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The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson (1959)

The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson is a 1959 novel in the gothic horror genre, though it might be more accurately described as a literary ghost story. A finalist for the National Book Award, it’s a masterful story of psychological terror.

Hill House is a mansion built by Hugh Crain, who has been long passed away. Dr. John Montague, an investigator of the supernatural, wishes to conduct a study there to find existence of spirits. With him are three young companions including the young heir to the mysterious house, and two young women.

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You might also like: We Have Always Lived in the Castle
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The psychological ghost story: setting the stage

In the 2006 Penguin re-issue edition of The Haunting of Hill House, Laura Miller provides detailed insight on the novel and its complicated, often troubled author. I highly recommend linking through to Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House: An Introduction for fascinating insights, not only on this particular work, but the genre. Here’s an excerpt:

The true antecedents of The Haunting of Hill House are not the traditional English ghost stories of M.R. James or Sheridan LeFanu, or even the gothic fiction of Edgar Allan Poe, but the ghostly tales of Henry James. The Turn of the Screw, another short novel about a lonely, imaginative young woman in a big isolated house, is a probable influence, and so, perhaps, is “The Jolly Corner,” the story of a middle-aged aesthete who roams the empty rooms of his childhood home, haunted by the specter of the man he would have been if he had lived his life differently.

The ghost story is a small genre to begin with, but its subgenre, the psychological ghost story, the category to which The Haunting of Hill House and Henry James’ tales belong, is tinier still. The literary effect we call horror turns on the dissolution of boundaries, between the living and the dead, of course, but also, at the crudest level, between the outside of the body and everything that ought to stay inside. In the psychological ghost story, the dissolving boundary is the one between the mind and the exterior world.

During the third major manifestation at Hill House, as Eleanor’s resistance begins to buckle, she thinks, “how can these others hear the noise when it is coming from inside my head?”

The psychological ghost story is as much about the puzzle of identity as it is about madness. The governess in The Turn of the Screw yearns to be a heroine, to do something brave and noble, and to attract the attention of the dashing employer whose sole directive is that she never, ever bother him. She wants to be someone else. Without the mission of protecting her two young charges from mortal danger, she’s merely a woman squandering her youth in the middle of nowhere, taking care of children who will only grow up to leave her behind.

Is the house she presides over haunted by the ghost of brutish Peter Quint and his lover, her predecessor, the sexually degraded Miss Jessel? Or is it haunted by some half-formed, half-desired alternate version of the nameless governess herself? Eleanor may be the target of The Haunting of Hill House, or she may be the one doing the haunting. After all, Dr. Montague invited her to participate in the project because of a poltergeist incident during her childhood.

(Excerpted from “Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House: An Introduction” by Laura Miller ©2006, reprinted by permission)

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See also: We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson
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A 1959 review of The Haunting of Hill House

The Haunting of Hill House was well received  1959. Here’s a typical review, giving a glimpse into the plot and characters of this classic work of psychological terror that bears Shirley Jackson’s the unique stamp.

From the original 1959 review by H.G. Rogers from The Literary Guideposts syndicated column, November, 1959: Way off in the hills at the end of a lonely road behind a locked gate stands Hill House. Eighty years old, the sprawling place with a tower, countless rooms, and doors upon doors upon doors, has been the scene of several deaths. The scared people in the nearby village avoid it like a nighttime graveyard.

Dr. Montague, student of ghosts and their goings-on, rents the building, invites a young man and two girls to stay with him and try to catch a spook. They are Luke, heir to the property, and Theodora and Eleanor, both with some psychic experiences. They will be joined by Mrs. Montague and a friend who works a planchette in anticipation of messages from the spirit world.

A surly pair of caretakers gets this odd house party off to a creepy start, and then in the quiet of the night the gremlins come banging down, thumping deafeningly on the walls and then softly, murderously feeling along with them with their fingertips. Doors close with no one to close them, deadly cold drafts blow with no lace to blow from,  mysterious presences flutter by unseen.

Miss Jackson isn’t saying right out that she believes in ghosts, but she does say: People who are bound to see ghosts see them, and what they think they see can hurt them.

As between her children, about whom she has written, and her ghosts, I prefer, literally, the ghosts, and the loudest and most terrifying “boo” utter in contemporary fiction was sounded in her short story, “The Lottery.” This novel gives you some queasy moments, but the climax is not one of them.

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The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson on Amazon
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Circling back to the present

Though The Haunting of Hill House is no longer widely read, it has lingered in the imagination through film and theater, having been adapted into two feature films and a stage play. Most recently, it was much expanded into a multipart 2018 Netflix series. Critical reaction has been mixed, as in this review in The Atlantic, and it’s probably safe to describe it as inspired by Shirley Jackson’s novel rather than adapted from it, as it departs markedly from the original.

Circling back to Laura Miller’s insights:

Jackson’s ghost story, published in 1959 was a hit; it became a bestseller, the critics praised it, and the movie rights sold for a goodly sum. The incipient madness of Eleanor Vance seemed to affect her creator, though — or perhaps it was the other way around.

We Have Always Lived in the Castle is narrated by girl who is even more disturbed; at one point, she sets the house on fire to scare off her sister’s suitor. Jackson, a mercurial personality at best and aggravated by the prescription amphetamines she took like aspirin, experienced her own psychic disintegration not long after finishing “Castle,” a breakdown triggered when one in her husband’s many affairs with Bennington students took an uncharacteristically serious turn.

Eventually, Jackson pulled herself together with the help of a psychiatrist, but the burden of so many years worth of bad habits proved to be harder to conquer. She died in her sleep, of cardiac arrest, at age 48.

The Haunting of Hill House, after “The Lottery,” is the work most often associated with Jackson, but she is no longer widely read. This isn’t necessarily surprising; the successful novelists of one generation often evaporate from the awareness of the next, and it probably didn’t help her reputation in literary circles that she sometimes wrote as a kind of thinking-woman’s Erma Bombeck. (Then even more than now, the domestic realm was viewed as insufficiently serious.)

Still, Jackson’s clean, terse style and her tough-mindedness ought to appeal to the kind of readers who keep Patricia Highsmith and James M. Cain in print today. In a way, Jackson was a kindred spirit to the hard-boiled genre novelists of her time. She also depicted the cruel jokes of fate and chance unfolding in an amoral universe. It’s just that instead of doing it with men and guns, she chose to write about mad, lonely girls and big, sinister houses. 

(Excerpted from “Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House: An Introduction” by Laura Miller ©2006, reprinted by permission. Special thanks to Laura Miller for her insights. Laura is currently books and culture columnist at Slate. In 1995, she co-founded Salon.com and worked there as an editor and staff writer for 20 years. Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, Harper’s, The Guardian, Los Angeles Times, the Wall Street Journal, and many other publications, including the New York Times Book Review, where she wrote the Last Word column for two years. She is the editor of the Salon.com Reader’s Guide to Contemporary Authors (Penguin, 2000). 

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Watch the series adaptation of The Haunting of Hill House on Netflix

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Quotes from The Haunting of Hill House

 

“To learn what we fear is to learn who we are. Horror defies our boundaries and illuminates our souls.”

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“Fear and guilt are sisters.” 

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“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream.”

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“Fear,” the doctor said, “is the relinquishment of logic, the willing relinquishing of reasonable patterns. We yield to it or we fight it, but we cannot meet it halfway.” 

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“She had taken to wondering lately, during these swift-counted years, what had been done with all those wasted summer days; how could she have spent them so wantonly?”

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“I have spent an all but sleepless night, I have told lies and made a fool of myself, and the very air tastes like wine. I have been frightened half out of my foolish wits, but I have somehow earned this joy; I have been waiting for it for so long.”

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“Am I walking toward something I should be running away from?” 

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“Eleanor looked up, surprised; the little girl was sliding back in her chair, sullenly refusing her milk, while her father frowned and her brother giggled and her mother said calmly, ‘She wants her cup of stars.’
      Indeed yes, Eleanor thought; indeed, so do I; a cup of stars, of course.
      ‘Her little cup,’ the mother was explaining, smiling apologetically at the waitress, who was thunderstruck at the thought that the mill’s good country milk was not rich enough for the little girl. ‘It has stars in the bottom, and she always drinks her milk from it at home. She calls it her cup of stars because she can see the stars while she drinks her milk.’ The waitress nodded, unconvinced, and the mother told the little girl, ‘You’ll have your milk from your cup of stars tonight when we get home. But just for now, just to be a very good little girl, will you take a little milk from this glass?’
      Don’t do it, Eleanor told the little girl; insist on your cup of stars; once they have trapped you into being like everyone else you will never see your cup of stars again; don’t do it; and the little girl glanced at her, and smiled a little subtle, dimpling, wholly comprehending smile, and shook her head stubbornly at the glass. Brave girl, Eleanor thought; wise, brave girl.” 

