Nava Atlas's Blog, page 7

The Many Lives of Lee Miller, Photographer & War Correspondent

Elizabeth Lee Miller (April 23, 1907 – July 21, 1977), known professionally as Lee Miller, was an American photographer and war correspondent. For many years she was known as the muse and lover of Surrealist artist Man Ray.

She was extraordinarily talented in her own right, moving with ease from the fashion circles of New York, to the Surrealist circles of Paris, to front-line photography in World War II.

Her life and work has been painstakingly documented and promoted by her son Antony Penrose, and most recently has been the subject of a 2023 film produced by and starring Kate Winslet.

 

Early life and education

Lee was born in Poughkeepsie, New York, in 1907. Her mother, Florence, was a nurse and her father Theodore was an engineer. She had two brothers: John (1905) and Erik (1910).

Theodore was a keen amateur photographer, and owned both a Kodak Brownie camera and a home darkroom. He taught Lee the basics of photography while she was just a girl. She was also his favorite model, and he took dozens of photographs of her, her friends, and her brothers over the years.

Despite having this loving family, Lee’s childhood was a difficult one. At age seven, while visiting relatives, she was raped by a family friend; this left her traumatized and suffering from a sexually transmitted disease. In the days before penicillin, the only treatment was douching with dichloride of mercury. As a nurse, it fell to Florence to administer these treatments, an experience which was horrendous for both her and Lee.

A few years later, Lee endured another tragedy when her teenage sweetheart died of heart failure while out on a lake in a rowing boat.

As a result, Lee struggled in school and was expelled several times. She did, however, show an interest in the theatre, and in an attempt to encourage her pursue something worthwhile, her parents agreed to send her to the L’École Medgyés pour la Technique du Théâtre in Paris for seven months.

She studied set design and lighting, but, as her son later wrote, she was “not one of the school’s star pupils. She was eighteen, gregarious, fabulously beautiful in the exactly the style of the period, and far more interested in celebrating her newfound freedom than in formal studies. Informally, what she was learning was what it meant to be a fully emancipated woman in charge of her own destiny.”

Lee returned to New York in 1926, where she attended the Experimental Theatre at Vassar College, studying Dramatic Production under Hallie Flannigan.

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Modeling in New York City

Lee’s career as a fashion model began that winter, when the publishing magnate Condé Nast reputedly saved her from being hit by oncoming traffic as she tried to cross the road in Manhattan. Impressed by her good looks, he offered her a job as a model for Vogue.

She was on the cover of both the British and American March 1927 editions. Subsequently, she worked with some of the greatest fashion photographers of the time including Edward Steichen and George Hoyningen-Huene.

Lee was hugely successful as a model, but quickly decided that she would “rather take a picture than be one.”

She abandoned modeling altogether when, in July 1928, a photograph taken of her by Edward Steichen was used as a advertisement for Kotex sanitary towels. At the time, feminine hygiene was considered far too personal and delicate to discuss in public, and after the image was the focal point of a massive nationwide advertising campaign, Lee found herself out on a limb — though also proud of the scandal it had caused.

 

On the other side of the camera in Paris

Lee moved to Paris in 1929, and sought out the Surrealist artist Man Ray. For several years she was his muse, lover, confidant, and collaborator, and she also established her own photographic studio in the city. Her portrait photography was highly sought after by writers, artists, socialites, and royalty — she even photographed the pet lizard of a French socialite.

However, it was her Surrealist photographs that are probably best known from this period. Alongside Man Ray, she experimented with juxtaposition — the technique of combining two elements within the same photo — and solarization, which partially reverses the positive and negative spaces of a photo, producing halo-like outlines that emphasize both light and shadow.

Even outside of the studio, her work had a quirky style. Later, her son Antony wrote, “The thing that became her distinctive, Surrealist style was what I call the ‘found image.’ She takes a photograph of, perhaps, an everyday occurrence, and she does it in such a way that it becomes an image that is containing ‘the marvelous.’”

While in Paris, Lee became part of the Surrealist circle of artists, including Paul and Nusch Éluard, Pablo Picasso, Max Ernst, Dorothea Tanning, Leonora Carrington, and Joan Miró.

According to Antony, “When Lee arrived in Paris she had, in a way, been a Surrealist for some time — before the movement even had a name — because she had that determination to pursue her life free of the constraints of society which the Surrealists were already rebelling against. They wanted to create a new world which was not governed by religion or law or whatever…The Surrealist movement was going in tremendous force, and she was ready-made for it, and it for her.”

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New York and Egypt

She and Man Ray separated in 1932. Lee returned to New York to establish another studio there with her younger brother Erik. She specialized in advertising and celebrity portraits, including photographs of actresses Lilian Harvey and Gertrude Lawrence, and continued to experiment with Surrealist styles and techniques.

Her work was included in Julian Levy’s exhibition Modern European Photographers in 1932, and he subsequently gave her a one-woman show which brought her work to the attention of the art world. Soon afterwards, she was listed by Vanity Fair as one of the “most distinguished living photographers.”

She married the wealthy Egyptian businessman Aziz Eloui Bey in 1934, and moved with him to Cairo. She became fascinated with the idea of desert travel, and photographed the pyramids, desert, villages and ruins.

The photographs show a sense of dislocation, perhaps drawn from her experiences as an expatriate, and her best-known Egyptian image, Portrait of Space, 1937, views the desert through a torn fly screen door, turning it into a dream-like, Surrealist space.

Lee continued to travel to Europe, and during a return visit to Paris in 1937 she met Roland Penrose, a Surrealist artist. They began an affair, and in 1939 she officially left Bey and moved with Penrose to London.

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Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
See also: 8 Female Journalists of the World War II Era
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Grim Glory: The World War II Years

In London, Lee met Audrey Withers, editor of British Vogue. It was a connection that would prove vital for both Lee and for the magazine when, in 1940, Lee photographed London during and after the Blitz. Vogue published these photos, along with several photo essays by Lee about the Auxiliary Territorial Service.

It not only gave Lee an outlet for her photography in a new country and with a new subject, but it also helped to change Vogue’s reputation from solely a luxury fashion magazine — an indulgence that wasn’t much in demand during the war years — to a magazine that also published serious news.

Lee also published her images in a book, Grim Glory: Pictures of Britain Under Fire (1941).

By 1943 she had become an accredited war correspondent through Condé Nast Publications, one of the very few women to do so, and in 1944 teamed up with Life photojournalist David E. Scherman.

She became the first female photojournalist to follow the US Army as it advanced on the front lines, and photographed major events such as the battle of Saint-Malo, the Liberation of Paris, and the liberation of both the Buchenwald and Dachau concentration camps. She also taught herself to write articles, and the pieces that accompanied the photographs in print were almost always her own.

Lee was unsure whether the photos from the concentration camps would be publishable, given the horrific subject matter, but she sent them back to Vogue with a telegram: “I IMPLORE YOU TO BELIEVE THIS IS TRUE.” In June 1945, American Vogue printed the photos under the title, “Believe It.”

In 1945, she traveled throughout Eastern and Central Europe, documenting the horrific aftermath of the war on mostly ordinary people, and had an eye for the detail of combat that her male counterparts often overlooked.

As Meredith Herndon wrote for The Smithsonian, “Miller’s eye for Surrealist elements resulted in haunting photos that juxtaposed images of ordinary beauty with violence and destruction.”

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After the war

Lee married Roland Penrose in 1947, and gave birth to their son Antony at the age of forty. The family moved out of London to Farleys, a farm in the East Sussex countryside.

She continued to cover fashion, art, and celebrity culture for Vogue, and Farleys became known as a gathering place for the Surrealists. Many of Lee’s more intimate (and now iconic) photographs, of friends including Man Ray, Picasso, Eileen Agar, Dorothea Tanning and Max Ernst, were taken here.

Sadly, she suffered from severe (and at that time undiagnosed) post-traumatic stress disorder, which manifested in alcoholism and depression, and never spoke of her war work to her son, Antony.

In the early 1950s, Lee moved away from professional photography. Her final tongue-in-cheek piece for Vogue, “Working Guests” (1953), showed major art world figures (such as Alfred H. Barr, Jr., then the director of the Museum of Modern Art in NYC) feeding the pigs at Farleys.

 

Last years

In the last two decades of her life, Lee managed what her son would later call “the most astonishing achievement of her whole career … self-recovery … somehow she found the strength to get her drinking under control.”

A large part of this recovery came through cooking. Lee had given up photography, but she still longed for a creative outlet, and sent herself to the Cordon Bleu cookery school in Paris for six months.

Cooking, her son wrote, was “a kind of displacement activity for the demons that must have been rushing around inside her head all the time.” She became an award-winning cook, known for her Surrealism-inspired dishes such as green chicken and blue fish.

Lee died at Farleys in July 1977 of cancer at the age of seventy.

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Legacy: Redefining femininity

After Lee Millers’s death, Antony and his wife discovered some sixty thousand negatives and twenty thousand photographic prints, along with contact sheets, writings, and documents, all boxed up in the attic at Farleys.

From the 1980s, Antony worked to archive and promote her photographic work, which had been largely forgotten by the art world. Farleys is now the home of the Lee Miller Archive, along with a gallery which hosts rotating exhibitions.

Her work has also been shown in several major retrospectives, including at the Imperial War Museum and V&A Museum in London, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Museo de Arte Moderno in Mexico.

Most recently, her war work has been the focus of the 2023 film Lee, produced by and starring Kate Winslet. Years of research went into making the film, along with a great deal of collaboration with Antony, and Kate Winslet reportedly spent days in the archives at Farleys.

According to Antony, “Other attempts to make a feature film about Lee had failed in the past, but this one succeeded…it owes much of its force and integrity to being a film about a women made by women.” On Lee, Kate Winslet said, “I think we live in a time when femininity is starting to mean something new, but Lee was already redefining femininity as resilience and power and courage and tenacity.”

Contributed by Elodie Barnes. Elodie is a writer and editor with a serious case of wanderlust. Her short fiction has been widely published online and is included in the Best Small Fictions 2022 Anthology published by Sonder Press. She is Books & Creative Writing Editor at Lucy Writers Platform, she is also co-facilitating What the Water Gave Us, an Arts Council England-funded anthology of emerging women writers from migrant backgrounds. She is currently working on a collection of short stories, and when not writing can usually be found planning the next trip abroad, or daydreaming her way back to 1920s Paris. Find her online at  Elodie Rose Barnes.

More about Lee Miller’s work

Women at War:  The National WWII Museum Photographer Lee Miller’s Second World War Lee Miller Archives

Further reading:

Lee Miller: On Both Sides of the Camera by Carolyn Burke (2006)Lee Miller’s War: Beyond D-Day by Antony Penrose (2020)The Lives of Lee Miller by Antony Penrose (2021)Lee Miller: Fashion in Wartime Britain by Robin Muir and Amber Butchart
(Lee Miller Archives Publishing, 2021)Lee Miller: Photographs by Antony Penrose and Kate Winslet (2023)Lee Miller Man Ray: Fashion, Love, War by Victoria Noel-Johnson (2023)Lee Miller: The True Story (Sky Original – Kate Winslet and Antony Penrose
discussing the film Lee) on YouTube

The post The Many Lives of Lee Miller, Photographer & War Correspondent appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.

James Weldon Johnson’s Analysis of Phillis Wheatley’s Poetry

Presented here is an analysis by James Weldon Johnson of Phillis Wheatley’s poetry, one of the first women to be published in colonial America, and the first person in the U.S. to have a book of poetry published while enslaved.

