Even though it is not a copy which I have read before, this well-worn library copy has absorbed the quintessential smell I remember from spending time with Harriet when I was a girl. (I borrowed a copy from my friend sometimes but more often from the public library.)
Learning the rules of Town
Back then, I was learning the rules of Town along with Sport. Now I recognize that Louise Fitzhugh is talking as much about the game of Storytelling as any other pastime.
Harriet begins with the men’s names, the wives’ names, the children’s names, their professions and then the fun begins: the stories about the residents.
“Ole Golly told me if I was going to be a writer I better write down everything, so I’m a spy that writes down everything,” Harriet tells the Cook.
Harriet’s family has a cook and she also occasionally eats at the luncheonette where she orders chocolate egg creams. Her house, on East Eighty-seventh Street in Manhattan, has a courtyard. And Harriet has a nurse named Ole Golly.
This was nothing like my childhood of low-rent apartments, processed noodles and fast-food for special occasions, and a library instead of a babysitter.
But Harriet also has a notebook. And I had notebooks. Four-packs bought at the hardware store every September and palm-sized coil notebooks with photographs of kittens on their covers: the former to be rationed and the latter to remain meticulously preserved.
Harriet wrote things down “because [she’s] seen them and [she wants] to remember them” when she had her notebook with her and she “fairly itched to take notes” even when she could not, and every night after she goes to bed, she hides under the covers where she reads “happily until Ole Golly came in and took the flashlight away.”
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You might also enjoy: Quotes from Harriet the Spy
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Ole Golly is a vital force in Harriet’s life. She quotes writers like Henry James on the practice of afternoon tea and Wordsworth on the “inward eye which is the bliss of solitude”, writers like Cowper and Emerson, and she advises Harriet on a writer’s eye and a writer’s responsibility.
Sometimes, however, Harriet wishes Ole Golly “would just shut up.” This is Harriet all over. Because only Ole Golly understands that Harriet needs her “pen flying over the pages, of her thoughts, finally free to move, flowing out.”
Without Ole Golly, Harriet’s life would be a world filled with judgements like those of her friend Janie’s mother, who warns: “I think you girls have something to learn. I think you have to find out you’re girls.”
Harriet had Ole Golly and nine-year-old-me had Harriet, who was eleven years old and donned a pair of eyeglasses without lenses because she wanted to look smart. (I wore mine only because my teacher called home to say that I had been keeping them in my desk.)
I wrote things in my notebook. I read under the covers. I didn’t wear the kind of clothes that young girls were expected to wear. And, after I met Harriet, I realized that made me a spy. And knowing Harriet made all of that okay, for me and for other writers.
Tributes for Harriet’s 50th anniversary edition
In recalling her experience of Harriet in a set of tributes collected in the book’s 50th anniversary edition (Delacorte Books, 2014), Judy Blume observes: “She had secrets; I had secrets. She was curious; I was curious.”
Gregory Maguire marvels: “She was trying to find out from lives what life itself was about.” And Rebecca Stead concludes “there are some kinds of loneliness we must learn to live with”.
It’s true that much of the story revolves around Harriet’s secrecy and solitude and what she observes about other people’s secrets, as she follows her regular route through the neighborhood. So it’s fair to say that much of the story unfolds in Harriet’s head: “She sat there thinking, feeling very calm, happy, and immensely pleased with her own mind.”
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Not all of Harriet’s time is spent spying, note-taking and being immensely pleased, however: the book begins and ends with Harriet’s friends. Sport and Janie are key figures, whom Harriet has the opportunity to observe closely and, in turn, their behavior leads Harriet to see herself in new (sometimes startling) ways.
Sport has his own self-titled book, published in 1979, five years after Louise Fitzhugh’s death, and Janie also appears in The Long Secret, which was published in 1965 (although Beth Ellen is at the heart of that story). Sport lives with his father, who is a novelist and works all night in an apartment that smells like old laundry (which also contributes to Harriet’s understanding of a writer’s life). Janie lives with two parents in a renovated brownstone where she has a chemistry set and explosive aspirations.