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“It was a house without kindness, never meant to be lived in, not a fit place for people or for love or for hope. Exorcism cannot alter the countenance of a house; Hill House would stay as it was until it was destroyed.”

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More about The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson

Wikipedia Reader discussion on Goodreads Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House: An Introduction

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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!

The post The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson (1959) appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.

12 Poems by Edna St. Vincent Millay

Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892 – 1950) has long been regarded as a major twentieth-century figure in the genre of poetry. Edna immersed herself in great works of literature from an early age. She read Shakespeare, Keats, Longfellow, Shelley, and Wordsworth.

At age of sixteen she compiled a dozen or so poems into a copybook and presented them to her mother as “Poetical Works of Vincent Millay.” In 1912, encouraged by her mother, Edna, then 19, sent her poem, “Renascence” to The Lyric Year, a magazine that held a yearly poetry contest and published winning entries. Though she didn’t win, the poem gained her a great deal of attention and launched her writing career.

A Few Figs from Thistles (1921), her first major collection, explored female sexuality, among other themes. Second April (also 1921) dealt with heartbreak, nature, and death. In 1923, Edna’s fourth volume of poems, The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver, won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. She was the first woman to win a Pulitzer, and only the second person to receive the prize for poetry.

Edna achieved the status of superstar status, something that was — and still is — rare for a poet. Throughout the 1920s, she recited to enthusiastic, sold-out crowds during her many reading tours at home and abroad. Perhaps she did burn her candle at both ends, as described in one of her most famous poems, First Fig, as she didn’t live long past the age of fifty. Here is a selection of 12 poems by Edna St. Vincent Millay from some of her earlier collections.

TavernI'll keep a little tavern
   Below the high hill's crest,
Wherein all grey-eyed people
   May set them down and rest.
There shall be plates a-plenty,
   And mugs to melt the chill
Of all the grey-eyed people
   Who happen up the hill.
There sound will sleep the traveller,
   And dream his journey's end,
But I will rouse at midnight
   The falling fire to tend.
Aye, 'tis a curious fancy—
   But all the good I know
Was taught me out of two grey eyes
   A long time ago.
SorrowSorrow like a ceaseless rain
   Beats upon my heart.
People twist and scream in pain,—
Dawn will find them still again;
This has neither wax nor wane,
   Neither stop nor start.
People dress and go to town;
   I sit in my chair.
All my thoughts are slow and brown:
Standing up or sitting down
Little matters, or what gown
   Or what shoes I wear.
Ashes of LifeLove has gone and left me and the days are all alike;
Eat I must, and sleep I will, — and would that night were here!
But ah! — to lie awake and hear the slow hours strike!
Would that it were day again! — with twilight near!

Love has gone and left me and I don't know what to do;
This or that or what you will is all the same to me;
But all the things that I begin I leave before I'm through, —
There's little use in anything as far as I can see.

Love has gone and left me, — and the neighbors knock and borrow,
And life goes on forever like the gnawing of a mouse, —
And to-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow
There's this little street and this little house.
First FigMy candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends—
It gives a lovely light!
EbbI know what my heart is like
      Since your love died:
It is like a hollow ledge
Holding a little pool
      Left there by the tide,
      A little tepid pool,
Drying inward from the edge.
Song of a Second AprilApril this year, not otherwise
   Than April of a year ago,
Is full of whispers, full of sighs,
   Of dazzling mud and dingy snow;
   Hepaticas that pleased you so
Are here again, and butterflies.
There rings a hammering all day,
   And shingles lie about the doors;
In orchards near and far away
   The grey wood-pecker taps and bores;
   The men are merry at their chores,
And children earnest at their play.
The larger streams run still and deep,
   Noisy and swift the small brooks run
Among the mullein stalks the sheep
   Go up the hillside in the sun,
   Pensively,—only you are gone,
You that alone I cared to keep.
What Lips My Lips Have KissedWhat lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why,
I have forgotten, and what arms have lain
Under my head till morning; but the rain
Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh
Upon the glass and listen for reply,
And in my heart there stirs a quiet pain
For unremembered lads that not again
Will turn to me at midnight with a cry.
Thus in winter stands the lonely tree,
Nor knows what birds have vanished one by one,
Yet knows its boughs more silent than before:
I cannot say what loves have come and gone,
I only know that summer sang in me
A little while, that in me sings no more.
DepartureIt's little I care what path I take,
And where it leads it's little I care,
But out of this house, lest my heart break,
I must go, and off somewhere!

It's little I know what's in my heart,
What's in my mind it's little I know,
But there's that in me must up and start,
And it's little I care where my feet go!

I wish I could walk for a day and a night,
And find me at dawn in a desolate place,
With never the rut of a road in sight,
Or the roof of a house, or the eyes of a face.

I wish I could walk till my blood should spout,
And drop me, never to stir again,
On a shore that is wide, for the tide is out,
And the weedy rocks are bare to the rain.

But dump or dock, where the path I take
Brings up, it's little enough I care,
And it's little I'd mind the fuss they'll make,
Huddled dead in a ditch somewhere.

"Is something the matter, dear," she said,
"That you sit at your work so silently?"
"No, mother, no—'twas a knot in my thread.
There goes the kettle—I'll make the tea."
The BetrothalOh, come, my lad, or go, my lad,
   And love me if you like!
I hardly hear the door shut
   Or the knocker strike.

Oh, bring me gifts or beg me gifts,
   And wed me if you will!
I'd make a man a good wife,
   Sensible and still.

And why should I be cold, my lad,
   And why should you repine,
Because I love a dark head
   That never will be mine?

I might as well be easing you
   As lie alone in bed
And waste the night in wanting
   A cruel dark head!

You might as well be calling yours
   What never will be his,
And one of us be happy;
   There's few enough as is.Dirge Without MusicI am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground.
So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind:
Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely.  Crowned
With lilies and with laurel they go; but I am not resigned.

Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you.
Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust.
A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew,
A formula, a phrase remains,—but the best is lost.

The answers quick and keen, the honest look, the laughter, the love,—
They are gone.  They are gone to feed the roses.  Elegant and curled
Is the blossom.  Fragrant is the blossom.  I know.  But I do not approve.
More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in the world.

Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave
Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;
Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.
I know.  But I do not approve.  And I am not resigned.Love is Not AllLove is not all: it is not meat nor drink
Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain;
Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink
And rise and sink and rise and sink again;
Love can not fill the thickened lung with breath,
Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone;
Yet many a man is making friends with death
Even as I speak, for lack of love alone.
It well may be that in a difficult hour,
Pinned down by pain and moaning for release,
Or nagged by want past resolution's power,
I might be driven to sell your love for peace,
Or trade the memory of this night for food.
It well may be. I do not think I would.


The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver“Son,” said my mother,
   When I was knee-high,
“You’ve need of clothes to cover you,
   And not a rag have I.

“There’s nothing in the house
   To make a boy breeches,
Nor shears to cut a cloth with
   Nor thread to take stitches.

“There’s nothing in the house
   But a loaf-end of rye,
And a harp with a woman’s head
   Nobody will buy,”
   And she began to cry.

That was in the early fall.
   When came the late fall,
“Son,” she said, “the sight of you
   Makes your mother’s blood crawl,—

“Little skinny shoulder-blades
   Sticking through your clothes!
And where you’ll get a jacket from
   God above knows.

“It’s lucky for me, lad,
   Your daddy’s in the ground,
And can’t see the way I let
   His son go around!”
   And she made a queer sound.

That was in the late fall.
   When the winter came,
I’d not a pair of breeches
   Nor a shirt to my name.

I couldn’t go to school,
   Or out of doors to play.
And all the other little boys
   Passed our way.

“Son,” said my mother,
   “Come, climb into my lap,
And I’ll chafe your little bones
   While you take a nap.”

And, oh, but we were silly
   For half an hour or more,
Me with my long legs
   Dragging on the floor,

A-rock-rock-rocking
   To a mother-goose rhyme!
Oh, but we were happy
   For half an hour’s time!

But there was I, a great boy,
   And what would folks say
To hear my mother singing me
   To sleep all day,
   In such a daft way?

Men say the winter
   Was bad that year;
Fuel was scarce,
   And food was dear.

A wind with a wolf’s head
   Howled about our door,
And we burned up the chairs
   And sat on the floor.