James Weldon Johnson (1871–1938) was a writer, educator, poet, diplomat, and civil rights activist. He helmed the NAACP from 1920 to 1930. He was a significant figure in the Harlem Renaissance movement, or as it was then called, The New Negro movement.

The Book of American Negro Poetry (1922), chosen and edited by Johnson, was one of a handful of significant anthologies of Black literature to be published in the 1920s. The segment following, in which he provides and analysis of Phillis Wheatley’s poetry, is a portion of the Johnson’s Preface to this collection.

 Phillis Wheatley’s Poetry: An Analysis by James Weldon Johnson

In 1761 a slave ship landed a cargo of slaves in Boston. Among them was a little girl seven or eight years of age. She attracted the attention of John Wheatley, a wealthy gentleman of Boston, who purchased her as a servant for his wife.

Mrs. Wheatley was a benevolent woman. She noticed the girl’s quick mind and determined to give her opportunity for its development. Twelve years later Phillis published a volume of poems. The book was brought out in London, where Phillis was for several months an object of great curiosity and attention.

Phillis Wheatley has never been given her rightful place in American literature. By some sort of conspiracy she is kept out of most of the books, especially the text-books on literature used in the schools.

Of course, she is not a great American poet—and in her day there were no great American poets—but she is an important American poet. Her importance, if for no other reason, rests on the fact that, save one, she is the first in order of time of all the women poets of America. And she is among the first of all American poets to issue a volume.

It seems strange that the books generally give space to a mention of Urian Oakes, President of Harvard College, and to quotations from the crude and lengthy elegy which he published in 1667; and print examples from the execrable versified version of the Psalms made by the New England divines, and yet deny a place to Phillis Wheatley …

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More about Phillis Wheatley
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Anne Bradstreet preceded Phillis Wheatley by a little over twenty years. She published her volume of poems, “The Tenth Muse,” in 1750. Let us strike a comparison between the two.

Anne Bradstreet was a wealthy, cultivated Puritan girl, the daughter of Thomas Dudley, Governor of Bay Colony. Phillis, as we know, was a Negro slave girl born in Africa. Let us take them both at their best and in the same vein. The following stanza is from Anne’s poem entitled “Contemplation”:

While musing thus with contemplation fed,
And thousand fancies buzzing in my brain,
The sweet tongued Philomel percht o’er my head,
And chanted forth a most melodious strain,
Which rapt me so with wonder and delight,
I judged my hearing better than my sight,
And wisht me wings with her awhile to take my flight.

And the following is from Phillis’s poem entitled “Imagination”:  

Imagination! who can sing thy force?
Or who describe the swiftness of thy course?
Soaring through air to find the bright abode,
The empyreal palace of the thundering God,
We on thy pinions can surpass the wind,
And leave the rolling universe behind,
From star to star the mental optics rove,
Measure the skies, and range the realms above,
There in one view we grasp the mighty whole,
Or with new worlds amaze the unbounded soul.

We do not think the Black woman suffers much by comparison with the white. Thomas Jefferson said of Phillis: “Religion has produced a Phillis Wheatley, but it could not produce a poet; her poems are beneath contempt.”

It is quite likely that Jefferson’s criticism was directed more against religion than against Phillis’ poetry. On the other hand, General George Washington wrote her with his own hand a letter in which he thanked her for a poem which she had dedicated to him. He, later, received her with marked courtesy at his camp at Cambridge.

It appears certain that Phillis was the first person to apply to George Washington the phrase, “First in peace.” The phrase occurs in her poem addressed to “His Excellency, General George Washington,” written in 1775.

The encomium, “First in war, first in peace, first in the hearts of his countrymen” was originally used in the resolutions presented to Congress on the death of Washington, December, 1799.

Phillis Wheatley’s poetry is the poetry of the Eighteenth Century. She wrote when Pope and Gray were supreme; it is easy to see that Pope was her model. Had she come under the influence of Wordsworth, Byron or Keats or Shelley, she would have done greater work.

As it is, her work must not be judged by the work and standards of a later day, but by the work and standards of her own day and her own contemporaries. By this method of criticism she stands out as one of the important characters in the making of American literature, without any allowances for her sex or her antecedents.

According to A Bibliographical Checklist of American Negro Poetry, compiled by Mr. Arthur A. Schomburg, more than one hundred Negroes in the United States have published volumes of poetry ranging in size from pamphlets to books of from one hundred to three hundred pages. About thirty of these writers fill in the gap between Phillis Wheatley and Paul Laurence Dunbar.

Just here it is of interest to note that a Negro wrote and published a poem before Phillis Wheatley arrived in this country from Africa. He was Jupiter Hammon, a slave belonging to a Mr. Lloyd of Queens-Village, Long Island.

In 1760 Hammon published a poem, eighty-eight lines in length, entitled “An Evening Thought, Salvation by Christ, with Penettential Cries.”

In 1788 he published “An Address to Miss Phillis Wheatley, Ethiopian Poetess in Boston, who came from Africa at eight years of age, and soon became acquainted with the Gospel of Jesus Christ.” These two poems do not include all that Hammon wrote.

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10 Poems by Phillis Wheatley

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The poets between Phillis Wheatley and [Paul Laurence] Dunbar must be considered more in the light of what they attempted than of what they accomplished. Many of them showed marked talent, but barely a half dozen of them demonstrated even mediocre mastery of technique in the use of poetic material and forms …

Only very seldom does Phillis Wheatley sound a native note. Four times in single lines she refers to herself as “Afric’s muse.” In a poem of admonition addressed to the students at the “University of Cambridge in New England” she refers to herself as follows:

Ye blooming plants of human race divine,
An Ethiop tells you ’tis your greatest foe.

But one looks in vain for some outburst or even complaint against the bondage of her people, for some agonizing cry about her native land. In two poems she refers definitely to Africa as her home, but in each instance there seems to be under the sentiment of the lines a feeling of almost smug contentment at her own escape therefrom. In the poem, “On Being Brought from Africa to America,” she says:

Twas mercy brought me from my pagan land,
Taught my benighted soul to understand
That there’s a God and there’s a Saviour too;
Once I redemption neither sought or knew.
Some view our sable race with scornful eye,
‘Their color is a diabolic dye.’
 Remember, Christians, Negroes black as Cain,
 May be refined, and join th’ angelic train.

In the poem addressed to the Earl of Dartmouth, she speaks of freedom and makes a reference to the parents from whom she was taken as a child, a reference which cannot but strike the reader as rather unimpassioned:

Should you, my lord, while you peruse my song,
Wonder from whence my love of Freedom sprung,
Whence flow these wishes for the common good,
By feeling hearts alone best understood;

I, young in life, by seeming cruel fate
Was snatch’d from Afric’s fancy’d happy seat;
What pangs excruciating must molest,
What sorrows labor in my parents’ breast?
Steel’d was that soul and by no misery mov’d
That from a father seiz’d his babe belov’d;
Such, such my case. And can I then but pray
Others may never feel tyrannic sway?

The bulk of Phillis Wheatley’s work consists of poems addressed to people of prominence. Her book was dedicated to the Countess of Huntington, at whose house she spent the greater part of her time while in England. On his repeal of the Stamp Act, she wrote a poem to King George III, whom she saw later; another poem she wrote to the Earl of Dartmouth, whom she knew.

A number of her verses were addressed to other persons of distinction. Indeed, it is apparent that Phillis was far from being a democrat. She was far from being a democrat not only in her social ideas but also in her political ideas; unless a religious meaning is given to the closing lines of her ode to General Washington, she was a decided royalist:

A crown, a mansion, and a throne that shine
With gold unfading, Washington! be thine.

Nevertheless, she was an ardent patriot. Her ode to General Washington (1775), her spirited poem, “On Major General Lee” (1776) and her poem, “Liberty and Peace,” written in celebration of the close of the war, reveal not only strong patriotic feeling but an understanding of the issues at stake.

In her poem, “On Major General Lee,” she makes her hero reply thus to the taunts of the British commander into whose hands he has been delivered through treachery:

                  O arrogance of tongue!
    And wild ambition, ever prone to wrong!
    Believ’st thou, chief, that armies such as thine
    Can stretch in dust that heaven-defended line?
    In vain allies may swarm from distant lands,
    And demons aid in formidable bands,
    Great as thou art, thou shun’st the field of fame,
    Disgrace to Britain and the British name!
    When offer’d combat by the noble foe,
    (Foe to misrule) why did the sword forego
    The easy conquest of the rebel-land?
    Perhaps TOO easy for thy martial hand.

    What various causes to the field invite!
    For plunder YOU, and we for freedom fight,
    Her cause divine with generous ardor fires,
    And every bosom glows as she inspires!
    Already thousands of your troops have fled
    To the drear mansions of the silent dead:
    Columbia, too, beholds with streaming eyes
    Her heroes fall—’tis freedom’s sacrifice!
    So wills the power who with convulsive storms
    Shakes impious realms, and nature’s face deforms;
    Yet those brave troops, innum’rous as the sands,
    One soul inspires, one General Chief commands;
    Find in your train of boasted heroes, one
    To match the praise of Godlike Washington.
    Thrice happy Chief in whom the virtues join,
    And heaven taught prudence speaks the man divine.

What Phillis Wheatley failed to achieve is due in no small degree to her education and environment. Her mind was steeped in the classics; her verses are filled with classical and mythological allusions. She knew Ovid thoroughly and was familiar with other Latin authors. She must have known Alexander Pope by heart.

And, too, she was reared and sheltered in a wealthy and cultured family—a wealthy and cultured Boston family; she never had the opportunity to learn life; she never found out her own true relation to life and to her surroundings. And it should not be forgotten that she was only about thirty years old when she died.

The impulsion or the compulsion that might have driven her genius off the worn paths, out on a journey of exploration, Phillis Wheatley never received. But, whatever her limitations, she merits more than America has accorded her.

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You may also enjoy:
The Age of Phillis by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers

 

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Women Translators of the Past (English, French & Spanish)

Women translators in history have been forgotten for too long before being recently acknowledged in Wikipedia thanks to its many contributors.  Marie Lebert has compiled brief biographies on women translators of the past into pdfs in three languages:

Women Translators of the Past (English) Quelques Traductrices du Passé (French) Algunas Traductoras del Pasado (Spanish)

Also by Marie Lebert on this site:

Five Women Translators to Celebrate on International Translation Day Laura and Eleanor Marx, Translators of Karl Marx 10 Lost Ladies of Literary Translation: A Tribute

Marie Lebert is a French translator and librarian who has worked for international organizations and global projects in several countries. She is currently based in Australia. She writes about translation and translators – past and present — with a focus on women translators.

Marie holds a PhD in linguistics (digital publishing) from the Sorbonne, Paris. Her articles, essays and ebooks are available online in English, French and Spanish at Marie Lebert. 

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Bronze by Georgia Douglas Johnson (1922) – full text

Georgia Douglas Johnson (1880 – 1966) was a prominent poet associated with the Harlem Renaissance movement. Following is the full text of Bronze: A Book of Verse (1922), her second collection of published poetry.

Bronze was preceded by The Heart of a Woman and Other Poems (1918). Next came An Autumn Love Cycle (1928), and many years later, Share My World (1962). Her poems were also published in numerous periodicals and anthologies, particularly in the 1920s.

In her poetry, Georgia addressed issues of race as well as universal themes of love, motherhood, and being a woman in a male-dominated world. Of all her works, Bronze most direction addressed issues of race and racism. Bronze: A Book of Verse is in the public domain.