These friendships and Harriet’s relationships with other neighborhood and school friends are significant, and individual children are sketched in detail (sometimes literally, as Louise Fitzhugh’s illustrations are scattered throughout the book), but the primary relationship in Harriet’s life is with her series of notebooks.
When readers meet her, she is writing in her fifteenth notebook, and when that relationship is fractured, Harriet is broken too. “She grabbed up the pen and felt the mercy of her thoughts coming quickly, zooming through her head out the pen onto the paper. What a relief, she thought to herself; for a moment I thought I had dried up.”
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Harriet the Spy on Amazon
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Revisiting Louise Fitzhugh’s novel as an adult, I’m no longer convinced that Harriet and I would have been friends off the page. We would never have summered together in Water Mill, Long Island. We would never have had a sleepover on a Saturday night while her parents attended a white-tie-and-tails party.
On the page, however, we could be best friends. Like me, Harriet is “just so about a lot of things” and the only kind of sandwich in her world is a tomato sandwich. When she “didn’t have a notebook it was hard for her to think” and she gets a “funny hole somewhere above her stomach” when she loses the person in her life who knows her best.
And perhaps most importantly, when she plays Town, she plays so hard that even her friends are like characters in her life – impediments to and inspirations for – doing the work of telling stories.
In that sense, Harriet and I have lived in the same Town from the moment we met, and, even still, that Town is a place I visit every day.
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*The other nine books in my stack? P.L. Travers’ Mary Poppins Opens the Door (1943), Mary Norton’s The Borrowers (1952), Edward Eager’s Half Magic (1954), L.M. Boston’s The Children of Green Knowe (1954), Natalie Babbitt’s Tuck Everlasting (1975), Mildred D. Taylor’s Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry (1976), E.L. Konigsburg’s From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler (1967), Penelope Lively’s A Stitch in Time (1976), and Cynthia Voigt’s Homecoming (1981).
Marcie McCauley’s “spy reports” have been published online and printed in literary journals in North America and Europe. She spies and writes and reads (mostly women writers!) in Toronto, Canada. You can also find her online at Marcie McCauley and on Twitter @buriedinprint.
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May 3, 2019
Gloria E. Anzaldúa
Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa (September 26, 1942 – May 15, 2004) was a queer Chicana poet, feminist theorist, and writer. Her writing and poetry discuss the anger that stems from social and cultural marginalization. She herself experienced this growing up in the Mexican-Texas border as the daughter of a Spanish American and Native American.
Anzaldúa was born in Jesús María Ranch in Rio Grande Valley of South Texas as the oldest of four siblings. Throughout her childhood, her parents, Urbano Anzaldúa and Amalia Anzaldúa García, moved their family to various ranches working as migrant farmers.
Anzaldúa worked in the fields and became aware of the Southwest and South Texas landscapes along with the existence of Spanish speakers on the margins in the United States. As a result, she began to gain awareness of social justice issues and started writing about them. After several years of working on ranches, her parents decided to relocate their family to Hargill, Texas.
Education and Teaching Career
Anzaldúa received a B.A. in English, Art, and Secondary Education from the University of Texas-Pan American (now University of Texas Rio Grande Valley) in 1968. Soon after in 1972, she received an M.A. in English and Education from the University of Texas at Austin. During her time in Austin, she joined politically active cultural poets and radical dramatists, such as Ricardo Sanchez and Hedwig Gorski.
After receiving her Bachelor’s in English, she started a job as a preschool and special education teacher. Around this time in the 1970s, she also taught a course at UT-Austin called “La Mujer Chicana”, which she described as a turning point for her as she felt more connected to the queer community, writing, and feminism.
She later enrolled in the University of Texas’ doctoral program for comparative literature but left the program. Soon after, she moved to California in 1977, where she supported herself as an independent scholar.
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The Chicana FeministIn California, Anzaldúa devoted herself completely to her writing. During this time, she was supporting herself through her writing, lectures, occasionally teaching sessions about feminism, Chicano studies, creative writing at San Francisco State University, the University of California, Santa Cruz, and more.
She continued taking part in political activism and consciousness-raising keeping in mind her main goal–to find ways to build a multicultural, inclusive feminist movement. To her dismay, she found that there were few writings by or about women of color.