All that was left us
   Was a chair we couldn’t break,
And the harp with a woman’s head
   Nobody would take,
   For song or pity’s sake.

The night before Christmas
   I cried with the cold,
I cried myself to sleep
   Like a two-year-old.

And in the deep night
   I felt my mother rise,
And stare down upon me
   With love in her eyes.

I saw my mother sitting
   On the one good chair,
A light falling on her
   From I couldn’t tell where,

Looking nineteen,
   And not a day older,
And the harp with a woman’s head
   Leaned against her shoulder.

Her thin fingers, moving
   In the thin, tall strings,
Were weav-weav-weaving
   Wonderful things.

Many bright threads,
   From where I couldn’t see,
Were running through the harp-strings
  Rapidly,

And gold threads whistling
   Through my mother’s hand.
I saw the web grow,
   And the pattern expand.

She wove a child’s jacket,
   And when it was done
She laid it on the floor
   And wove another one.

She wove a red cloak
   So regal to see,
“She’s made it for a king’s son,”
   I said, “and not for me.”
   But I knew it was for me.

She wove a pair of breeches
   Quicker than that!
She wove a pair of boots
   And a little cocked hat.

She wove a pair of mittens,
   She wove a little blouse,
She wove all night
   In the still, cold house.

She sang as she worked,
   And the harp-strings spoke;
Her voice never faltered,
   And the thread never broke.
   And when I awoke,—

There sat my mother
   With the harp against her shoulder
Looking nineteen
   And not a day older,

A smile about her lips,
   And a light about her head,
And her hands in the harp-strings
   Frozen dead.

And piled up beside her
   And toppling to the skies,
Were the clothes of a king’s son,
   Just my size.

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My Cousin Rachel by Daphne du Maurier (1951)

My Cousin Rachel is a novel by British author Daphne du Maurier, first published in the U.K. in 1951 and in the U.S. in 1952. Echoing du Maurier’s masterwork, Rebecca, My Cousin Rachel is a romantic thriller.  It’s set primarily on a large estate in Cornwall, where du Maurier took real-life inspiration at Antony House. There she saw a portrait of a woman named Rachel Carew, and the creative spark was lit.

So highly anticipated was My Cousin Rachel’s publication that the film rights were fought over even before it was published. David O. Selznick’s 1940 film adaptation of Rebecca had been hugely successful, giving him plenty of confidence inMy Cousin Rachel’s prospects. In 1951, the year the novel was published in the U.K., Selznick sought the film rights.

But his rival, Darryl Zanuck of 20th Century-Fox, had apparently secured the rights to the film just twenty minutes before Selznick was set to make his bid. The 1952 film starred Olivia de Haviland in the title role, with Richard Burton co-starring.

You know a story has touched a nerve when multiple television and film adaptations continue to be produced. My Cousin Rachel was aired by the BBC as a mini-series in 1983, and as a modern-day radio play, also by the BBC in 2011. Most recently, a film adaptation was released in 2017 starring the aptly named Rachel Weisz in the title role.

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See also: Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
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It’s worth seeing both the 1952 and 2017 film versions, but it’s always best to read the book first! My Cousin Rachel was quite well received on both sides of the Atlantic. Here are two views from its initial publication by American reviewers highlighting the intriguingly ambiguous plot and character of its antiheroine:

 

The Golden Du Maurier Touch

From the original review by Harrison Smith of My Cousin Rachel by Daphne du Maurier in The Berkshire Review, February 9, 1952:

Some prominent English families have a way of inheriting talent for several generations. The du Mauriers are an example of this trait. Beginning at age 24, Daphne, its youngest member, had published in the course of five years three literary novels, a notable book about her distinguished actor-father Gerald, and the resoundingly successful romance Jamaica Inn.

The romantic streak in the family is further illustrated by her grandfather, George du Maurier, who was not only an artist but the author of two immensely successful books, Trilby and Peter Ibbetson.

A worthy successor to Rebecca

The best-remembered of all of du Maurier’s books is Rebecca, the classic story of a young and devoted second wife who arrived at Maxim de Winter’s historic country house to discover much that was unexpected, sinister, and mysterious.

My Cousin Rachel may prove equally successful, though to many, the story may not be as appealing. This is for the simple reason that Rachel is years older than Rebecca and is a beautiful but enigmatic, devious woman, half-Italian by birth.

The novel is actually a mystery story to the end, for the reader never knows whether Rachel Ashley is guilty of the murder of her elderly English husband in her Florentine villa, or whether she is equally guilty of an attempt to poison his young cousin and heir in the old family home in Cornwall.

There can be no argument that the fascination of My Cousin Rachel makes it difficult to take time out for eating or sleeping. But the evidence of Rachel’s innocence or guilt will be argued for a long time and will be a subject for the film version as well.

The case against and in defense of Rachel

For the prosecution, this beautiful and fascinating woman can be accused of having led a riotous life with her first husband, an Italian count, and of having married the elder Ashley for his more and then poisoned him.

There is a mysterious Italian who follows her to young Philip Ashleys Cornwall home who was likely her lover. The symptoms of the malady that nearly kill this young man, who had never loved another, duplicate the fatal illness of the elder Ashley. There can be no doubt that Rachel was a skillful seducer of the inexperienced young man of 24, who became so enamored with her that he gave her the family jewels and made a will surrendering his fortune to her upon his death.

The defense can only prove that there is no actual evidence of her guilt, and the final decision will depend on whether the reader falls in love with her, and thus becomes her defender, or loathes her as he or she would a poisonous snake.

Is she guilty or innocent?

This reviewer believes that Daphne Du Maurier  has weighted the evidence heavily against the heroine, but is still left in doubt of the author’s own opinion of her guilt or innocence. At any rate, this story once again proves that the author is the most entrancing of living romantic novelists and the ablest constructor of complex and absorbing plots.

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You might also enjoy: Jamaica Inn by Daphne du Maurier
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Devil or angel? The reader must decide

From the original review of My Cousin Rachel by Daphne du Maurier in Council Bluffs Nonpareil, February 1952: My Cousin Rachel is reminiscent of Daphne Du Maurier’s best seller Rebecca. Because Rachel, like Rebecca, remains a puzzle to the end. Devil or angel? The reader must decide.

The story is told by Phillip Kendall, a very conscience-stricken and unhappy young man. Phillip has been raised to be a young Devonshire squire by a doting bachelor uncle, Ambrose Ashley. 

One winter Ambrose takes off for Italy’s warmer clime, leaving his heir, Phillip, to take care of his properties. In Italy Uncle Ambrose does a startling thing for a man of his advancing years. He meets the beautiful Contessa Sangaletti. She is also, writes Ambrose, a widow and an Englishwoman and a distant cousin of the Devonshire Ashleys.

They are married and settle in Rachel’s villa in Florence. The tone of Ambrose’s letters changes. They hint at dark deeds, mention Ambrose’s failing health, and a sinister Signor Rinaldi, devoted friend of Rachel.

Phillip hastens to Italy only to learn of his uncle’s death, also shrouded in mystery. And Rachel has disappeared. The youth returns to Devonshire and shortly thereafter he has a beautiful and charming house guest — Rachel.

Despite his growing distrust and suspicions, the worldly and experienced Rachel soon has Phillip enraptured — and snared. Phillip becomes suddenly and dangerously ill. His suspicions of Rachel, backed by those of his childhood playmate Louise Kendall, grow. What Phillip does or does not do about his suspicions is the twist at the end of the tale.

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My Cousin Rachel by Daphne du Maurier on Amazon

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More about My Cousin Rachel  

Wikipedia Reader discussion on Goodreads 2017 film version of My Cousin Rachel

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Endearing Quotes by Gabriela Mistral, Latina Nobel Prize Winner

Gabriela Mistral, born Lucila Godoy Alcayaga (April 7, 1889 – January 10, 1957), was a Chilean poet, educator, diplomat, and feminist. She was also best known for being the first Latin American woman to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Born in Vicuña, Chile she was raised in the small Andean village of Montegrande where her family was rather poor. She attended a primary school taught by her older sister, Emelina Molina, at the age of nine but only attended for three years.

Though she stopped formally attending school at the age of twelve, she became an educator just three years later. During her time as an educator, she began writing poetry and using her pen pal name, Gabriela Mistral.

Since then, Mistral’s poetry was fueled by heartbreak and life experiences. You might enjoy these 10 poems by Gabriela Mistral. Here are quotes by the talented and intellectual Nobel Prize in Literature recipient, Gabriela Mistral:

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“Let the earth look at me, and bless me, for now I am fecund and sacred, like the palms and the furrows.”