Learn more about Georgia Douglas Johnson
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Bronze: A Book of Verse

Foreword by W.E.B. Du Bois
Those who know what it means to be a colored woman in 1922 — and know it not so much in fact as in feeling, apprehension, unrest and delicate yet stern thought — must read Georgia Douglas Johnson’s Bronze.

Much of it will not touch this reader and that, and some of it will mystify and puzzle them as a sort of reiteration and over-emphasis. But none can fail to be caught here and there by a word — a phrase — a period that tells a life history or even paints the history of a generation.

Can you not see that marching of the mantled with “Voices strange to ecstasy?” Have you ever looked on the “twilight faces” of their throngs, or seen the black mother with her son when “Her heart is sandaling his feet?” Or can you not conceive that infinite sorrow of a dark child wandering the world: “Seeking the breast of an unknown face!”

I hope Mrs. Johnson will have wide reading. Her word is simple, sometimes trite, but it is singularly sincere and true, and as a revelation of the soul struggle of the women of a race it is invaluable. — W. E. B. Du Bois. New York, August 4, 1922.

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Sonnet to the Mantled
And they shall rise and cast their mantles by,
Erect and strong and visioned, in the day
That rings the knell of Curfew o’er the sway
Of prejudice — who reels with mortal cry
To lift no more her leprous, blinded eye.
Reft of the fetters, far more cursed than they
Which held dominion o’er human clay.
The spirit soars aloft where rainbows lie.
 
Like joyful exiles swift returning home —
The rhythmic chanson of their eager feet.
While voices strange to ecstasy, long dumb.
Break forth in major rhapsodies, full sweet.
Into the very star-shine, lo! they come
Wearing the bays of victory complete! 

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Sonnet to Those Who See But Darkly
Their gaze uplifting from shoals of despair
Like phantoms groping enswathed from the light
Up from miasmic depths, children of night,
Surge to the piping of Hope’s dulcet lay,
Souled like the lily, whose splendors declare
God’s mazèd paradox — purged of all blight.
Out from the quagmire, unsullied and fair.
 
Life holds her arms o’er the festering way,
Smiles, as their faith-sandalled rushes prevail,
Slowly the sun rides the marge of the day.
Wine to the lips sorely anguished and pale;
On, ever on, do the serried ranks sway
Charging the ultimate, rending the veil. 

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Brotherhood
Come, brothers all!
Shall we not wend
The blind-way of our prison-world
By sympathy entwined?
Shall we not make
The bleak way for each other’s sake
Less rugged and unkind?
O let each throbbing heart repeat
The faint note of another’s beat
To lift a chanson for the feet
That stumble down life’s checkered street.

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Let Me Not Lose My Dream
Let me not lose my dream, e’en though I scan the veil
     with eyes unseeing through their glaze of tears,
Let me not falter, though the rungs of fortune perish
     as I fare above the tumult, praying purer air,
Let me not lose the vision, gird me. Powers that toss
     the worlds, I pray!
Hold me, and guard, lest anguish tear my dreams away!

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Let Me Not Hate
Let me not hate, although the bruising world decries my peace,
Gives me no quarter, hounds me while I sleep;
Would snuff the candles of my soul and sear my inmost dreamings.
Let me not hate, though girt by vipers, green and hissing through the dark;
I fain must love. God help me keep the altar-gleams that flicker wearily, anon,
On down the world’s grim night!

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Calling Dreams
The right to make my dreams come true
I ask, nay, I demand of life,
Nor shall fate’s deadly contraband
Impede my steps, nor countermand.

Too long my heart against the ground
Has beat the dusty years around,
And now, at length, I rise, I wake!
And stride into the morning-break !

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Desire
Ope! ye everlasting doors, unto my soul’s demand,
I would go forward, fare beyond these dusty boulevards,
Faint lights and fair allure me all insistently
And I must stand within the halls resplendent, of my dreams.

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Sorrow Singers
Hear their viol-voices ringing
Down the corridor of years,
As they lift their twilight faces
Through a mist of falling tears!

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The Cross
All day the world’s mad mocking strife,
The venomed prick of probing knife,
The baleful, subtle leer of scorn
That rims the world from morn to morn,
While reptile-visions writhe and creep
Into the very arms of sleep
To quench the fitful burnished gleams:
A crucifixion in my dreams!

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Prejudice
These fell miasmic rings of mist, with ghoulish menace bound,
Like noose-horizons tightening my little world around,
They still the soaring will to wing, to dance, to speed away.
And fling the soul insurgent back into its shell of clay:

Beneath incrusted silences, a seething Etna lies.
The fire of whose furnaces may sleep — but never dies!

. . . . . . . . . . .

Laocoon
This spirit-choking atmosphere
With deadly serpent-coil
Entwines my soaring-upwardness
And chains me to the soil,
Where’er I seek with eager stride
To gain yon gleaming height,
These noisesome fetters coil aloft
And snare my buoyant flight.

O, why these aspirations bold,
These rigours of desire.
That surge within so ceaselessly
Like living tongues of fire?
And why these glowing forms of hope
That scintillate and shine,
If naught of all that burnished dream
Can evermore be mine?
It cannot be, fate does not mock,
And man’s untoward decree
Shall not forever thus confine
My life’s entirety,
My every fibre fierce rebels
Against this servile role,
And all my being broods to break
This death-grip from my soul!

. . . . . . . . . . .

Moods 
My heart is pregnant with a great despair
With much beholding of my people’s care,
‘Mid blinded prejudice and nurtured wrong,
Exhaling wantonly the days along:
I mark Faith’s fragile craft of cheering light
Tossing imperiled on the sea of night,
And then, enanguished, comes my heart’s low cry,
“God, God! I crave to learn the reason why!”
Again, in spirit loftily I soar
With winged vision through earth’s outer door.
In such an hour, it is mine to see,
In frowning fortune smiling destiny!

. . . . . . . . . . .

Hegira
Oh, black man, why do you northward roam, and leave
     all the farm lands bare?
Is your house not warm, tightly thatched from storm,
     and a larder replete your share?
And have you not schools, fit with books and tools the
     steps of your young to guide?
Then what do you seek, in the north cold and bleak,
     ‘mid the whirl of its teeming tide?

I have toiled in your cornfields, and parched in the sun,
I have bowed ‘neath your load of care,
I have patiently garnered your bright golden grain, in
     season of storm and fair.
With a smile I have answered your glowering gloom,
     while my wounded heart quivering bled.
Trailing mute in your wake, as your rosy dawn breaks,
     while I curtain the mound of my dead.

Though my children are taught in the schools you have
     wrought, they are blind to the sheen of the sky,
For the brand of your hand, casts a pall o’er the land,
     that enshadows the gleam of the eye.
My sons, deftly sapped of the brawn-hood of man, self-
     rejected and impotent stand,

My daughters, unhaloed, unhonored, undone, feed the
     lust of a dominant land.

I would not remember, yet could not forget, how the
     hearts beating true to your own.
You’ve tortured, and wounded, and filtered their blood
     ‘till a budding Hegira has blown.

Unstrange is the pathway to Calvary’s hill, which I
     wend in my dumb agony,
Up its perilous height, in the pale morning light, to
     dissever my own from the tree.

And so I’m away, where the sky-line of day sets the
     arch of its rainbow afar,
To the land of the north, where the symbol of worth
      sets the broad gates of combat ajar!

. . . . . . . . . . .

The Passing of the Ex-Slave
Swift melting into yesterday,
The tortured hordes of ebon-clay;
No more is heard the plaintive strain,
The rhythmic chaunting of their pain.

Their mounded bodies dimly rise
To fill the gulf of sacrifice,
And o’er their silent hearts below
The mantled millions softly go.

Some few remaining still abide.
Gnarled sentinels of time and tide.
Now mellowed by a chastened glow
Which lighter hearts will never know.

Winding into the silent way,
Spent with the travail of the day,
So royal in their humble might
These uncrowned Pilgrims of the Night!

. . . . . . . . . . .

The Octoroon
One drop of midnight in the dawn of life’s pulsating stream
Marks her an alien from her kind, a shade amid its gleam;
Forevermore her step she bends insular, strange, apart —
And none can read the riddle of her wildly warring heart.

The stormy current of her blood beats like a mighty sea
Against the man-wrought iron bars of her captivity.
For refuge, succor, peace and rest, she seeks that humble fold
Whose every breath is kindliness, whose hearts are purest gold.

. . . . . . . . . . .

Aliens
(To You — Everywhere! Dedicated)

They seem to smile as others smile, the masquerader’s art
Conceals them, while, in verity, they’re eating out their heart.
Betwixt the two contending stones of crass humanity
They lie, the fretted fabric of a dual dynasty.

A single drop, a sable strain debars them from their own,-—
The others — fold them furtively, but God! they are alone.
Blown by the fickle winds of fate far from the traveled mart
To die, when they have quite consumed the morsel of their heart.
When man shall lift his lowered eyes to meet the moon of truth,
Shall break the shallow shell of pride and wax in ways of ruth,
He cannot hate, for love shall reign untrammelled in the soul,
While peace shall spread a rainbow o’er the earth from pole to pole.

. . . . . . . . . . .

Concord
Nor shall I in sorrow repine,
But offer a paean of praise
To the infinite God of my days
Who marshals the pivoting spheres
Through the intricate maze of the years,
Who loosens the luminous flood
That lightens the purlieus of men,
I shall not in sorrow repine
To break the eternal Amen!

. . . . . . . . . . .

The Mother
The mother soothes her mantled child
With incantation sad and wild;
A deep compassion brims her eye
And stills upon her lips, the sigh.

Her thoughts are leaping down the years,
O’er branding bars, through seething tears,
Her heart is sandaling his feet
Adown the world’s corroding street.

Then, with a start she dons a smile
His tender yearnings to beguile.
And only God will ever know
The wordless measure of her woe.

. . . . . . . . . . .

Maternity
Proud?
Perhaps— and yet
I cannot say with surety
That I am happy thus to be
Responsible for this young life’s embarking.
Is he not thrall to prevalent conditions?
Does not the day loom dark apace
To weave its cordon of disgrace
Around his lifted throat?
Is not this mezzotint enough and surfeit
For such prescience?
Ah, did I dare
Recall the pulsing life I gave,
And fold him in the kindly grave!

Proud?
Perhaps — could I but ever so faintly scan
The broad horizon of a man
Swept fair for his dominion —
So hesitant and half-afraid
I view this babe of sorrow!

. . . . . . . . . . .

Black Woman
Don’t knock at my door, little child,
I cannot let you in.
You know not what a world this is
Of cruelty and sin.
Wait in the still eternity
Until I come to you,
The world is cruel, cruel, child,
I cannot let you in!

Don’t knock at my heart, little one,
I cannot bear the pain
Of turning deaf-ear to your call
Time and time again!
You do not know the monster men
Inhabiting the earth.
Be still, be still, my precious child,
I must not give you birth!

. . . . . . . . . . .

“One of the Least of These, My Little One”
The infant eyes look out amazed upon the frowning earth,
A stranger, in a land now strange, child of the mantled-birth;
Waxing, he wonders more and more; the scowling grows apace;
A world, behind its barring doors, reviles his ebon face:
Yet from this maelstrom issues forth a God-like entity.
That loves a world all loveless, and smiles on Calvary!

. . . . . . . . . . .

Shall I Say, “My Son, You’re Branded?”
Shall I say, “My son, you’re branded in this country’s pageantry,
By strange subtleties you’re tethered, and no forum sets you free?”
Shall I mark the young lights fading through your soul-enchannelled eye,
As the dusky pall of shadows screen the highway of your sky?
Or shall I, with love prophetic, bid you dauntlessly arise.
Spurn the handicap that clogs you, taking what the world denies,
Bid you storm the sullen fortress wrought by prejudice and wrong
With a faith that shall not falter, in your heart and on your tongue!