The Prolific 1980sAnzaldúa continued writing, teaching, and traveling to speaking events throughout the 1980s. During this time, she co-edited This Bridge Called My Back: Writing by Radical Women of Color with Cherrie Moraga, which was published in 1981 and won the Before Columbus Foundation American Book Award.
In addition, she wrote the semi-autobiographical Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza which was published in 1987. Making Face Making Soul/Haciendo Caras: Creative and Critical Perspectives by Women of Color was published in 1990 and included writings by famous feminists, such as Audre Lorde. The book includes titles such as “Still Trembles Our Rage in the Face of Racism” and “(De)Colonized Slaves”.
Themes of Anzaldúa’s worksAnzaldúa’s writing included the theme of Nepantla, meaning “in the middle” to describe her experience as a Chicana woman. From this, she created the term “Nepantlera,” meaning a threshold of people that move among multiple conflicting worlds as they refuse to align themselves exclusively with any single individual, group, or belief system.
Spirituality was another common theme as she occasionally described herself as a very spiritual person and stated that she had experienced four out-of-body experienced in her lifetime. She referred to her devotion to la Virgen de Guadalupe and developed concepts of spiritual activism.
Sexuality and feminism are very prominent themes in her writing. She expressed that she possessed a multi-sexuality and even stated that she felt an “intense sexuality” towards her father, animals, and trees. Though she identifies as a lesbian in her writing, she had relationships with both men and women. She also identified as a feminist and some of her major works are associated with Chicana feminism and postcolonial feminism.
Anzaldúa’s writing brings English and Spanish together as a united language, stemming from her theory of “borderlands” identity. Her work emphasizes the connection between language and identity and expresses concern with those who give up on their native language in order to fit in with society.
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Gloria E. Anzaldúa page on Amazon
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In 1986, she won the Before Columbus Foundation American Book Award for This Bridge Called My Back: Writing by Radical Women of Color.
In 1987, her work Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza was named one of the 38 best books of 1987 by Library Journal and 100 Best Books of the Century by Hungry Mind Review and Utne Reader.
In 1991, Anzaldúa won the Lambda Lesbian Small Book Press Award for Making Face Making Soul/Haciendo Caras: Creative and Critical Perspectives by Women of Color. This year, she was also awarded the Lesbian Rights Award.
In 2012, she was named by Equality Forum as one of their 31 Icons of the LGBT History Month. In 2016, she won the Independent Publisher Book Award for Anthologies in 2016 for This Bridge Called My Back: Writing by Radical Women of Color.
LegacyAround the time of her death, Anzaldúa was very close to completing her book manuscript, Light in the Dark/Luz en lo Oscuro: Rewriting Identity, Spirituality, Reality, and was planning on submitting it as her dissertation. Unfortunately, she passed away in 2004 in Santa Cruz, California due to complications from diabetes and was unable to complete it. Duke University Press posthumously published it in 2015.
Today, many institutions offer awards in the name of Gloria E. Anzaldúa, such as The Gloria E. Anzaldúa Prize awarded annually and the Gloria E. Anzaldúa Book Prize given by the National Women’s Studies Association.
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Major works
This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color – 1981Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza – 1987Making Face, Making Soul/Haciendo Caras: Creative and Critical Perspectives by Feminists of Color – 1990Interviews/Entrevistas – 2000This Bridge We Call Home: Radical Visions for Transformation – 2002The Gloria Anzaldúa Reader – 2009Light in the Dark/Luz en lo Oscuro: Rewriting Identity, Spirituality, Reality – 2015Biographies
Northamerican Silences: History, Identity, and Witness in the Poetry of Gloria Anzaldúa, Cherríe Moraga, and Leslie Marmon Silko by Kate Adams (1994)Gloria Anzaldúa’s Queer Mestizaje by Ian Barnard (1997)More Information
Wikipedia The Poetry Foundation ThoughtCo The Gloria E. Anzaldúa FoundationSkyler 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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May 2, 2019
Quotes from A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry
Lorraine Hansberry (1930 – 1965) was an American playwright and author. Her best-known work, A Raisin in the Sun(1959), was the first play by an African-American woman to be staged on Broadway. And at the young age of 29, Hansberry became the youngest American and the first African-American playwright to win the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award for Best Play.