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Learn more about Gabriela Mistral 

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“I have all that I lost and I go carrying my childhood like a favorite flower that perfumes my hand.”

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“I have a faithful joy and a joy that is lost. One is like a rose, the other, a thorn. The one that was stolen I have not lost.” – “Selected poems of Gabriela Mistral”, 1971

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“All night I have suffered; all night my flesh has trembled to bring forth its gift. The sweat of death is on my forehead; but it is not death, it is life!”

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“We are guilty of many errors and many faults, But our worst crime is abandoning the children, Neglecting the fountain of life. Many of the things we need can wait. The child cannot. Right now is the time his bones are being formed, His blood is being made, And his senses are being developed. To him we cannot answer ‘Tomorrow.’ His name is ‘Today.’” – “His Name Is Today”, mid 1900s

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“For me, religiosity is … the constant remembrance of the presence of the soul.”

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“At this moment, by an undeserved stroke of fortune, I am the direct voice of the poets of my race and the indirect voice for the noble Spanish and Portuguese tongues.”

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“Many things we need can wait. The child cannot. Now is the time his bones are formed, his mind developed. To him we cannot say tomorrow, his name is today.”

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“You saw her a hundred times, but not once did you look at her.”

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“In the secret of night, my prayer climbs like the liana, My prayer is, and I am not. It grows, and I perish. I have only my hard breath, my reason and my madness. I cling to the vine of my prayer. I tend it at the root of the stalk of night.” – “Selected poems of Gabriela Mistral”, 1971

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“You shall create beauty not to excite the senses but to give sustenance to the soul. ”

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8 Fascinating Facts About Gabriela Mistral, Latina Nobel Prize Winner

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“Love that stammers, that stutters, is apt to be the love that loves best.”

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“We are guilty of many errors and many faults, but our worst crime is abandoning the children, neglecting the fountain of life. Many of the things we need can wait. The child cannot. Right now is the time his bones are being formed, his blood is being made, and his senses are being developed. To him we cannot answer ‘Tomorrow,’ his name is today.”

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“Love beauty; it is the shadow of God on the universe.”

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“I write poetry because I can’t disobey the impulse; it would be like blocking a spring that surges up in my throat. For a long time I’ve been the servant of the song that comes, that appears and can’t be buried away. How to seal myself up now?…It no longer matters to me who receives what I submit. What I carry out is, in that respect, greater and deeper than I, I am merely the channel.”

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“Many things we need can wait. The child cannot. Now is the time his bones are formed, his mind developed. To him we cannot say tomorrow, his name is today.”

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“Now what mattered to me no longer matters.”

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“Everyone left and we have remained on a path that goes on without us.”

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“She talks with an accent of savage seas. Her breathing is the breath of the wilderness, she has loved with a passion that makes her blanch, which she never mentions and which would be like the map of another star if she told us.”

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“She loved only her lover and Iphigenia in the narrowness of her cold breast.”

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“The night itself is riddled with her, wide with her, and alive with her.”

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“Writing tends to cheer me; it always soothes my spirit and blesses me with the gift of an innocent, tender, childlike day. It is the sensation of having spent a few hours in my homeland, with my customs, free whims, my total freedom.”

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Gabriela Mistral page on Amazon

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“I write poetry because I can’t disobey the impulse; it would be like blocking a spring that surges up in my throat. For a long time I’ve been the servant of the song that comes, that appears and can’t be buried away. How to seal myself up now?…It no longer matters to me who receives what I submit. What I carry out is, in that respect, greater and deeper than I, I am merely the channel.” – Madwomen, 2009

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Renaissance House: A Retreat for Writers and Artists

RENAISSANCE HOUSE RETREAT FOR WRITERS AND ARTISTS IN OAK BLUFFS RECEIVES A GRANT FROM SUSTAINABLE ARTS FOUNDATION AS IT ENTERS 20TH YEAR

Renaissance House: A Retreat for Writers and Artists has received a grant from The Sustainable Arts Foundation to fund a full scholarship to a resident and their child. The resident will be able to complete the program while the child goes to day camp or some other activity.

Applications are now being accepted for the 2019 season as well as for the scholarship.

“The retreat provides the time in which to create new works or finish existing ones. Renaissance House is one of the few retreats designed for issue-oriented writers, writers of color and writers of social justice,” explained Abigail McGrath, founder and director of Renaissance House, daughter of poet Helene Johnson and niece of Dorothy West. “The program is offered to artists who do not have the luxury of time.”

In order to write,  a writer must have to just look out the window and stare,” Helene Johnson. “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction,” Virginia Woolf famously wrote. Renaissance House is not able to give money, but they do offer a room of your own with a window to look out and stare. 

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Portrait of Helene Johnson, a respected poet of the Harlem Renaissance era,
and mother of Renaissance founder Abigail McGrath. The photo is inscribed
to her cousin, fellow writer Dorothy West, and dated 12/22/31
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Helene Johnson was a poet and summer Martha’s Vineyard resident who had to stop writing in order to support her family. Her cousin, novelist and short story writer Dorothy West, was a year-round Martha’s Vineyard island resident who worked at Harbor Side Restaurant until Jacqueline Kennedy spotted her writing in the MV Gazette and gave her the opportunity to simply “stare at the trees and do nothing.”

This enabled West to write The Wedding, a best-selling novel inspired by the interracial marriage of Abigail and Tony McGrath. The Wedding was also produced as a television mini-series by Oprah Winfrey and starred Halle Berry.

About this special grant from the Sustainable Arts Foundation: “Renaissance House is committed to helping parents gain access to the resources, community, and, most importantly, the creative time that they offer. The ripple effect of this commitment is powerful, as it helps to normalize the still-radical idea of a parent artist, and makes the road a little less lonely for each one.

We are glad to partner with Renaissance House to provide not just a short-term creative opportunity, but a reminder to each resident that their work is vital, and that there are people and organizations committed to helping them make it. Finally, they are sending a clear message to non-parents that a creative life with family is possible.”

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Renaissance House on Martha’s Vineyard is located in charming Oak Bluffs
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The Renaissance House program includes formal sit-down dinners and salons by local residents, such as: Jill Nelson, Jessica Harris, Kate Feiffer, Susan Kline, Robert Hayden, Marty Nadler, Nat Benjamin, Shirley Craig, Brooks Robards, Janet Hill, Elisabeth Benedict, Justen Ahern, Daniel Waters, Mike West, and on and on.

“Renaissance House admits writers to the program who span different stages in their careers—from emerging writers to notable award winners,” explained McGrath, who founded the retreat in 1999. “The point of the program is to give artists ‘alone’ time, away from their families and their jobs and the everyday chores that make up a life.

Our residents are: a hotel maid who writes poetry during her lunch hour, a single mother filmmaker, a factory worker who learned Mandarin in order to write poetry in that language, a bestselling author of note who needed a safe place to take chances, a journalist looking for the truth, a PhD candidate doing her best not to ‘write formulaic for the PhD.” And in general, it is for artists who need “a room of their own.”

Renaissance House also has locations in Napanoch, NY and Palm Springs.

For more information, visit the website: Renaissance House  or contact Renaissancehse@aol.com | (917) 747-0367

Abigail McGrath
P.O. Box 4776
Vineyard Haven, MA  02568

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Dorothy West at her home in Martha’s Vineyard, 1998
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History of Renaissance House

This history of Renaissance House and its mission is from Abigail McGrath:

”I was raised by my mother, Helene Johnson, the Harlem Renaissance Poet, and Dorothy West, the Harlem Renaissance novelist. They were cousins who were born within the same year and died a few years apart. People asked me what I was going to do to celebrate their lives. My first thought was to offer a scholarship to women whose lives closely paralleled theirs. But, there already were such scholarships.

Then I remembered how difficult it was for them to find time to write. Both of them had to have pedantic, time consuming jobs just to be able to survive; time to write became more and more of a luxury. So, I created Renaissance House as a tribute to them both. It is located in the former home of Helene Johnson which is next door to the home of Dorothy West.

They were both prodigies of a sort and both writers of such substance that they helped create the Harlem Renaissance, a period in the arts which has not been rivaled since. When the two teenage girls arrived in New York City, they were beset with issues unknown to them in their native Boston. The reality of everyday, urban life, of working at a job and supporting a family took them away from their writing.

When asked why she stopped her major flow of writing at such a young age, Helene Johnson said: “In order to create, a person needs time in which to do nothing, to simply stare out a window and let thoughts come to them.”

That is the essence of Renaissance House. A place to muster up one’s energy and burst forward with works that may have had to take a back seat in one’s everyday world. Renaissance House is a program of the Helene Johnson and Dorothy West Foundation For Artists In Need. The foundation funds specific needs for all artists especially in the fields of residency.” 