. . . . . . . . . . .

My Boy
I hear you singing happily,
My boy of tarnished mien,
Lifting your limpid, trustful gaze
In innocence serene.

A thousand javelins of pain
Assault my heaving breast
When I behold the storm of years
That beat without your nest.

O sing, my lark, your matin song
Of joyous rhapsody,
Distil the sweetness of the hours
In gladsome ecstasy.

For time awaits your buoyant flight
Across the bar of years.
Sing, sing your song, my bonny lark,
Before it melts in tears!

. . . . . . . . . . .

Guardianship
That dusky child upon your knee
Is breath of God’s eternity;
Direct his vision to the height —
Let naught obscure his royal right.

Although the highways to renown
Are iron-barred by fortune’s frown,
‘Tis his to forge the master-key
That wields the locks of destiny!

. . . . . . . . . . .

Utopia
God grant you wider vision, clearer skies, my son,
With morning’s rosy kisses on your brow;
May your wild yearnings know repose,
And storm-clouds break to smiles
As you sweep on with spreading wings
Unto a waiting sunset!

. . . . . . . . . . .

Little Son
The very acme of my woe,
The pivot of my pride,
My consolation, and my hope
Deferred, but not denied.
The substance of my every dream,
The riddle of my plight,
The very world epitomized
In turmoil and delight.

. . . . . . . . . . .

Benediction
Go forth, my son,
Winged by my heart’s desire!
Great reaches, yet unknown,
Await
For your possession.
I may not, if I would.
Retrace the way with you,
My pilgrimage is through,
But life is calling you!
Fare high and far, my son,
A new day has begun.
Thy star-ways must be won!

. . . . . . . . . . .

Credo
I believe in the ultimate justice of Fate;
That the races of men front the sun in their turn;
That each soul holds the title to infinite wealth
In fee to the will as it masters itself;
That the heart of humanity sounds the same tone
In impious jungle, or sky-kneeling fane.
I believe that the key to the life-mystery
Lies deeper than reason and further than death.
I believe that the rhythmical conscience within
Is guidance enough for the conduct of men.

. . . . . . . . . . .

Promise
Through the moil and the gloom they have issued
To the steps of the upwinding hill,

Where the sweet, dulcet pipes of tomorrow
In their preluding rhapsodies trill.

With a thud comes a stir in the bosom,
As there steals on the sight from afar,

Through a break of a cloud’s coiling shadow
The gleam of a bright morning star!

. . . . . . . . . . .

The Suppliant
Long have I beat with timid hands upon life’s leaden door,
Praying the patient, futile prayer my fathers prayed before,
Yet I remain without the close, unheeded and unheard,
And never to my listening ear is borne the waited word.

Soft o’er the threshold of the years there comes this counsel cool:
The strong demand, contend, prevail; the beggar is a fool!

. . . . . . . . . . .

Hope
Frail children of sorrow, dethroned by a hue,
The shadows are flecked by the rose sifting through,
The world has its motion, all things pass away.
No night is omnipotent, there must be day.
The oak tarries long in the depth of the seed,
But swift is the season of nettle and weed.
Abide yet awhile in the mellowing shade.
And rise with the hour for which you were made.
The cycle of seasons, the tidals of man
Revolve in the orb of an infinite plan.
We move to the rhythm of ages long done,
And each has his hour — to dwell in the sun!

. . . . . . . . . . .

Cosmopolite
Not wholly this or that,
But wrought
Of alien bloods am I,
A product of the interplay
Of traveled hearts.
Estranged, yet not estranged, I stand
All comprehending;
From my estate
I view earth’s frail dilemma;
Scion of fused strength am I,
All understanding,
Nor this nor that
Contains me.

. . . . . . . . . . .

Fusion
How deftly does the gardener blend
This rose and that
To bud a new creation,
More gorgeous and more beautiful
Than any parent portion,
And so,
I trace within my warring blood
The tributary sources,
They potently commingle
And sweep
With new-born forces!

. . . . . . . . . . .

Perspective
Some day
I shall be glad that it was mine to be
A dark fore-runner of a race burgeoning;
I then shall know
The secret of life’s Calvary,
And bless the thorns
That wound me!

. . . . . . . . . . .

When I Rise Up
When I rise above the earth,
And look down on the things that fetter me,
I beat my wings upon the air.
Or tranquil lie,
Surge after surge of potent strength
Like incense comes to me
When I rise up above the earth
And look down upon the things that fetter me.

. . . . . . . . . . .

Faith
The faint lose faith
When in the tomb their all is laid,
And there returns
No echoing of weal or woe.
The strong hope on,
They see the clods close over head,
The grass grow green.
No word is said.
And yet —
A little world within the world
Are we,
Daily our hearts’ high yearnings fade,
Are buried!
New ones are made, —
Are crucified!
And yet —

. . . . . . . . . . .

We Face the Future
The hour is big with sooth and sign, with errant men at war,
While blood of alien, friend, and foe imbues the land afar,
And we, with sable faces pent, move with the vanguard line.
Shod with a faith that Springtime keeps, and all the stars opine.

. . . . . . . . . . .

Soldier
Though I should weep until the judgment,
How would it serve —
Brave men are fighting, women speed them,
‘Tis a day
Of crucial conflict!
My son, sometimes it seems I’d rather hold
You safe beneath my heart
Than send you forth!
But lo! The sun is red and weaker children go!
Though I should weep until the judgment.
How would it serve!
I’ll close my eyes and smile, O Son of Mine,
Your cause is kingly!
Step proud and confident, worthy your mother;
Be firm and brave, O Son of Mine, be strong.
For terror waxeth,
Speed swift away.
Though I should weep until the judgment . . .

. . . . . . . . . . .

Homing Braves
There’s music in the measured tread
Of those returning from the dead
Like scattered flowers from a plain
So lately crimson, with the slain.

No more the sound of shuffled feet
Shall mark the poltroon on the street,
Nor shifting, sodden, downcast eye
Reveal the man afraid to die.

They shall have paid full, utterly
The price of peace across the sea,
When, with uplifted glance, they come
To claim a kindly welcome home.

Nor shall the old-time daedal sting
Of prejudice, their manhood wing.
Nor heights, nor depths, nor living streams
Stand in the pathway of their dreams!

. . . . . . . . . . .

Taps
They are embosomed in the sod,
In still and tranquil leisure,
Their lives they’ve cast like trifles down,
To serve their country’s pleasure.

Nor bugle call, nor mother’s voice.
Nor moody mob’s unreason,
Shall break their solace and repose
Through swiftly changing season.

O graves of men who lived and died
Afar from life’s high pleasures,
Fold them in tenderly and warm
With manifold fond measures.

. . . . . . . . . . .

Peace
Peace on a thousand hills and dales,
Peace in the hearts of men
While kindliness reclaims the soil
Where bitterness has been.

The night of strife is drifting past,
The storm of shell has ceased.
Disrupted is the cordon fell,
Sweet charity released.

Forth from the shadow, swift we come
Wrought in the flame together.
All men as one beneath the sun
In brotherhood forever.

Further reading

Poems by Georgia Douglas Johnson 8 Black Women Playwrights of the Early 20th Century Georgia Douglas Johnson on Poetry Foundation

The post Bronze by Georgia Douglas Johnson (1922) – full text appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.

18 Poems by Effie Lee Newsome

Effie Lee Newsome (1885–1979), a writer associated with the Harlem Renaissance, wrote poetry that was widely published in journals and anthologies of the 1920s. Notably, these included NAACP’s The Crisis and the Urban League’s Opportunity, and Caroling Dusk: An Anthology of Verse by Negro Poets, edited by Countee Cullen.

Mary Effie Lee was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and raised in Wilburforce, Ohio. She took classes at Wilberforce University, Oberlin College, the Philadelphia Academy of the Arts, and the University of Pennsylvania, though she didn’t complete a degree.

As the editor of the children’s column “Little Page” in The Crisis, Effie Lee was one of the first  to write poems expressly for Black children. Her poetry encouraged younger readers to appreciate their worth and beauty.

In 1920, she married Rev. Henry Nesby Newsome. In her biographical note in Caroling Dusk, 1927, a highly regarded anthology of poetry by Black writers, she describes herself as “ a lover of the out-of-doors, and of the beautiful.” The love of the natural world in particular is amply reflected in her poetry.

After her husband’s death in 1937, Effie Lee returned to her hometown of Wilburforce, Ohio, where she worked as a children’s librarian.

Though Effie Lee Newsome never lived in New York City, her thoughtful poetry became a fixture in the era of the Harlem Renaissance movement. A volume containing dozens of her poems for children, Gladiola Garden: Poems of Outdoors and Indoors for Second Grade Readers, was published in 1940. 

 

 

Poems by Effie Lee NewsomeO Autumn, Autumn!SunsetMagnificatThe Bronze LegacyExodusCantabileNegro Street Serenade (in the South)CapriccioSun DiskSassafras TeaPansyThe QuiltSky PicturesAt the PoolBluebirdThe LordA Black Boy DreamsThe Baker’s Boy

. . . . . . . . . .

O Autumn, Autumn!

O Autumn, Autumn! O pensive light and wistful sound!
Cold haunted sky, green-haunted ground!
When, wan, the dead leaves flutter by
Deserted realms of butterfly!
When robins band themselves together
To seek the soul of sun-steeped weather;
And all of summer’s largesse goes
For lands of olive and the rose! 

(The Crisis, October 1918)

. . . . . . . . . .

Sunset

Since Poets have told of sunset, 
What is left for me to tell?
I can only say that I saw the day
Press crimson lips to horizon gray,
And kiss the earth farewell.

(The Crisis,May 1921)

 

. . . . . . . . . .

Magnificat

In lapis lazuli—
Such azure shot with gold!—
On domes of sanctity
That chiseled tribute hold,
Or breathe the Word through breath of brush
In ripened tones and old;
Through silence and in state—
Still splendors everywhere!—
Earth’s tribute from earth’s great
Steeped deep in incensed air,
With praise imprint on wall and floor,
And even shadows there;
Cathedrals strive to voice
The thanks of mild Mary,
Who found herself the choice
For immortality,
When, lowly-born, there came the word
Earth’s Mother she should be.
God, we, thy lowly race,
Would thank thee for such grace.
Though we have never been
Welcome at earthly inn,
Thy glorious Son swung wide
Those gates that scoff at pride.
And guard a Realm of Equity,
Wherein abides the Wisdom Holy
Which shapes high purpose for the lowly.

(The Crisis, December 1922)

. . . . . . . . . .

The Bronze Legacy

’Tis a noble gift to be brown, all brown,
     Like the strongest things that make up this earth,
Like the mountains grave and grand,
     Even like the very land,
     Even like the trunks of trees—
     Even oaks, to be like these!
God builds His strength in bronze.
To be brown like thrush and lark!
     Like the subtle wren so dark!
Nay, the king of beasts wears brown;
     Eagles are of this same hue.
I thank God, then, I am brown.
     Brown has mighty things to do.
(The Crisis, October 1922)

 

 . . . . . . . . .

Exodus

Rank fennel and broom
Grow wanly beside
The cottage and room
We once occupied,
But sold for the snows!
The dahoon berry weeps in blood,
I know,
Watched by the crow–
I’ve seen both grow
In those weird wastes of Dixie!

(The Crisis, January 1925)

. . . . . . . . . .