The play details the life of the Youngers, an African-American family living on the South Side of Chicago in the 1950s. It follows their struggles, their commitment to family, and their desire to overcome poverty while remaining a family unit. Here are quotes from Hansberry’s most famous work, A Raisin in the Sun:
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“Once upon a time freedom used to be life—now it’s money.”
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“I wonder if the quiet was not better than … death and hatred. But … I will not wonder long.”
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“Man say to his woman: I got me a dream. His woman say: Eat your eggs.”
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“Just tell me, what it is you want to be—and you’ll be it. . . . Whatever you want to be—Yessir! You just name it, son . . . and I hand you the world!”
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“Then isn’t there something wrong in a house—in a world—where all dreams, good or bad, must depend on the death of a man?”
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See also: To Be Young, Gifted and Black by Lorraine Hansberry
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“There is always something left to love. And if you ain’t learned that, you ain’t learned nothing.”
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“Son – I come from five generations of people who was slaves and sharecroppers – but ain’t nobody in my family never let nobody pay ‘em no money that was a way of telling us we wasn’t fit to walk the earth. We ain’t never been that poor. We ain’t never been that – dead inside.”
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“Yes – I taught you that. Me and your daddy. But I thought I taught you something else too… I thought I taught you to love him.”
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“See there, that just goes to show you what women understand about the world. Baby, don’t nothing happen for you in this world ‘less you pay somebody off!”
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“I guess that’s how come that man finally worked hisself to death like he done. Like he was fighting his own war with this here world that took his baby from him.”
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“Sometimes it’s like I can see the future stretched out in front of me – just plain as day. The future, Mama. Hanging over there at the edge of my days. Just waiting for me – a big, looming blank space – full of nothing. Just waiting for me. But it don’t have to be.”
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You might also enjoy: Quotes by Lorraine Hansberry
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“And where does it end?… An end to misery! To stupidity! Don’t you see there isn’t any real progress, Asagai, there is only one large circle that we march in, around and around, each of us with our own little picture in front of us – our own little mirage that we think is the future.”
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“Asagai, while I was sleeping in that bed in there, people went out and took the future right out of my hands! And nobody asked me, nobody consulted me – they just went out and changed my life! “
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“You making something inside me cry, son. Some awful pain inside me.”
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“Well – we are dead now. All the talk about dreams and sunlight that goes on in this house. It’s all dead now.”
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“Child, when do you think is the time to love somebody the most? When they done good and made things easy for everybody? Well then, you ain’t through learning – because that ain’t the time at all. It’s when he’s at his lowest and can’t believe in hisself ‘cause the world done whipped him so! When you starts measuring somebody, measure him right, child, measure him right. Make sure you done taken into account what hills and valleys he come through before he got to wherever he is.”
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“I guess I always think things have more emphasis if they are big, somehow.”
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Lorraine Hansberry page on Amazon
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“What’s the matter with you all! I didn’t make this world! It was give to me this way! Hell, yes, I want me some yachts someday! Yes, I want to hang some real pearls ‘round my wife’s neck. Ain’t she supposed to wear no pearls? Somebody tell me – tell me, who decides which women is suppose to wear pearls in this world. I tell you I am a man – and I think my wife should wear some pearls in this world!”
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“It’s dangerous, son…When a man goes outside his home to look for peace.”
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“That is just what is wrong with the colored woman in this world…Don’t understand about building their men up and making ‘em feel like they somebody. Like they can do something. “
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“Who the hell told you you had to be a doctor? If you so crazy ‘bout messing ‘round with sick people – then go be a nurse like other women – or just get married and be quiet…”
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“It’s just that every American girl I have known has said that to me. White – black – in this you are all the same. And the same speech, too!…It’s how you can be sure that the world’s most liberated women are not liberated at all. You all talk about it too much!”
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“When the world gets ugly enough – a woman will do anything for her family. “
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“It ain’t much, but it’s all I got in the world and I’m putting it in your hands. I’m telling you to be the head of this family from now on like you supposed to be.”