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Ursula K. Le Guin

Ursula K. Le Guin (1929 – 2018), born Ursula Krober, was known primarily as a masterful writer of science fiction and fantasy, though she wrote across many genres. The imaginary worlds she created were commentaries on our real world, with all the complexities of human nature. She also produced children’s books, short stories, essays, and poetry.

Her lifelong interest in mythology influenced her mastery of the fantastic in her writings. With an immensely prolific and respected career to her credit, she is perhaps best remembered for The Left Hand of Darkness and the Earthsea series. Lavinia (2008) also made quite a splash. Some of the themes explored in her speculative works include gender and sexuality, freedom, political systems, and morality.

Background and family life

Ursula was born in Berkeley, California. Her father, Alfred L. Kroeber, was a respected anthropologist; her mother, Theodora Kroeber, was an author engaged in Native American matters. Ursula’s childhood was intellectually and artistically rich, with a large family and academic community.

She studied at Radcliffe College and Columbia University, earning her Master’s degree in French and Italian Renaissance literature by the age of twenty-two, in 1952. While on a steamer sailing to France in 1953, she met Charles Le Guin, and the two married just a few months later. They settled in Portland, Oregon, where they brought up their three children, and where Charles, a historian, was a professor of history at Portland State University.

Ursula derived comfort and inspiration from the Eastern spiritual traditions of Taoism and Buddhism. She was quoted as saying: “Taoism gave me a handle on how to look at life and how to lead it when I was an adolescent hunting for ways to make sense of the world without going off into the God business.”

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Ursula in 1973. Photo: NY Public Library
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Stepping into science fiction

When Ursula began writing science fiction in the 1960s, the genre was largely written by and for white men. The books and magazine stories being published were largely space adventures with men of science as their heroes. While striving to become a published writer, Ursula collected many rejections over a number of years.

Ursula’s first novel, Rocannon’s World (1966), adhered to that trope, but a major change was on the horizon. According to a 2013 interview with Ursula Le Guin in The Paris Review :

“No single work did more to upend the genre’s conventions than The Left Hand of Darkness (1969). In this novel, her fourth, Le Guin imagined a world whose human inhabitants have no fixed gender: their sexual roles are determined by context and express themselves only once every month. The form of the book is a mosaic of primary sources, an interstellar ethnographer’s notebook, ranging from matter-of-fact journal entries to fragments of alien myth.

Writers as diverse as Zadie Smith and Algis Budrys have cited The Left Hand of Darkness as an influence, and Harold Bloom included it in The Western Canon. In the decades that followed, Le Guin continued to broaden both her range and her readership, writing the fantasy series she has perhaps become best known for, Earthsea, as well as the anarchist utopian allegory The Dispossessed, to name just a few books among dozens.” (— John Wray)

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Life, Love, Freedom, and Dragons: Quotes by Ursula K. Le Guin
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Left Hand of Darkness and Earthsea

The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) was actually the fourth book in a series called the Hainish Cycle. It followed Planet of Exile (1966) and City of Illusions (1967). Yet it was The Left Hand of Darkness that became one of her most visionary novels, and indeed, a groundbreaking work in the genre of science fiction. It describes the Gethenians, an alien race with no fixed gender characteristics until it’s time to mate. The book won the prestigious Nebula and Hugo awards.

A publisher encouraged Ursula to try her hand at young adult fiction, and this resulted in the publication of A Wizard of Earthsea in 1968. Some have speculated that this series was a kind of quiet predecessor of Harry Potter, being the story of a student wizard named Sparrowhawk.

Followed by The Tombs of Atuan (1970), The Farthest Shore (1972) and Tehanu (1990), Tales From Earthsea (2001) and The Other Wind (2001), the series became known simply as Earthsea. Though originally intended for the young adult market, readers of all ages have embraced this series, as evidenced by worldwide sales in the millions.

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Ursula K. Le Guin page on Amazon
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Legacy

Ursula Le Guin instilled cultural exploration as a vital part to the genre of science fiction. Her characters vibrantly bursting from the page as scientists, anthropologists, diplomats, and travelers. She was described as “fiery” and with having “immense energy” by those who knew her best.

She also spoke eloquently about the art and craft of writing and considered storytelling as a cornerstone of human experience. Generously, she nurtured the dreams of aspiring writers on her website, dispensing advice in her Book View Café. She also wrote essays on feminist issues. A slew of honors came her way during her lifetime, including the Living Legend Medal awarded by the Library of Congress. She won the National Book Award, the Kafka Prize, a number of Nebula and Hugo awards, and many others.

Ursula Le Guin died at her home in Portland, Oregon, on January 22, 2018, at age 88. Stephen King summed up her legacy with a brief tweet: “Ursula K. LeGuin, one of the greats, has passed. Not just a science fiction writer; a literary icon. Godspeed into the galaxy.”

More about Ursula Le Guin on this site

Quotes by Ursula K. Le Guin on Reading, Writing, and Storytelling Life, Love, Freedom, and Dragons: Quotes by Ursula K. Le Guin

Major Works

Ursula Le Guin’s body of work is too vast to list here. See her complete bibliography on Wikipedia.

Hainish Cycle

Rocannon’s World  (1966)Planet of Exile  (1966)City of Illusions  (1967)The Left Hand of Darkness  (1969)…and there are many other short stories from the Hainish Cycle

Earthsea

A Wizard of Earthsea  (1968)The Tombs of Atman  (1971)The Farthest Shore  (1972)Tehanu (1990)Tales from Earthsea (2001)The Other Wind  (2001)

Orsinia (a cycle of stories and novels from 1961 – 1979, culminating in two omnibus collections, 2016 & 2017)

Catwings (children’s novels)

Catwings (1988)Catwings’ Return (1989)Wonderful Alexander and Catwings(1994)Jane on Her Own (1999)

… and numerous other short stories, novels, and novellas, including

Lavinia (2008) “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” (1973)

More information

Ursula K. Le Guin official site

Wikipedia Reader discussion of Ursula K. Le Guin’s books on Goodreads Biography.com The Essential Novels of Ursula K. Le Guin

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Photo: LitHub
Quotes by Ursula Le Guin on Writing, Reading, and Storytelling

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Mary Norton

Mary Norton (December 10, 1903 – August 29, 1992) was a British children’s book author best known for The Borrowers series. Born Kathleen Mary Pearson in London, she grew up in a manor house in the town of Leighton Buzzard, Bedfordshire, England, and attended a convent school.

In 1925, in her early twenties, Mary became an actress with the Old Vic theatre company. In 1926, she married Robert Norton. She and her husband moved to Portugal, close to his relatives, and lived there from 1927 until the outbreak of World War II twelve years later. The couple had four children — two sons and two daughters.

Wartime Life and the Launch of a Writing Career

When World War II began, Robert Norton joined the Navy, and Mary took their four children and moved to America. There she published her first novel, The Magic Bed-Knob; Or, How to Become a Witch in Ten Easy Lessons, in 1943. It was published in England two years later and well-received in both markets. At the same time, she worked for the British Purchasing Commission.

This book, and its sequel, Bonfires and Broomsticks, were very popular, and were eventually adapted into the film Bedknobs and Broomsticks, which was released in 1971 and won an Oscar for best special visual effects. 

 

The Borrowers

Post-World War II, Mary Norton and her family moved back to England, where Bonfires and Broomsticks was published and where she wrote her most famous series, The Borrowers.

The series follows the Clocks, a family of the Borrower race. They are only six inches tall and occupy nooks and crannies in a human house based on the manor where Norton grew up. They “borrow” small items from their unknowing human hosts to set up their little homes in corners and under floorboards, where they enjoy mostly quiet lives, sometimes interrupted by adventure. Central characters are Pod, Homily, and their teenage daughter Arrietty.

As a very nearsighted child, Mary had been “an inveterate gazer into banks and hedgerows . . . a rapt investigator of shallow pools,”  according to her obituary in The Independent. Young Mary wondered what it would be like to live as a tiny human among the small creatures that she saw there. What might it be like, she wondered, for a very tiny person to see what to them would be an extremely giant and fearsome buzzard circling in the sky? These little creatures and their lives developed and formed themselves in the back of her imagination until she published The Borrowers in 1952.

This book earned her a well deserved place in the pantheon of great children’s authors and was followed by titles The Borrowers Afield, Afloat, Aloft, and Avenged, as well as the short story “Poor Stainless.” These stories about tiny people making their way in a great big world captivated the hearts and minds of parents and children alike in the 1950s and on, and they continue to resonate with readers of all ages today.