Cantabile

Green holly has a lovely leaf
to make the Christmas bright,
Green cedar gives a spicy smell
On Christmas eve at night.
Green candles wear a joyous look,
Each with its golden light.
   Good holly, cedars,
   Candles gay!
   Come Christmas sprite!
   Come Christmas fay!
You’ve never known a brighter day
For joining childhood in its play!

(The Crisis, December 1925)

 

. . . . . . . . . .

Negro Street Serenade (in the South)

The quavering zigzag of the fiddle’s notes;
The thumping “tum-tum” of the banjo and guitar;
The gauzy quiver, flutter of the fiddle;
The measured muffled thud of that guitar!
And then a voice breaks forth—
Loose, careless, mellow—
A wealth of voice that rolls, soars,
Rolls and falls,
A reveling, rich voice,
Deeper than the banjo’s;
With more of melody than fiddles’ trebles,
Yet with that subtle minor trembling through 
Which shakes the viol’s slender vibrance
As the winds might—
And all of this out in a half-hushed autumn dusk!
The autumn air itself is tense, suspended,
And into this that most spontaneous song!
Which ripples on and floats and floats
Midst “thum” of banjo
And rhythmic background of that constant taut guitar,
And travels with the wavers of the fiddle,
To float and rise and rest with moon and star! 

(The Crisis, July 1926)

. . . . . . . . . .

Capriccio

When soft suns of autumn just mock with a shadow,
When thin wind of autumn light blows,
Aye, Swallow, I’d follow,
And follow and follow—
I’d follow the petals of rose!

(The Crisis, September 1926)

 

. . . . . . . . . .

Sun Disk

Grant old Egypt dead, what words shall thank thee
For the tenuous touch that carved the portion,
And wrought apart the place unchanging
That marks the dark man’s challenge
From the ancient world of art?
That winged sun has wended through the ages,
And known its shape on silk and blinding page;
Been inset with the gems of burning jewels
By artisans who swing again the disk
On wings outspread, which sweep e’en centuries by!
Signet of Ra that the swart Pharoahs singled,
“Sons of the sun,”
When time and the russet mummy are lost in abyss,
And symbols and sun disk shall no longer bind death
By mystical strands to the cycles of earth,
That wisdom supernal which made wise the Pharoahs,
Will judge generations more knowing than they,
Which bury themselves deep in His Life Eternal,
That fain would fold races in Infinity.

(The Carolina Magazine, May 1927)

. . . . . . . . .

Sassafras Tea

The sass’fras tea is red and clear
In my white china cup,
So pretty I keep peeping in
Before I drink it up.

I stir it with a silver spoon,
And sometimes I just hold
Al little tea inside the spoon,
Like it was lined with gold.

It makes me hungry just to smell
The nice hot sass’fras tea,
And that’s the one thing I really like
That they say’s good for me.

(Caroling Dusk: An Anthology of Verse by Negro Poets, edited by Countee Cullen, 1927)

 

. . . . . . . . .

Pansy

Oh, the blue blue bloom
On the velvet cheek
Of the little pansy’s face
That hides away so still and cool
In some soft garden place!
The tiger lily’s orange fires,
The red lights from the rose
Aren’t like the gloom on that blue cheek
Of the softest flower that grows!

(Caroling Dusk: An Anthology of Verse by Negro Poets, edited by Countee Cullen, 1927)

. . . . . . . . .

The Quilt

I have the greatest fun at night,
When casement windows are all bright.
I make believe each one’s a square
Of some great quilt up in the air.

The blocks of gold have black between,
Wherever only night is seen.
It surely makes a mammoth quilt-
With bits of dark and checks of gilt-
To cover up the tired day
In such a cozy sort of way.

(Caroling Dusk: An Anthology of Verse by Negro Poets, edited by Countee Cullen, 1927)

 

. . . . . . . . . .

Sky Pictures

Sometimes a right white mountain
Or great soft polar bear,
Or lazy little flocks of sheep
Move on in the blue air.
The mountains tear themselves like floss,
The bears all melt away.
The little sheep will drift apart
In such a sudden way.
And then new sheep and mountains come.
New polar bears appear
And roll and tumble on again
Up in the skies so clear.
The polar bears would like to get
Where polar bears belong.
The mountains try so hard to stand
In one place firm and strong.
The little sheep all want to stop
And pasture in the sky,
But never can these things be done,
Although they try and try!

(Caroling Dusk: An Anthology of Verse by Negro Poets, edited by Countee Cullen, 1927)

. . . . . . . . . .

The Baker’s Boy

The baker’s boy delivers loaves
All up and down our street.
His car is white, his clothes are white,
White to his very feet.
I wonder if he stays that way.
I don’t see how he does all day.
I’d like to watch him going home
When all the loaves are out.
His clothes must look quite different then,
At least I have no doubt.

(Caroling Dusk: An Anthology of Verse by Negro Poets, edited by Countee Cullen, 1927)

 

. . . . . . . . . .

At the Pool

Like to stand right still awhile
Beside some forest pool.
The reeds around it smell so fresh,
The waters look so cool!
Sometimes I just hop in and wade,
And have a lot of fun,
Playing with bugs that dart across
The water in the sun.
They lodge here at this little pool—
All sorts ef bugs and things
That hop about its shady banks,
Or dart along with wings,
Or ‘scamper on the water top,
As water-striders go,
Or strange back-swimmers upside down,
Using their legs to row,
Or the stiff, flashing dragon flies,
The gentle demoiselle,
The clumsy, sturdy water-bugs,
And scorpions as well,
That come on top to get fresh air
From homes beneath the pool,
Where water-boatmen have their nooks,
On pebbles, as a rule.
And then, behold! Kingfisher comes,
That great big royal bird!
To him what is the dragon fly
That. kept the pool life stirred?
Or water-tigers terrible
That murder bugs all day?
Kingfisher comes, and each of these
Would hide itself away!
He swoops and swallows what he will,
A stone-fly or a frog.
Wing’d things rush frightened through the air,
Others to hole and log.
The little pool that held them all
I watch grow very bare,
But fisher knows his hide and seek—
He’ll find some one somewhere!

(The Crisis, February 1927)

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Bluebird

I just heard your soft smothered voice today!
I’m sure you’ll flit on in your lightwinged way,
Unmindful, undreaming of me,
Who have not yet seen you in blue and brown, 
But just heard your lush notes drip down, drip down
As showers from the black ash tree.

(The Crisis, April 1927)

 

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The Lord

Bring to me your heart all bleeding
When have I been known to mock men’s tears,
To scoff at men because their hearts were full,
Despise them in their grief?
I am the Comforter.
I make the lilies.
I am the merciful.
Hope in me.
Bring unto me the wounds that throb,
The sorrows of which you would not whisper.
I have known tears myself.
Tears cannot anger me.

(The Crisis, May 1927)

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A Black Boy Dreams

I trot on with the silver streams,
And laugh and build my little dreams.
I trip on with the lively brooks
Through meadowland and wood.
Ha, ho! How merrily I run!
To dream and move along is fun.
I tread the meads of yesterday
Where once the Indians used to play.
The soil belonged to white men next…
How many changes it has known!
For now it is my father’s own!
I trot on with these silver streams, 
And laugh and build my little dreams,
Ha, ho, how merrily I run!
To dream yet move along is fun.

(The Crisis, October 1927)

  Discover more female poets of the Harlem Renaissance .

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Love Songs by Mina Loy (1915)

Mina Loy (1882 – 1966) was an English-born poet, playwright, and artist. She was lauded by her peers for her dense analyses of the female experience in early twentieth-century Western society. Here lasting impact is arguably as a modernist poet.

She was associated with other great minds and literary innovators of her time, like T.S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, Sylvia Beach, Sinclair Lewis, Ezra Pound, and others.

“Love Songs,” a poem that first appeared in print in 1915, is among her best known works.

Analyses of “Love Songs” by Mina Loy:

The Early Poetry of Mina Loy

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Learn more about Mina Loy
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  Love Songs by Mina Loy

I

Spawn of fantasies
Sifting the appraisable
Pig Cupid his rosy snout
Rooting erotic garbage
“Once upon a time”
Pulls a weed white star-topped
Among wild oats sown in mucous membrane
I would an eye in a Bengal light
Eternity in a sky-rocket
Constellations in an ocean
Whose rivers run no fresher
Than a trickle of saliva
 
These are suspect places
 
I must live in my lantern
Trimming subliminal flicker
Virginal to the bellows
Of experience
Colored glass.
 
 
II
 
At your mercy
Our Universe
Is only
A colorless onion
You derobe
Sheath by sheath
Remaining
A disheartening odour
About your nervy hands
 
 
III
 
Night
Heavy with shut-flower’s nightmares
———————————————
Noon
Curled to the solitaire
Core of the
Sun
 
 
IV
 
Evolution fall foul of
Sexual equality
Prettily miscalculate
Similitude
 
Unnatural selection
Breed such sons and daughters
As shall jibber at each other
Uninterpretable cryptonyms
Under the moon
 
Give them some way of braying brassily
For caressive calling
Or to homophonous hiccoughs
Transpose the laugh
Let them suppose that tears
Are snowdrops or molasses
Or anything
Than human insufficiences
Begging dorsal vertebrae
 
Let meeting be the turning
To the antipodean
And Form a blur
Anything
Than to seduce them
To the one
As simple satisfaction
For the other
 
V
 
Shuttle-cock and battle-door
A little pink-love
And feathers are strewn
 
VI
 
Let Joy go solace-winged
To flutter whom she may concern
 
VII
 
Once in a mezzanino
The starry ceiling
Vaulted an unimaginable family
Bird-like abortions
With human throats
And Wisdom’s eyes
Who wore lamp-shade red dresses
And woolen hair
 
One bore a baby
In a padded porte-enfant
Tied with a sarsenet ribbon
To her goose’s wings
 
But for the abominable shadows
I would have lived
Among their fearful furniture
To teach them to tell me their secrets
Before I guessed
— Sweeping the brood clean out
 
VIII
 
Midnight empties the street
— — — To the left a boy
— One wing has been washed in rain
The other will never be clean any more —
Pulling door-bells to remind
Those that are snug
To the right a haloed ascetic
Threading houses
Probes wounds for souls
— The poor can’t wash in hot water —
And I don’t know which turning to take —
 
IX
 
We might have coupled
In the bed-ridden monopoly of a moment
Or broken flesh with one another
At the profane communion table
Where wine is spill’t on promiscuous lips
 
We might have given birth to a butterfly
With the daily-news
Printed in blood on its wings
  
X
 
In some
Prenatal plagiarism
Foetal buffoons
Caught tricks
— — — — —
From archetypal pantomime
Stringing emotions
Looped aloft
— — — —
For the blind eyes
That Nature knows us with
And most of Nature is green
— — — — — — — — — — — —
 
XI
 
Green things grow
Salads
For the cerebral
Forager’s revival
And flowered flummery
Upon bossed bellies
Of mountains
Rolling in the sun
 
XII
 
Shedding our petty pruderies
From slit eyes
 
We sidle up
To Nature
— — — that irate pornographist
 
XIII
 
The wind stuffs the scum of the white street
Into my lungs and my nostrils
Exhilarated birds
Prolonging flight into the night
Never reaching — — — — —— — —

 

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The Mother of Social Science: The Works of Harriet Martineau

As a social scientist, Harriet Martineau (1802–1876) published at least fifteen book titles, some of them spanning several volumes.

As a journalist, Martineau made a living by writing for mid-19th century journals and newspapers, encouraging intellectual and social debates across her native England and around the world.

As a writer, she engaged readers of novels, travelogues, biographies, and much more – she probably would have a book in every section of the library if her work were still in print today.