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Larrisa Pope is a 2019 SUNY New Paltz graduate with a degree in International Business and Public Relations. She is passionate about keeping the legacies of iconic female authors alive.
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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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Quotes from My Cousin Rachel by Daphne du Maurier
My Cousin Rachel is a novel by British author Daphne du Maurier (1907 – 1989), first published in the U.K. in 1951 and in the U.S. in 1952. Echoing du Maurier’s 1938 masterwork Rebecca, My Cousin Rachel is a romantic thriller. It’s set primarily on a large estate in Cornwall, England, where du Maurier drew real-life inspiration. She saw a portrait of a woman named Rachel Carew at an estate, and the creative spark was lit. Read on for quotes from My Cousin Rachel, which will give you the flavor of this iconic novel.
Multiple television and film adaptations of this novel have been produced. My Cousin Rachel was adapted into a 1983 BBC miniseries, and as a 2011 radio play, also by the BBC. Most recently, a film adaptation was released in 2017 starring the aptly named Rachel Weisz in the title role.
The story is told by Phillip Kendall, a conscience-stricken, unhappy young man As seen through his eyes, the novel is a mystery to the very end.
Is Rachel Ashley is guilty of the murder of her elderly English husband in her Florentine villa, and is she equally guilty of an attempt to poison his young cousin and heir in the old family home in Cornwall? Rachel, like du Maurier’s iconic Rebecca character, remains a puzzle to the end. Is Rachel a devil or an angel? It’s up to the reader to decide.
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Learn more about My Cousin Rachel by Daphne du Maurier
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“Truth was something intangible, unseen, which sometimes we stumbled upon and did not recognize, but was found, and held, and understood only by old people near their death, or sometimes by the very pure, the very young.”
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“He was like someone sleeping who woke suddenly and found the world…all the beauty of it, and the sadness too. The hunger and the thirst. Everything he had never thought about or known was there before him, and magnified into one person who by chance, or fate — call it what you will — happened to be me.”
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“She had contemplated life so long it had become indifferent to her.”
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“People who mattered could not take the humdrum world. But this was not the world, it was enchantment; and all of it was mine.”
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“I wondered how it could be that two people who had loved could yet have such a misconception of each other and, with a common grief, grow far apart. There must be something in the nature of love between a man and a woman that drove them to torment and suspicion.”
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“… A lonely man is an unnatural man, and soon comes to perplexity. From perplexity to fantasy. From fantasy to madness.”
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You may also enjoy Quotes from Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
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“… I believe there is nothing so self-destroying, and no emotion quite so despicable, as jealousy.”
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“If we killed women for their tongues all men would be murderers.”
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“A man’s jealousy is like a child’s, fitful and foolish, without depth. A woman’s jealousy is adult, which is very different.”
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“A woman of feeling does not easily give way. You may call it pride, or tenacity, call it what you will. In spite of all the evidence to the contrary, their emotions are more primitive than ours. They hold to the thing they want, and never surrender.”
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“We were dreamers, both of us, unpractical, reserved, full of great theories never put to test, and like all dreamers, asleep to the waking world.”
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“There is no going back in life, no return, no second chance. I cannot call back the spoken word or the accomplished deed.”
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“There are some women … good women very possibly, who through no fault of their own impel disaster. Whatever they touch, somehow turns to tragedy.”
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“How soft and gentle her name sounds when I whisper it. It lingers on the tongue, insidious and slow, almost like poison, which is apt indeed. It passes from the tongue to the parched lips, and from the lips back to the heart. And the heart controls the body, and the mind also. Shall I be free of it one day?”
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“I love the stillness of a room after a party. The chairs are moved, the cushions disarranged, everything is there to show that people enjoyed themselves; and one comes back to the empty room happy that it’s over, happy to relax and say, ‘Now we are alone again.’ Ambrose used to say to me in Florence that it was worth the tedium of visitors to experience the pleasure of their going. He was so right.”
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“The point is, life has to be endured, and lived. But how to live it is the problem.”