The first book won the British Carnegie Medal from the Library Association in 1952, recognizing it as the year’s outstanding children’s book by a British author.

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Later, Bed-Knob and Broomstick became a combined edition of 
The Magic Bed-Knob and Bonfires and Broomsticks
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Later Life

After her initial Borrowers success, Norton continued to write. Between Borrowers sequels, she began thinking about where fairy tale creatures go after their tales are over. This led her to pen the quirky, lesser-known Are All the Giants Dead, which is a charming story about a young English boy, a princess, and a lot of retired fairy tale heroes.

Mary divorced Robert Norton and in 1970 was married to Lionel Bonsley until he passed away in 1989. She died three years later from a stroke on August 29, 1992 in Hartland, North Devon, England.

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Mary Norton page on Amazon
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Legacy

It’s difficult to overstate the far-reaching impact of Mary Norton’s books. They are both utterly realistic and utterly fantastic, taking very ordinary heroes and placing them into extraordinary circumstances.

This is a familiar feature of a lot of successful children’s fantasy, as evidenced by authors like C.S. Lewis and J.K. Rowling. In Lewis and Rowling’s cases, it is magic that makes the settings extraordinary. But for Norton’s little heroes, it was the sheer, overwhelming bigness of the world. This is what sets her apart and makes the Clock family so very relatable.

Real children may be more than six inches tall, but everyone knows what it is like to sometimes feel like a very small person in a very big, overwhelming, and sometimes scary world. Norton’s books teach that problems which (like buzzards and cats) may be very small to one person might seem huge and terrifying to another person, but that with a little determination and creativity, even the smallest person can find his or her way out of any predicament.

Mary Norton’s books, already literary classics, will continue to excite and teach children and adults for generations to come.

More about Mary Norton

Major Works

The Magic Bed-Knob  (1945)Bonfires and Broomsticks  (1947)
Are All the Giants Dead?  (1975; unconnected with any series)

The Borrowers series:

The Borrowers  (1952) The Borrowers Afield  (1955)The Borrowers Afloat  (1959)The Borrowers Aloft  (1961)Poor Stainless: A New Story About the Borrowers  (1966)The Borrowers Avenged  (Viking Kestrel, 1982)The Complete Borrowers Stories  (1983) — omnibus, excluding Poor Stainless

More information

Wikipedia Discussion of Mary Norton’s books on Goodreads Mary Norton’s obituary in The Independent, UK

Film and TV adaptations

The Magic Bed Knob; or, How to Become a Witch in Ten Easy Lessons and Bonfires and Broomsticks were combined and adapted into Bedknobs and Broomsticks, a 1971 Disney film starring Angela Lansbury and David Tomlinson.The Borrowers was a 1997 film with a British and American cast The Borrowers: a 2011 British film
The Secret World ofArrietty is a 2012 Japanese Anime film inspired by The Borrowers , with an almost perfect score on RottenTomatoes from both viewers and reviewers

There have been numerous theatrical adaptations of The Borrowers and several adaptations of The Borrowers for television, including:

The Borrowers: a 1973 American made-for-TV movie.The Borrowers andThe Return of the Borrowers,  BBC series that ran in 1992 and 1993

Visit

Mary Norton’s grave is located on the property of St. Nectan’s Church, the parish church of Hartland, Devon. The inscription on her headstone reads:

Do not stand at my grave and weep,
I am not there. I do not sleep.
I am a thousand winds that blow.
I am the diamond glints on snow.
I am the sunlight on ripened grain.
I am the gentle autumnal rain.
Do not stand at my grave and cry;
I am not there. I did not die.

(Portion of a poem by American poet Mary Elizabeth Frye, 1905 – 2004)

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Bluestockings — A Radical Bookstore Treasure in NYC’s Lower East Side

ctiDo you remember feminist bookstores (for those of you old enough to remember, that is)? Oh, and do you remember independent bookstores in Manhattan? As of this writing, there are only 13 feminist bookstores in North America, down from about 120 in the mid-nineties. And there are only a handful of indie bookstores left in Manhattan, though mercifully, there are a bunch in Brooklyn and Queens (see this great listing).

One of Manhattan’s few independent bookstores (and only feminist bookstore) is one of my favorite places, Bluestockings, located in the lively Lower East Side.

It’s more than than a repository for feminist thought; their shelves are filled with a beautifully curated selection of more than 6,000 titles on queer and gender studies, resistance/liberation, capitalism, climate, race, and a selection of rad children’s books. Also on the shelves are zines, journals, and poetry collections.

How about this tag line?  “Bluestockings tag line is 98% radical, 100 volunteer-powered, 2% glitter.” It’s a community-oriented venue, and to that end, the store hosts events nearly every evening, including readings, workshops, films, and performances.

Bluestockings was founded in 1999 and is collectively owned and volunteer run. About the collective philosophy: “Bluestockings strives to empower our volunteer workers through non-hierarchy, cooperation, and collective-based decision making, providing an example of the society we are working toward.”

The first time I visited the store, I came to hear a reading from a recently-published book of sci-fi short stories by trans writers — Meanwhile, Elsewhere. And ever since, I’ve stopped to browse and buy, and to rest my weary feet, because there’s no better way to explore the Lower East Side. Bluestockings has a small café with organic, vegan, and fair trade coffee and goodies, and a few tables where you can sit and sip and read.

Bluestockings’ history

First of all, where did this name come from? It harks back to  The Blue Stockings Society, a political movement and literary discussion group that promoted female authorship and readership in mid-18th century England. Today, the definition of a bluestocking is “an intellectual or literary woman.” Yeah, I’ll wear that mantle proudly!

The store was founded as Bluestockings Women’s Bookstore by Kathryn Welsh, then only twenty-three. With a silent partner and a group of volunteers, the store opened in 1999.

Then a new and used bookstore, its selection focused on feminism and was collectively run. After 9/11, the business declined and was set to close down in 2003 when an angel named Brooke Lehman bought the business. She put together a six-person collective and the store was saved. The updated mission statement reads as follows:

Bluestockings is an independent bookstore, café, and activist resource center, located in the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Through words, art, food, activism, education, and community, we strive to create a space that welcomes and empowers all people.

We actively support movements that challenge hierarchy and all systems of oppression, including but not limited to patriarchy, heterosexism, the gender binary, white supremacy and classism, within society as well as our own movements.

We seek to make our space and resources available to such movements for meetings, events, and research. Additionally, we offer educational programming that promotes centered, strategic, and visionary thinking, towards the realization of a society that is infinitely creative, truly democratic, equitable, ecological, and free.

With Bluestockings’ rebirth, the vision was enlarged from feminism to a broader spectrum of progressive and activist books and activities. The store also nearly doubled its space.

Bluestockings is conveniently located at 172 Allen St., New York, NY 10002, just a couple of blocks from the F train at Second Avenue and E. Houston. Open 11 am – 11 pm daily.

While you’re in the neighborhood, other highlights of the Lower East Side include the nearby Tenement Museum, The Museum at Eldridge Street (historic synagogue), and the Lower East Side art galleries.

See more of our features in Literary Travels and The Bookish Life

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12 Poems by Emma Lazarus, creator of “The New Colossus”

Emma Lazarus (1849 – 1887) was an American poet, translator, and activist. She’s best remembered for “The New Colossus,” an 1883 sonnet that contains the iconic “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.

It would be a pity if this were her only legacy, as she was an incredibly accomplished woman, made all the more impressive by the fact that she died at the age of thirty-eight. Lazarus was one of the first Jewish American authors to achieve national stature.

She was still in her teens when she started to write and translate poetry; her translations of German poems were published in the 1860s. Her first collection, Poems and Translations, was published in 1867 and caught the attention of Ralph Waldo Emerson. 

From that time on, she published regularly and took up causes dear to her heart, both as a writer and activist: the persecution of Russian Jews, the struggles of American Jews, and the argument for a Jewish homeland, well before the concept of Zionism became widely known. Her book, Songs of a Semite, was the first collection of poetry to explore Jewish-American identity and common struggles.

Lazarus spent some time in Europe, and when she returned to New York, she was commissioned to write a poem for the purpose of raising funds for a pedestal for the Statue of Liberty. At first she resisted, but then wrote the sonnet that would seal her legacy, “The New Colossus,” in 1883. Its lines were engraved on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty in 1903, some sixteen years after her untimely death.

Here is a sampling of poems by Emma Lazarus, an American poet who deserves to be read and remembered. Many of her best-known poems were written in the 1880s.

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The New Colossus

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “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!”