How did Martineau come to be known as the mother of social science, and even more curiously, how did she manage to support herself with the writing of her philosophic and social opinions and observations in a time when the role of women was assigned to the household sphere?

It was an age when, according to Regan Penaluna in How to Think Like a Woman, women were allowed, even encouraged, to work as writers as long as they confined themselves to novels, reviews, translations, and home and hearth. They were encouraged to leave the heavy ideas to male journalists.

How did such a prolific, insightful, and relevant writer become nearly obscure, her work lost in the shadow of the acknowledged great thinkers such as Rousseau, Kant, and her contemporary social scientists?

Harriet Martineau was born in 1802, the sixth of eight children born to textile manufacturer Thomas Martineau and his wife, Elizabeth Rankin Martineau. Harriet’s father’s work provided a middle-class upbringing for the family, but she suffered from things a comfortable lifestyle could not cure.

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Learn more about Harriet Martineau
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She endured debilitating fears and panic attacks, chronic stomach ailments, an increasing hearing loss, and had no sense of smell. She wrote in her autobiography:

“Sometimes, I was panic-struck at the head of the stairs, and was sure I could never get down; and I could never cross the yard into the garden without flying and panting, and fearing to look behind, because a wild beast was after me. The starlight sky was the worst; it was always coming down to stifle and crush me, and rest upon my head.”

Martineau also makes mention in her autobiography, of her “daily pain from chronic inflammation of the stomach.” And that “my education was considerably advanced before my hearing began to go.” Also, because she suffered with having no sense of smell, her sense of taste was “exceedingly imperfect.”     

She was largely educated at the family’s home in Norwich. Despite her painful stomach discomforts, crippling fears (which she never told anyone about), and her increasing hearing loss which would render her almost totally deaf by the age of twenty — Martineau was able to attend a private school for two years. She also spent a year in a boarding school for girls, where her parents felt the country air would benefit her health.

Women were not allowed to study at a university level, but Martineau continued the self-study she’d practiced since childhood; reading books, asking questions, writing arguments and essays in search of answers, in all subjects she could think of, including those normally taught only to males.

 

First published writings

Having grown up with strong Unitarian influences, Martineau’s natural first writing endeavor was a submission to the Monthly Respository, a unitarian magazine. Under the pen name of “V. of Norwich,” her first article was published and, along with the praise from her esteemed older brother, swelled her heart with pride at becoming an “authoress.”

She was nineteen years old, and this success sent her back to the empty pages of her notebooks, excited to fill each page with her thoughts. She did not spend a lot of time and effort in revising her work, committing herself to a single copy, as “distinctness and precision must be lost if alterations were made in a different state of mind from that which suggested the first utterance.”

Tragedy struck when Martineau’s older brother, her biggest supporter, died of consumption (tuberculosis). Soon after, her father’s business began to flounder, which landed the family in tenuous financial straits. Her father died in 1826, and though the manufacturing business provided a livable income for the Martineau mother and daughters, its failure in 1829 sent them scrambling to maintain their home.

The industrious Martineau women rose from tragedy like worker bees to a vacant hive, and Harriet was the most tireless of all. She produced needlework by day and did her studying and writing at night. Her spirit soared under these circumstances of seemingly crushing hours and responsibility. In her autobiography, she wrote that the exertion of all her faculties made her very happy and gave her a “deep-felt sense of progress and expansion.”

 

Illustrations of Political Economy

Spending all those late nights writing into the wee hours paid off when Martineau won £45 in an essay contest sponsored by the Unitarians. She entered and won all three categories: arguments of Unitarianism to the notice of Catholics, Jews, and Mohammedans. Such success spurred her to write her famous series Illustrations of Political Economy, which was itself a great feat in publishing.

The presses at the time (1832) were concerned with a couple of pretty hot political topics — first, that the reform bill was causing much raucousness among citizens, clergy, and politicians alike, and second, that cholera was becoming like a plague from the Middle Ages, decimating the population at an alarming rate.

It was no small victory when Martineau negotiated an agreement with a publisher which stipulated that once 500 subscribers were obtained, the book would go to print. Her success was tremendous with Illustrations of Political Economy, the fictionalized tales illustrating the concept of the new political science.

Subscribers signed up in droves, and the publisher wrote to ask her to make any needed corrections, for Illustrations of Political Economy was going to be sent for a second printing of 5,000 copies. Letters poured in from readers who wanted her to include their hobby or work in the next installment in the series. She began receiving offers from many publishers who wanted to be a part of her future work.

Illustrations of Political Economy grew into a 9-volume series of short stories intended to illustrate the social and political activities taking place in a free market economy. Martineau published these volumes between 1832 and 1834, hoping to make political economy an accessible study for readers of all stripes.

The series is a marriage of politics, economics, social structure, and literature that heralds the birth of Martineau as a philosopher and a much sought after social/political commentator, which is evidenced in the 1836 publication of Miscellanies.

Martineau moved herself and her mother to London in order to better meet the demands of the incoming requests for her increasingly popular work, but almost immediately her desire for writing her observations took her to the United States. From 1834 to 1836 she toured the U.S. for Society in America (1837 ) and Retrospect of Western Travel (1838) and How to Observe Morals and Manners (also 1838) was published. The latter is considered the first systematic methodological writing in sociology.

 

Persevering through poor health

Since childhood, Martineau’s stomach pains were chronic, and she learned to live with the ailment as best she could. But from the time she arrived home from the United States until 1842, her pain was such that she stayed on her couch, desperately hoping the doctor could find a cure.

During this sick time, she wrote a collection of endearing whimsical children’s stories including The Crofton Boys, The Peasant and the Prince, The Settlers at Home, and Feats on the Fiord.

Although she was under the care of some of the best doctors available, it was believed that her condition would not improve, and Martineau accepted that she would never get any better. When her brother suggested that she give mesmerism a try, Martineau agreed, having run the gamut of local doctors and all other remedies.

Mesmerists were, in many circles, considered quacks, but even today some of their techniques using magnetism and hypnosis are used in the treatment of modern ailments. After a successful treatment with magnetism, she rose from her sick bed and wrote:     

“For my part, if any friend of mine had been lying in a suffering and hopeless state for nearly six years, and if she had fancied she might get well by standing on her head instead of her heels, or reciting charms, or bestriding a broomstick, I should have helped her to try; and thus was I aided by some of my family and by a further sympathy in others, but two or three of them were induced to regard my experiment and recovery as an unpardonable offence, and by them I never was pardoned.” (Autobiography, Volume 2)                                                                                                                                                                      

 A fevered pitch of writing and translation

Upon healing from her illness, Martineau moved to the countryside, where her writing took on a fevered pitch, as if making up for lost time (though her work only slowed down during her illness and she never did fully stop writing). After publishing several popular books and articles, she translated Auguste Comte’s famous social work, and titled it The Positive Philosophy of Auguste Comte, Freely Translated and Condensed, 2 volumes, (1853).

Her translation won her great esteem, even from Compte himself, and made a significant contribution to the scholarly conversation on positivism in Britain. Having often been referred to as the Father of Social Science, Martineau’s translation of Comte’s work, coupled with her own social commentary, earned her the title of Mother of Social Science.          

For the next twenty-three years, Martineau worked her land, kept her house, and published more books, writing her thoughts and observations up to the very day she died and amassing quite an extensive bibliography. In part:                                                                                   

1832–1834. Illustrations of Political Economy. 25 nos. in 6 vols1836. Miscellanies. 2 vols.1837. Society in America. 3 vols. London: Saunders & Otley. Abridged ed. by Seymour Martin Lipset1838. Retrospect of Western Travel. 2 vols.1838. How to Observe Morals and Manners.1839. Deerbrook.  A novel1840 The Hour and the Man (a novel)1841 The Playfellow. (a series of children’s stories)1844. Life in the Sick-Room. 1848. Eastern Life, Present and Past1859. England and Her Soldiers1861. Health, Husbandry, and Handicraft1877. Harriet Martineau’s Autobiography, edited by Maria Weston Chapman. 2 vols.1983. Harriet Martineau’s Letters to Fanny Wedgewood, edited by Elisabeth S. Arbuckle

(In addition, more than 1,500 newspaper columns, and several magazine articles. Not listed)

Co-wrote/translated:

Atkinson, Henry George, and Harriet Martineau. 1851.
Letters on the Laws of Man’s Nature and DevelopmentComte, Auguste. The Positive Philosophy of Auguste Comte,
translated and condensed by Harriet Martineau. 1853 Harriet Martineau’s legacy

Martineau wrote about such topics as Unitarianism, abolitionism, feminism, disability, social science, atheism, and more. She was a biographer and critic who spared nothing from the printing press as she wrote about education, history, husbandry, legislation, manufacturing, mesmerism, occupational health, philosophy, political economy, religion, slavery, and travel.

Her most popular work in the United States today is Society in America, an exploration of the political economy of America with special interest in the slavery of the South. After a biographical introduction detailing Martineau’s travels and social interactions (unencumbered by her ear trumpet), page 3 states,

“The United States have indeed been useful in proving these two things, before held impossible; the finding of a true theory of government, by reasoning from the principles of human nature, as well as from the experience of governments; and the capacity of mankind for self-government.”

After that assent, the rest of the book measures and probes the prisons, schools, factories, plantations, farms, tribal establishments, and literary and scientific institutions, from north to south and east to west of the United States in order to find if life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness were actively apparent among everyone in equal measure.

Finding this not to be the case, Martineau aligned herself with the abolitionist movement. She sold embroidery to donate money to abolition and worked for the the Anti-Slavery Standard until the end of the Civil War. It was in the United States, too, where Martineau was further inspired to reveal gender inequality and its effects on society, championing women’s suffrage.

In 1846 Martineau toured Egypt, Palestine, and Syria, focusing her analytical eye on religion and customs. Her later writings reflect that she became an atheist during this time.

One of Martineau’s most downloaded works on Project Gutenberg is Life in the Sick-room: Essays. In this work, Martineau reaches out to encourage others: “We know and feel, to the very centre of our souls, that there is no hurry, no crushing, no devastation attending Divine processes.” (Dedication).

Harriet Martineau’s vast compilation of work, opinions ranging from politics, to philosophy, to pain, was, and still is, sought after reading fodder among many social scientists. We might not find Martineau’s work among the scholars while browsing the philosophy section at the bookstore, but some of her books can be found at online books stores and her many of her titles have been made into e-books as well.

It is indeed is a glaring slight that her work is not readily found in the library stacks among the great thinkers, but its digital availability can be seen as a social redemption of sorts. I’m sure we have the social scientists to thank for that.

Contributed by Tami Richards, a history enthusiast and freelance writer living in the Pacific Northwest. More of her work can be found here. 

Further reading and sourcesHarriet Martineau’s Autobiography, Volume 1, 1855Penaluna, Regan. How to Think Like a Woman, Grove Press, 2024Harriet Martineau on Project GutenbergInternetarchive.org, Harriet Martineau,by Miller, Florence Fenwick Miller, 1887Openlibrary.org 

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Five women translators to celebrate on International Translation Day

International Translation Day falls on September 30 each year, but translators should be celebrated year round for what they contribute to how literature becomes a common thread between cultures.

Here are five women translators of the past whose work was groundbreaking, contributing to gender equality, education for all, abolitionism and scientific knowledge across borders and languages.

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Claudine Picardet,
chemist and scientific translator

Claudine Picardet (1735–1820) was a French chemist, mineralogist and meteorologist living in Dijon, a town in eastern France. She was the only woman at the Dijon Academy, and the only scientist who was proficient in five foreign languages (Latin, English, Italian, German, Swedish).