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My Cousin Rachel by Daphne du Maurier on Amazon
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May 1, 2019
A House with Four Rooms by Rumer Godden (1989)
A House with Four Rooms (1989) is the second part of a two-part autobiography by Rumer Godden (1907 – 1998). A noted and prolific novelist and memoirist born in Eastbourne, Sussex (England), her early years and youth were spent in India at the height of British colonial rule. Though her life was not without its share of struggles, it was often as dramatic and colorful as the stories she so skillfully created.
Interestingly, she based the title — A House With Four Rooms —on an Indian proverb, which says: “Everyone is a house with four rooms, a physical, a mental, an emotional and a spiritual. Most of us tend to live in one room most of the time but, unless we go into every room, every day, even if only to keep it aired, we are not a complete person.”
While the first part of Rumer’s autobiography, A Time to Dance, No Time to Weep (1987), is more absorbing and speaks of her years in India, this one should also appeal to the author’s fans, as it provides insights into the mind of a brilliant writer, who seems to appeal to generations, beyond her time.
The book starts with Rumer’s permanent return to England, forced upon her by an unfortunate incident in India. Also on the verge of a divorce, with two little girls to take care of, this book is all about the rebuilding of Godden’s life, most importantly her writing one.
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See also: A Time to Dance, No Time to Weep
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Rumer touches upon the caste system of India in those days, which resulted in the bifurcation of work done by domestic help and her learning to depend on them, from her childhood years. She is frank enough to admit to her lack of skills in the housekeeping department and quickly evolves a convenient philosophy, “Never do anything that someone else around you can do better than you can.”
Thus she resolves to stick to whatever she has a gift for — “teaching children perhaps, and amusing them; bringing up Pekingese, and writing.” But conscious of her own shortcomings, she does make sure that her daughters get the training, not to be found wanting in domestic skills.
A substantial portion of this book covers her adventures with her various publishers and agents including Spencer Curtis Brown, who after reading her manuscript, The River tells her, “You need have no doubts that Robert Lusty will publish this. I particularly like the names of the four frog children,” which gives Rumer an idea of Spencer’s thorough perusal of her manuscript.
The River and working with Jean Renoir
How The River attracts the attention of Jean Renoir, “simply one of the finest film directors in the world,” in the words of Spencer, makes for an absorbing part of this autobiography. Like his other contemporaries, Renoir had also made the shift to Hollywood from Europe, and felt that Hollywood would expect him to make films similar to what he was doing earlier.
In Renoir’s words, “I had to find a new style which would fit with the new person I had become and with the new life I had found. The day I read Rumer Godden’s novel, The River, I knew I had found it.”
Thus begins a new life for Rumer, as she is persuaded to write the script for the film, and is again catapulted into another life that includes a stay in India for the casting and shooting of the film.
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A House with Four Rooms on Amazon
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Savoring successIn her autobiography, Rumer speaks unabashedly about her stepping foot into the life of luxury that only the very well-known writers can dream of. She writes:
“With Macmillan as my publisher, I seemed to enter into a new dimension. Eventually it was not only lunches at Boulestin’s, and its like or in the boardroom, it was dinner in private houses or at the Garrick, of having cars sent for me, or escorts to publicity interviews, radio and television…” and so on.
This book has mention of the many houses that Rumer opts to live in and do up, as she has a great fondness for bric-a-brac and a desire to make any house “into a home.” There are also details about travails with the different kinds of domestic help, and in deciding on the right kind of schools for her daughters, Jane and Paula.
A new husband and a spiritual search
The book heralds the arrival of James Haynes-Dixon, who worms his way into Rumer’s life and heart, finally winding up as her second husband. From her descriptions, he is clearly the opposite of what her first husband has been and seems to be the man for all seasons for Rumer and her two girls.
Rumer also speaks of her inner spiritual search, which she discovers in the religion that she was born into, Christianity.
Interspersed with black and white pictures of the author, with family and friends, the book does provide delightful glimpses of all the four rooms that Rumer Godden occupied. One can’t help wondering though, whether there was a fifth one that she held back from her readers.
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Melanie P. Kumar is a Bangalore, India-based independent writer who has always been fascinated with the magic of words. Links to some of her pieces can be found at gonewiththewindwithmelanie.wordpress.com.
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Learn more about Rumer Godden
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