 

 The New Year

Rosh-Hashanah, 5643

Not while the snow-shroud round dead earth is rolled, 
And naked branches point to frozen skies.— 
When orchards burn their lamps of fiery gold, 
The grape glows like a jewel, and the corn 
A sea of beauty and abundance lies, 
Then the new year is born. 
Look where the mother of the months uplifts 
In the green clearness of the unsunned West, 
Her ivory horn of plenty, dropping gifts, 
Cool, harvest-feeding dews, fine-winnowed light; 
Tired labor with fruition, joy and rest 
Profusely to requite. 
Blow, Israel, the sacred cornet! Call 
Back to thy courts whatever faint heart throb 
With thine ancestral blood, thy need craves all. 
The red, dark year is dead, the year just born 
Leads on from anguish wrought by priest and mob, 
what undreamed-of morn? 
For never yet, since on the holy height, 
The Temple’s marble walls of white and green 
Carved like the sea-waves, fell, and the world’s light 
Went out in darkness,—never was the year 
Greater with portent and with promise seen, 
Than this eve now and here. 
Even as the Prophet promised, so your tent 
Hath been enlarged unto earth’s farthest rim. 
To snow-capped Sierras from vast steppes ye went, 
Through fire and blood and tempest-tossing wave, 
For freedom to proclaim and worship Him, 
Mighty to slay and save. 
High above flood and fire ye held the scroll, 
Out of the depths ye published still the Word. 
No bodily pang had power to swerve your soul: 
Ye, in a cynic age of crumbling faiths, 
Lived to bear witness to the living Lord, 
Or died a thousand deaths. 
In two divided streams the exiles part, 
One rolling homeward to its ancient source, 
One rushing sunward with fresh will, new heart. 
By each the truth is spread, the law unfurled, 
Each separate soul contains the nation’s force, 
And both embrace the world. 
Kindle the silver candle’s seven rays, 
Offer the first fruits of the clustered bowers, 
The garnered spoil of bees. With prayer and praise 
Rejoice that once more tried, once more we prove 
How strength of supreme suffering still is ours 
For Truth and Law and Love.

 

Critic and Poet

An Apologue

No man had ever heard a nightingale,
When once a keen-eyed naturalist was stirred
To study and define—what is a bird,
To classify by rote and book, nor fail
To mark its structure and to note the scale
Whereon its song might possibly be heard.
Thus far, no farther;—so he spake the word.
When of a sudden,—hark, the nightingale!
Oh deeper, higher than he could divine
That all-unearthly, untaught strain! He saw
The plain, brown warbler, unabashed. “Not mine”
(He cried) “the error of this fatal flaw.
No bird is this, it soars beyond my line,
Were it a bird, ‘twould answer to my law.”

 

 Age and Death

Come closer, kind, white, long-familiar friend,
      Embrace me, fold me to thy broad, soft breast.
Life has grown strange and cold, but thou dost bend
      Mild eyes of blessing wooing to my rest.
So often hast thou come, and from my side
      So many hast thou lured, I only bide
Thy beck, to follow glad thy steps divine.
      Thy world is peopled for me; this world’s bare.
      Through all these years my couch thou didst prepare.
Thou art supreme Love—kiss me—I am thine!

 

Venus of the Louvre

Down the long hall she glistens like a star, 
The foam-born mother of Love, transfixed to stone, 
Yet none the less immortal, breathing on. 
Time’s brutal hand hath maimed but could not mar. 
When first the enthralled enchantress from afar 
Dazzled mine eyes, I saw not her alone, 
Serenely poised on her world-worshipped throne, 
As when she guided once her dove-drawn car,— 
But at her feet a pale, death-stricken Jew, 
Her life adorer, sobbed farewell to love. 
Here Heine wept! Here still he weeps anew, 
Nor ever shall his shadow lift or move, 
While mourns one ardent heart, one poet-brain, 
For vanished Hellas and Hebraic pain. 

 

Echoes

Late-born and woman-souled I dare not hope,
The freshness of the elder lays, the might
Of manly, modern passion shall alight
Upon my Muse’s lips, nor may I cope
(Who veiled and screened by womanhood must grope)
With the world’s strong-armed warriors and recite
The dangers, wounds, and triumphs of the fight;
Twanging the full-stringed lyre through all its scope.
But if thou ever in some lake-floored cave
O’erbrowed by rocks, a wild voice wooed and heard,
Answering at once from heaven and earth and wave,
Lending elf-music to thy harshest word,
Misprize thou not these echoes that belong
To one in love with solitude and song.

 The South

Night, and beneath star-blazoned summer skies 
Behold the Spirit of the musky South, 
A creole with still-burning, languid eyes, 
Voluptuous limbs and incense-breathing mouth: 
Swathed in spun gauze is she, 
From fibres of her own anana tree. 
Within these sumptuous woods she lies at ease, 
By rich night-breezes, dewy cool, caressed: 
‘Twixt cypresses and slim palmetto trees, 
Like to the golden oriole’s hanging nest, 
Her airy hammock swings, 
And through the dark her mocking-bird yet sings. 
How beautiful she is! A tulip-wreath 
Twines round her shadowy, free-floating hair: 
Young, weary, passionate, and sad as death, 
Dark visions haunt for her the vacant air, 
While noiselessly she lies 
With lithe, lax, folded hands and heavy eyes. 
Full well knows she how wide and fair extend 
Her groves bright flowered, her tangled everglades, 
Majestic streams that indolently wend 
Through lush savanna or dense forest shades, 
Where the brown buzzard flies 
To broad bayous ’neath hazy-golden skies. 
Hers is the savage splendor of the swamp, 
With pomp of scarlet and of purple bloom, 
Where blow warm, furtive breezes faint and damp, 
Strange insects whir, and stalking bitterns boom— 
Where from stale waters dead 
Oft looms the great jawed alligator’s head. 
Her wealth, her beauty, and the blight on these,— 
Of all she is aware: luxuriant woods, 
Fresh, living, sunlit, in her dream she sees; 
And ever midst those verdant solitudes 
The soldier’s wooden cross, 
O’ergrown by creeping tendrils and rank moss. 
Was hers a dream of empire? was it sin? 
And is it well that all was borne in vain? 
She knows no more than one who slow doth win, 
After fierce fever, conscious life again, 
Too tired, too weak, too sad, 
By the new light to be or stirred or glad. 
From rich sea-islands fringing her green shore, 
From broad plantations where swart freemen bend 
Bronzed backs in willing labor, from her store 
Of golden fruit, from stream, from town, ascend 
Life-currents of pure health: 
Her aims shall be subserved with boundless wealth. 
Yet now how listless and how still she lies, 
Like some half-savage, dusky Indian queen, 
Rocked in her hammock ’neath her native skies, 
With the pathetic, passive, broken mien 
Of one who, sorely proved, 
Great-souled, hath suffered much and much hath loved! 
But look! along the wide-branched, dewy glade 
Glimmers the dawn: the light palmetto trees 
And cypresses reissue from the shade, 
And she hath wakened. Through clear air she sees 
The pledge, the brightening ray, 
And leaps from dreams to hail the coming day.

 

In Exile

“Since that day till now our life is one unbroken paradise. We live a true brotherly life. Every evening after supper we take a seat under the mighty oak and sing our songs.”—Extract from a letter of a Russian refugee in Texas. 

Twilight is here, soft breezes bow the grass, 
Day’s sounds of various toil break slowly off. 
The yoke-freed oxen low, the patient ass 
Dips his dry nostril in the cool, deep trough. 
Up from the prairie the tanned herdsmen pass 
With frothy pails, guiding with voices rough 
Their udder-lightened kine. Fresh smells of earth, 
The rich, black furrows of the glebe send forth. 
After the Southern day of heavy toil, 
How good to lie, with limbs relaxed, brows bare 
To evening’s fan, and watch the smoke-wreaths coil 
Up from one’s pipe-stem through the rayless air. 
So deem these unused tillers of the soil, 
Who stretched beneath the shadowing oak tree, stare 
Peacefully on the star-unfolding skies, 
And name their life unbroken paradise. 
The hounded stag that has escaped the pack, 
And pants at ease within a thick-leaved dell; 
The unimprisoned bird that finds the track 
Through sun-bathed space, to where his fellows dwell; 
The martyr, granted respite from the rack, 
The death-doomed victim pardoned from his cell,— 
Such only know the joy these exiles gain,— 
nLife’s sharpest rapture is surcease of pain. 
Strange faces theirs, wherethrough the Orient sun 
Gleams from the eyes and glows athwart the skin. 
Grave lines of studious thought and purpose run 
From curl-crowned forehead to dark-bearded chin. 
And over all the seal is stamped thereon
Of anguish branded by a world of sin, 
In fire and blood through ages on their name, 
Their seal of glory and the Gentiles’ shame. 
Freedom to love the law that Moses brought, 
To sing the songs of David, and to think 
The thoughts Gabirol to Spinoza taught, 
Freedom to dig the common earth, to drink 
The universal air—for this they sought 
Refuge o’er wave and continent, to link 
Egypt with Texas in their mystic chain, 
And truth’s perpetual lamp forbid to wane. 
Hark! through the quiet evening air, their song 
Floats forth with wild sweet rhythm and glad refrain. 
They sing the conquest of the spirit strong, 
The soul that wrests the victory from pain; 
The noble joys of manhood that belong 
To comrades and to brothers. In their strain 
Rustle of palms and Eastern streams one hears, 
And the broad prairie melts in mist of tears. 