Claudine decided to translate a number of books and articles into French  that were written by leading scientists of her time, for the benefit of her colleagues.

She translated three books and dozens of scientific papers originally written in Swedish (works by Carl Wilhelm Scheele and Torbern Bergman), in English (works by John Hill, Richard Kirwan and William Fordyce), in German (works by Johann Christian Wiegleb, Johann Friedrich Westrumb, Johann Carl Friedrich Meyer and Martin Heinrich Klaproth) and in Italian (works by Marsilio Landriani).

Claudine Picardet’s translations were essential for the dissemination of scientific knowledge during the Chemical Revolution, a movement led by French chemist Antoine Lavoisier, often called the Father of modern chemistry.

She also hosted renowned scientific and literary salons in Dijon and in Paris, where she moved later on, and actively participated in the collection of meteorological data.

 

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Sarah Austin, tireless advocate
of public education for all

As a child, Sarah Austin (1793–1867) studied Latin, French, German and Italian in her native England. After marrying legal philosopher John Austin in 1819, she became a translator and editor, and corresponded extensively with many writers. The couple moved from London to Bonn, Germany, in 1827, living largely on Sarah’s income.

Sara translated into English a few works written by her German and French contemporaries, for example Characteristics of Goethe from the German of Falk, von Müller, etc., with notes, original and translated, illustrative of German literature (in 1833), as well as books by German philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Carové (in 1834), German historian Leopold von Ranke (in 1840) and French historian François Guizot (in 1850).

One of her translations was the Report on the State of Public Instruction in Prussia, written in 1832 by French philosopher Victor Cousin for the French Minister of Public Education.

In the preface to her translation (published in 1834), she personally pleaded for the cause of public education. She also advocated for a national system of education in England in a pamphlet published in 1839 in the Foreign Quarterly Review.

She regularly stood for her intellectual rights as a translator, writing that “It has been my invariable practice, as soon as I have engaged to translate a work, to write to the author of it, announcing my intention, and adding that if he has any correction, omission, or addition to make, he might depend on my paying attention to his suggestions” (in “Sarah Austin,” Dictionary of National Biography, vol. 2, 1885).

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Clémence Royer (1830-1902),
translator of Charles Darwin’s seminal book

Clémence Royer (1830–1902) was a self-taught French scholar who undertook the major task of translating English naturalist Charles Darwin’s seminal book On the Origin of Species (first published in 1859). His concept of evolutionary adaptation through natural selection was attracting widespread interest outside Britain, and Darwin was eager to have his book translated into French.

In the first French edition (1862), based on the third English edition, Clémence Royer went beyond her role as a translator, with a 60-page preface expressing her own views and many detailed explanatory footnotes.

Her own views had more in common with French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck’s ideas than with Darwin’s ideas. After reading her translation, Darwin was unhappy with her preface and footnotes and, according to him, her lack of knowledge in natural history.

Darwin requested the correction of some errors and inaccuracies in the second French edition (1866). The third French edition (1873) was produced without Darwin’s consent, with a second preface that also made Darwin unhappy, and an appendix that forgot the additions to the fourth and fifth English editions and only included the additions to the sixth English edition (published in 1872).

After three French editions (1862, 1866, 1873) published by Guillaumin, the fourth French edition (1882) was published by Flammarion the year of Darwin’s death, and stayed popular until 1932. Her controversial translation brought fame to Clémence Royer, who extensively wrote and lectured on philosophy, feminism and science, including on Darwinism.

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Mary Louise Booth, translator of major books
by anti-slavery advocates

Born in Millville (now Yaphank) in the State of New York, Mary Louise Booth (1831–1899) was of French descent on her mother’s side.

After moving to New York City at the age of 18, she wrote many pieces for various newspapers and magazines, and translated around 40 books from French into English, including works by writers Joseph Méry and Edmond François Valentin About, and by philosopher Victor Cousin.

She assisted Orlando Williams Wight, a fellow American translator, in producing a series of translations of French classics. She also wrote a History of the City of New York (1859) that became a bestseller.

When the American Civil War started in 1861, she translated French anti-slavery advocate Agénor de Gasparin’s book Uprising of a Great People (just published in France) in a very short time by working twenty hours a day for one week. Her translation was published in a fortnight by American publisher Scribner’s and widely distributed.

Then she translated Gasparin’s America before Europe (translation published in 1861), as well as books by other anti-slavery advocates, including Pierre-Suzanne-Augustin Cochin’s Results of Emancipation and Results of Slavery (1862) and Édouard René de Laboulaye’s Paris in America (1865).

She received praise and encouragement from President Abraham Lincoln, Senator Charles Sumner and other statesmen for her invaluable contribution towards the abolition of slavery.

She also translated other books by the same authors, including Gasparin’s religious works (written with his wife) and Laboulaye’s Fairy Book, as well as Fairy Tales by educator Jean Macé, History of France by historian Henri Martin, and Provincial Letters by philosopher Blaise Pascal.

She became the first editor-in-chief of the newly created magazine Harper’s Bazaar from 1867 until her death in 1899. Under her leadership, the magazine steadily increased its circulation and influence to become a household name. After struggling financially for decades as a writer and translator, she finally earned a larger salary than any woman in America.

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Alix Strachey,
translator of Freud’s complete works

Alix Strachey (1892–1973), an American-born English psychoanalyst, spent her whole life working alongside her husband, James Strachey, who was a fellow English psychoanalyst. Shortly after getting married in 1920, they left for Vienna, Austria, and spent two years studying psychology with famed Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud.

At Freud’s request, they first translated some of his articles from German into English. Then they worked tirelessly for many years (from 1953 to 1966) to translate his complete works (written between 1886 to 1939), in collaboration with Anna Freud, Freud’s youngest daughter, and with the help of English musicologist and translator Alan Tyson.

The 24-volume translation was published in 1953-74 by Hogarth Press in London under the title The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, with James Strachey as its editor. Also known to scholars as The Standard Edition (SE), it included introductions to Freud’s various works and extensive bibliographical and historical footnotes, It quickly became the reference edition of Freud’s works in English, and a reference work for translations into other languages.

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More women translators are celebrated in the ebook Some Women Translators of the Past (July 2024)

Also by Marie Lebert: 10 Lost Ladies of Literary Translation

Article written by Marie Lebert (edited by Nava Atlas). Marie Lebert is a French translator and librarian who has worked for international organizations and global projects in several countries. She is currently based in Australia. She writes about translation and translators – past and present — with a focus on women translators.

Women translators have been forgotten for too long before being recently acknowledged in Wikipedia thanks to its many contributors. Marie holds a PhD in linguistics (digital publishing) from the Sorbonne, Paris. Her articles, essays and ebooks are available online in English, French and Spanish at Marie Lebert. 

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Bad Girl by Viña Delmar, a 1928 Novel That Was “Banned in Boston”

In the 1920s, urban American women experimented with sexual freedom more openly than ever. Popular novels by writers — male and female — held up a mirror to the times. Despite its provocative title, the forgotten bestselling 1928 novel, Bad Girl by Viña Delmar, wasn’t one of them.

Dorothy, or “Dot,” as she’s familiarly called, has one instance of premarital sex, marries the guy (who’s not a bad sort, but not very bright), and after a respectable period of time, becomes pregnant. The novel is then preoccupied with her pregnancy and childbirth. The cover of a later edition, at right, sensationalizes the contents, as was typical of pulp novels.

There’s nothing scandalous about this middling novel, but the realities of a young wife’s pregnancy and her experiences in a birthing hospital were enough to catch the eyes of The New England Watch and Ward Society.

This New England-based organization whose mission was censorship of books and the performing arts was most active from the late nineteenth century through the 1920s.

For the most part, publishers welcomed a book being “banned in Boston,” as this kind of controversy boosted sales. Winning these censorship cases in court, however, really did mean that the books in question couldn’t be sold in Massachusetts under severe penalty of law.

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Being banned in Boston drove Bad Girl onto national bestseller lists and helped make its 23-year-old author an overnight sensation. The 1931 pre- Hayes Code film adaptation received great reviews, making the most of its thin material and breathing new life into the novel’s notoriety just a few years later.

“Bad Girl is Popular” read the headline of a brief blurb that was syndicated to several newspapers in 1928:

Vina Delmar’s novel, “Bad Girl” which attracted so much attention before and after it was “banned in Boston,” has reached (so its publishers, Harcourt, Brace and Company announce) its seventh large printing, not including the 40,000 to the Literary Guild. During the last two weeks in has been reported to be the best selling novel in the country, supplanting, at least for the present, “The Bridge of San Luis Rey.”

Reviewers were, if not bowled over, generally kind to the novel and its young author. Following is a fairly typical review from the period, after which are two articles about its banning in Massachusetts.

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Another sensationalized cover of Bad Girl. See also —
Her First Time: Seduction and Loss of Innocence in 1920s Women’s Novels

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Bad Girl is a Poignant Transcript of Life

Tulsa Daily World, Tulsa, Oklahoma, June 17, 1928: Viña Delmar has written a rough and honest tale of loving. Bad Girl by Viña Delmar has been so widely heralded as a precocious first novel that a cautious reader is to be pardoned if it has been catalogued among books that can wait. And yet caution, in this instance, is totally unnecessary.

A first novel it may be, but it is free from the taint of precocity, and from the blight of conscious straining for style. It is a spontaneous and honest piece of writing. It concerns the meeting, mating, and marriage. It depicts one year of married life of two young people from that strata whose constituents consider themselves educated and ready for life when the eighth grade is behind them.

Mrs. Delmar’s Dorothy is an eager, slim, pliable young thing exactly like all the other millions of lipsticked, bobbed, silk-stockinged young women whose bright eyes shone with life. Her Eddie is an unbelievably sensitive, consistently staunch youth, outwardly like all the other swaggering boys who seek and accept the challenge of bright eyes.

Eddie and Dorothy (often referred to as Dot) pick each other up on an excursion boat. For all the shield of their rude, self-protective banter they understand one another. They marry and have a child.

Dorothy and Eddie are real people. So is Edna, the strange girl who Dorothy’s brother loved, so far as he could love. And so are the sly-eyed, perfumed Maude, the noisy Sue, the kind, matter-of-fact doctors who took Dorothy through the hell of labor into the blessed haven of her motherhood.

Viña Delmar has written a poignant, moving story of honest thought and action. There’s no reticence in Bad Girl. Perhaps that’s why Boston banned it. But its frankness is that of reality, and is not offensive. The book takes its its title form Dot and Eddie’s prenuptial adventure, out of which she emerged panic-stricken an afraid, and Eddie came out of grim and purposeful.

There’s something intensely appealing about Eddie. He is sullen, he is rude, he is profane, but underneath this rough exterior is a man who is tender, wonderfully kind, oddly wistful, and ready to sacrifice anything for the little flame of a girl he married.

When Dot found out she was to have a baby, she trembled for fear that Eddie didn’t want it. She was ready to go any lengths if he didn’t. And Eddie, interpreting her fear as an aversion to the baby, thought that it was Dot who didn’t want it. He feigned disgust at the thought of a third member coming into the family. Love makes such strange tangles sometimes!

Anyone who could produce such a vital book as this one will go a long way. The reader feels that Viña Delmar knows what she’s writing about in this, her first book — that she has felt the pain and joy that color it. And knowing and feeling as she does, she was able to write about simple and elemental things.

Bad Girl isn’t, from any standpoint, an important book. But it is a true one, which makes it good.

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Viña Delmar in 1928
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Boston Bans “Bad Girl”

The Springfield Daily Republican (Springfield, Massachusetts), May 4, 1928: Literary Guild selection novel by Viña Delmar, former actress, held by booksellers to be “Actionable” under Massachusetts. “Obscenity” ignores truth, says author.

Bad Girl, a novel that raised Vina Delmar to literary fame at the age of 23, has been banned from sale in Boston. Harcourt, Brace & Co.. the publishers. received notice today from the Boston Booksellers’ association that the book is “actionable.”

The association. by agreement with the district attorney. has the power to rule on the counters of its members any books which it believes violate the Massachusetts “obscenity” law.

When Miss Delmar was informed of the action. she said Boston ignores the truth. Propagation is evidently obscene, The Lord was less cautious in his personal contacts than the Boston book banners in their reading. They are witch burners, truth hiders, and killers of the seeds of sincerity.

Bad Girl, by being barred from Boston. now joins the company of Elmer Gantry, An American Tragedy, The Plastic Age, and other recent novels that have won praise elsewhere.

Bad Girl was selected by the Literary Guild as its book for the month of April. This made Miss Delmar. a former actress and writer of short stories. famous overnight. She contends that Bad Girl is true to the lives or the people in her neighborhood” and that she took all the characters from her acquaintances.

The heroine in the book was married at the age of seventeen and the story goes on with her married life until the first baby is born.

 

Boston Bans New Novel, Bad Girl; Editor Is Angry

The Dispatch (Moline, Illinois). May 12, 1928: Bad Girl. a new novel by Viña Delmar, has been banned in Boston, The Watch and Ward Society having disapproved it. The Boston Booksellers’ association has sent word to Harcourt. Brace & Co. of New York that they will not handle the book.

“The book has one pretty strong chapter in it,” said a leading Boston publisher, “and the Watch and Ward society, I’m frank to say, under Massachusetts statutes anyone who sold it could be prosecuted. We care neither to push out such books, nor to furnish our contemporaries over in New York with just much free advertising.

“We read the book, of course, before submitting it to the Watch and Ward society. The banning by the society didn’t cause even a ripple among us. Dare say we will sell plenty of books without adding this one to our stock.”

“The exploitation of ‘Banned in Boston’ or ‘puritan Boston’ gives any such book a certain boost in New York. I suppose. but the New York publishers are welcome to it.”

Silly, says editor

A letter from the Boston Booksellers’ association was received by Harcourt, Brace & Co. publishers. notifying them that Viña Delmar’s novel, Bad Girl was actionable. No other reason was given by the association for its refusal to handle the book in Boston.

The author of the book is twenty-three, a former usher, stenographer, and vaudeville actress. Its banning was termed an act of  “a crazy bunch of madmen” by Harrison Smith, editor for Harcourt, Brace & Co.

“What’s the use?” he said. Asked if the prohibition from sale would be contested. “It’s incredible that the book should be thought obscene, even in Boston. A baby is born in it; can’t babies be born in books Boston reads?”

The theme of the novel—Mrs. Delmar’s first—is pregnancy. A Bronx stenographer, Dot, flirts with a “white Harlem” radio mechanic, Eddie. on board a steamer. They marry, and Dot, believing her husband does not want a baby, suffers in silence because she is pregnant, Eddie, too, thinking his wife dreads childbirth, suffers quietly. The birth, it’s hinted at the very end, will clear up these misunderstandings.

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More about Bad Girl by Viña Delmar

Full text on Internet Archive
Viña Delmar, Flapper Fiction, and Snappy Stories Magazine

 

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Flora Thompson, Author of Lark Rise to Candleford

Flora Thompson (December 5, 1876 – May 21, 1947), was an English novelist and poet, best known for her semi-autobiographical trilogy Lark Rise to Candleford.

The commercial and critical success of the books — Lark Rise, Over to Candleford, and Candleford Green — is such that they have never been out of print, and were adapted by the BBC for a four-season series in 2008.

 

Early life: The origins of Candleford

Flora Jane Timms was born in the rural hamlet of Juniper Hill, near Brackley, Oxfordshire. Her father, Albert, was a stonemason, whose ambitions to become a sculptor had been thwarted by his drinking and gambling.

Flora later remembered him as “a terrible spendthrift … he never seemed to grasp the fact that he was responsible for our upbringing … He had all of the bad qualities of genius and a few of the good ones.”

Her mother, Emma, had gone into service at an early age and had worked as a nursemaid before she married Albert. She gave birth to ten children between 1875 and 1898, but only six survived beyond the age of three. Despite her challenging life, Emma was a talented storyteller and delighted in creating imaginary worlds for her children through songs, games, and stories.

When Flora was growing up, Juniper Hill was barely touched by the Industrial Revolution that was sweeping across England. It was still a place where farm laborers earned a subsistence wage, and where women still drew water from a communal well.

Later, in the first of her famous trilogy, Lark Rise, Flora described it as “bare, brown, and windswept for eight months out of the twelve … only for a few weeks in later summer had the landscape real beauty.”

 

Reading, writing, and the post office

Flora attended school in Cottisford, a mile-and-a-half walk away from Juniper Hill. On those walks, she developed an intimate knowledge of the natural world that surrounded her, which she would later use in her writing. She left school at age twelve, like the other children in the hamlet, expected to go into service.

Her mother assumed that Flora would become a nursemaid like herself and was quietly disappointed when Flora showed no interest in babies. Instead, she preferred to read and write.

Flora left home at age fourteen to work in the Post Office in nearby Fringford, where her duties included selling stamps, working the new telegraph machine, and sorting letters.

Despite the lack of formal education, writing was already central to her life. Later, she would say that she “could not remember the time when [she] did not wish or mean to write,” and that she “never left off writing essays for the pleasure of writing.” She was also a voracious reader, and while lodging in Fringford took out a library ticket at the Mechanics Institute in a nearby town and read her way through Austen, Trollope, Scott, and Dickens.

In 1898 Flora left Fringford to work at the post office in Grayshott, Hampshire, where she served some of the well-known literary figures of the time who lived in the area, including George Bernard Shaw and Arthur Conan Doyle. Overawed by their celebrity, she nearly abandoned her own writing. It was likely here that she met her future husband, John William Thompson, a post office clerk and telegraphist from Aldershott (also in Hampshire).

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Marriage (and writing in secret)

By 1902 Flora was working at the post office in Twickenham. She married John Thompson on January 7, 1903, at the local St Mary’s Church. The couple then moved to Winton on the outskirts of Bournemouth, where two of their three children (Basil and Winifred) were born.

There they stayed there until 1916 when John became Postmaster at Liphook in Hampshire. Their third child, Peter, was born there as well, when Flora was forty-one. Another move followed in 1928, to Dartmouth in Devon, where the family settled.

Flora realized that her husband’s family did not approve of her “cottage origins” and regarded her passion for reading and writing as a waste of time. John did not encourage her writing either, so when the children were past infancy, she took to writing in secret.

 

Nature writing, literary essays, and poetry

In 1911, Flora had her first writing success when her essay on Jane Austen won a women’s newspaper competition. She subsequently sent the same newspaper another article and a short story, both of which were accepted and for which she received payment.

This seemed to precipitate a change of heart by her husband: so long as her writing paid and didn’t interfere with her responsibilities at home, then it could be tolerated.

She went on to write several short stories and newspaper articles, and when she was living in Liphook contributed two long series of articles to the Catholic Fireside magazine. One of these comprised literary essays, and the other consisted of nature writing.

Both series came from her own enthusiasm and dedication: she was a self-taught naturalist from childhood, and her literary essays were also the result of her own private study, carried out mainly in the newly established free public library system. These nature articles later went on to be collected in Margaret Lane’s A Country Calendar (1979) and in Julian Shuckburgh’s The Peverel Papers (1986).

Flora’s true real ambition was to be a poet. She lacked confidence — partly, perhaps, because of her childhood poverty and lack of formal education. She later said, “To be born in poverty is a terrible handicap to a writer. I often say to myself that it has taken one lifetime for me to prepare to make a start. If human life lasted two hundred years, I might hope to accomplish something.”

She was encouraged by Ronald Campbell Macfie, a Scottish physician and poet who had admired her writing in The Literary Monthly. This was an important friendship — the only real literary friendship she ever had — and it resulted in her first published book, a collection of poems titled Bog Myrtle and Peat, in 1921.

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Lark Rise to Candleford

Flora continued to write through the family’s move to Dartmouth. From 1925 until the outbreak of war in 1939 she ran a mail-based writing club called the Peverel Society, in which members shared their own work and critiqued the work of others.

It wasn’t until 1935 that she began to write about her Oxfordshire childhood — a vanishing world of rural and agricultural traditions — with the intention of giving “a true picture of the people and time … to describe things exactly as they were, without sentimentalizing or dramatizing.”

She sent the result to Oxford University Press, who accepted it for publication. Lark Rise was published in 1939, Over to Candleford in 1941, and Candleford Green in 1942. They were first issued together as a trilogy in 1945 under the title Lark Rise to Candleford.

The books tell the lightly fictionalized story of three closely-related Oxfordshire communities — a hamlet, a nearby village, and a small market town (based on Juniper Hill, Cottisford and Fringford) — and have often been used as sources for the social history of the period. Gillian Lindsay has written that “Few works better or more elegantly capture the decay of Victorian agrarian England.”

This success came relatively late in Flora’s life — she was by then in her sixties, and she claimed that by that point she was “too old to care much for the bubble reputation.” She had never been a part of any literary circles, preferring to keep to the fringes, and was surprised at how popular the trilogy was when so much of her writing had long been ignored.

She continued to write, although no further books were published until after her death. Heatherley, an account of her time in Grayshott and seen as a sequel to Lark Rise to Candleford, was unpublished until Margaret Lane included it in A Country Calendar. Her final book, Still Glides the Stream, was published after her death in 1948.

Her later work never achieved the popularity of Lark Rise to Candleford. The trilogy has never been out of print and has been adapted for both stage and television: two musicals based on the books, Lark Rise and Candleford, were performed at London’s National Theatre in 1978 and 1979, and a four-season series was produced by the BBC starting in 2008.

 

Last years

In 1940, Flora’s husband John retired from the post office, and the couple moved to a cottage in Brixham, Devon. By this time their oldest son Basil had left England for Australia, while their daughter Winifred was a nurse in Bristol. Their youngest son Peter was killed in 1941 while serving in the merchant navy, when his ship was torpedoed in the Atlantic.

Flora never recovered from the loss of her son. She died of a heart attack at home in 1947, and her ashes are buried at the Longcross cemetery, Dartford, Devon.

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Contributed by Elodie Barnes. Elodie is a writer and editor with a serious case of wanderlust. Her short fiction has been widely published online and is included in the Best Small Fictions 2022 Anthology published by Sonder Press. She is Books & Creative Writing Editor at Lucy Writers Platform, she is also co-facilitating What the Water Gave Us, an Arts Council England-funded anthology of emerging women writers from migrant backgrounds. She is currently working on a collection of short stories, and when not writing can usually be found planning the next trip abroad, or daydreaming her way back to 1920s Paris. Find her online at  Elodie Rose Barnes. 

More about Flora Thompson

Major Works

Poetry

Bog Myrtle and Peat (1921)

Novels

Lark Rise (1939)Over to Candleford (1941)Candleford Green (1943)Lark Rise to Candleford (1945 — the three novels published as a trilogy)Still Glides the Stream (1948, posthumous)Heatherley (1944, posthumous)

Nature writing

The Peverel Papers (abridged,1986; complete, 2008)

Biography

Dreams of the Good Life: The Life of Flora Thompson and the Creation of
Lark Rise to Candleford by Richard Mabey (2015)

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