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Emma Lazarus page on Amazon
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 Long Island Sound

I see it as it looked one afternoon 
In August,— by a fresh soft breeze o’erblown. 
The swiftness of the tide, the light thereon, 
A far-off sail, white as a crescent moon. 
The shining waters with pale currents strewn, 
The quiet fishing-smacks, the Eastern cove, 
The semi-circle of its dark, green grove. 
The luminous grasses, and the merry sun 
In the grave sky; the sparkle far and wide, 
Laughter of unseen children, cheerful chirp 
Of crickets, and low lisp of rippling tide, 
Light summer clouds fantastical as sleep 
Changing unnoted while I gazed thereon. 
All these fair sounds and sights I made my own.

 

Work

Yet life is not a vision nor a prayer,
    But stubborn work; she may not shun her task.
After the first compassion, none will spare
    Her portion and her work achieved, to ask.
She pleads for respite,—she will come ere long
When, resting by the roadside, she is strong.
Nay, for the hurrying throng of passers-by
    Will crush her with their onward-rolling stream.
Much must be done before the brief light die;
She may not loiter, rapt in the vain dream.
With unused trembling hands, and faltering feet,
She staggers forth, her lot assigned to meet.
But when she fills her days with duties done,
    Strange vigor comes, she is restored to health.
New aims, new interests rise with each new sun,
    And life still holds for her unbounded wealth.
All that seemed hard and toilsome now proves small,
And naught may daunt her,—she hath strength for all.

 
In the Jewish Synagogue at Newport (1871)

Here, where the noises of the busy town,
   The ocean’s plunge and roar can enter not,
We stand and gaze around with tearful awe,
   And muse upon the consecrated spot.
No signs of life are here: the very prayers
   Inscribed around are in a language dead;
The light of the “perpetual lamp” is spent
   That an undying radiance was to shed.
What prayers were in this temple offered up,
   Wrung from sad hearts that knew no joy on earth,
By these lone exiles of a thousand years,
   From the fair sunrise land that gave them birth!
How as we gaze, in this new world of light,
   Upon this relic of the days of old,
The present vanishes, and tropic bloom
   And Eastern towns and temples we behold.
Again we see the patriarch with his flocks,
   The purple seas, the hot blue sky o’erhead,
The slaves of Egypt,—omens, mysteries,—
   Dark fleeing hosts by flaming angels led.
A wondrous light upon a sky-kissed mount,
   A man who reads Jehovah’s written law,
‘Midst blinding glory and effulgence rare,
   Unto a people prone with reverent awe.
The pride of luxury’s barbaric pomp,
   In the rich court of royal Solomon—
Alas! we wake: one scene alone remains,—
   The exiles by the streams of Babylon.
Our softened voices send us back again
   But mournful echoes through the empty hall:
Our footsteps have a strange unnatural sound,
   And with unwonted gentleness they fall.
The weary ones, the sad, the suffering,
   All found their comfort in the holy place,
And children’s gladness and men’s gratitude
   ‘Took voice and mingled in the chant of praise.
The funeral and the marriage, now, alas!
   We know not which is sadder to recall;
For youth and happiness have followed age,
   And green grass lieth gently over all.
Nathless the sacred shrine is holy yet,
   With its lone floors where reverent feet once trod.
Take off your shoes as by the burning bush,
   Before the mystery of death and God.

 

1492

Thou two-faced year, Mother of Change and Fate, 
Didst weep when Spain cast forth with flaming sword, 
The children of the prophets of the Lord, 
Prince, priest, and people, spurned by zealot hate. 
Hounded from sea to sea, from state to state, 
The West refused them, and the East abhorred. 
No anchorage the known world could afford, 
Close-locked was every port, barred every gate. 
Then smiling, thou unveil’dst, O two-faced year, 
A virgin world where doors of sunset part, 
Saying, “Ho, all who weary, enter here! 
There falls each ancient barrier that the art 
Of race or creed or rank devised, to rear 
Grim bulwarked hatred between heart and heart!”

 

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Quotes from My Ántonia, Willa Cather’s Masterpiece

My Ántonia (1918) by American author, Willa Cather (1873 — 1947), was considered Cather’s first masterpiece. My Ántonia is the last book of her “prairie trilogy” of novels, preceded by O Pioneers! and The Song of the Lark.

The novel takes place in 19th-century Nebraska and tells the stories of an orphan boy from Virginia, Jim Burden, and the eldest daughter in an immigrant family from Bohemia, Ántonia Shimerda, who were each brought to be pioneers. There in the lifeless prairie, Ántonia makes friends and  improves the condition of the land.

The first year in the prairie leaves lifelong impressions in both children, a theme that’s explored throughout the novel. Cather was highly praised for My Ántonia, giving life to the American West and making it fascinating to readers.

There is no question that Cather has written a book of singular beauty and simplicity, in which her power of giving the essence of a community is united with an immense capacity for character creation. Here are quotes from My Ántonia, an enduring classic novel by the prolific Willa Cather:

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“Some memories are realities and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again.”

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“If there were no girls like them in the world, there would be no poetry.”

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“I was something that lay under the sun and felt it, like the pumpkins, and I did not want to be anything more. I was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge. At any rate, that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep.”

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“The country girls were considered a menace to the social order. Their beauty shone out too boldly against a conventional background.”

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“The sky was growing pale, and that forgotten plow had sunk back to its own littleness somewhere in the prairie.”

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“Now I understood that the same road was to bring us together again. Whatever we had missed, we possessed together the precious, the incommunicable past.”

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“She’d always believe him. That’s Ántonia’s failing, you know; if she once likes people, she won’t hear anything against them.”

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Willa Cather on the Art of Fiction
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“The idea of you is part of my mind … you really are a part of me.”

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“I was convinced that man’s strongest antagonist is the cold.”

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“This is reality, whether you like it or not — all those frivolities of summer, the light and shadow, the living mask of green that trembled over everything, they were lies, and this is what was underneath. This is the truth.”

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“Whatever we had missed, we possessed together the precious, the incommunicable past.”

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“That is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep.”

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“There seemed to be nothing to see; no fences, no creeks or trees, no hills or fields. If there was a road, I could not make it out in the faint starlight. There was nothing but land: not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made.”

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“The prayers of all good people are good.”

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“As I went back alone over that familiar road, I could almost believe that a boy and girl ran along beside me, as our shadows used to do, laughing and whispering to each other in the grass.”

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“This was enough for Ántonia. She liked me better from that time on, and she never took a supercilious air with me again. I had killed a big snake – I was now a big fellow.”

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“More than any other person we remembered, this girl seemed to mean to us the country, the conditions, the whole adventure of our childhood.”

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My Ántonia by Willa Cather on Amazon

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“There was nothing but land: not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made.”

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“The eyes peering anxiously at me were—simply Ántonia’s eyes … She was there, in the full vigor of her personality, battered but not diminished.”

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“Ántonia came up to me and held out her hand coaxingly. In a moment we were running up the steep draw side together.”

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“I was thinking, as I watched her, how little it mattered– about her teeth, for instance. I know so many women who have kept all the things that she had lost, but whose inner glow has faded. Whatever else was gone, Antonia had not lost the fire of life.”

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“I knew that I should never be a scholar. I could never lose myself for long among impersonal things. Mental excitement was apt to send me with a rush back to my own naked land and the figures scattered upon it.”

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“I knew it was homesickness that had killed Mr. Shimerda, and I wondered whether his released spirit would not … find its way back to his … country.”

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“Things will be easy for you. But they will be hard for us.”

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“I’ve seen a good deal of married life, and I don’t care for it. I want to … not have to ask lief of anybody.”

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A 1918 review of My  Ántonia
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