Nava Atlas's Blog, page 70
March 30, 2019
Angela Carter
Angela Carter (May 7, 1940– February 16, 1992), born Angela Olive Stalker, was an English novelist, short story writer, and journalist. Born in Eastbourne, England. She became known as one of Britain’s most original writers, best known for her eclectic range of themes and genres.
Her varied influences included fairy tales, gothic fantasy, Shakespeare, Surrealism, and the cinema of Godard and Fellini. Her work breaks taboo, often being labeled provocative. She was also a strong believer in women having control over their own narrative. She is perhaps best known for The Bloody Chamber (1979), which is a type of re-envisioned version of the classic European fairy tales.
Early LifeCarter was born to a journalist father, Hugh Alexander Stalker, and mother, Olive, who worked as a cashier at a local grocery store. Both parents spoiled her to no end. She was gifted with treats, kittens, and storybooks. Her mother never put her to bed until after midnight, when her father got back from work. Her father brought her long rolls of white paper from his office, and while her parents chatted she wrote stories in crayon.
She spent much of her childhood with her grandmother in Yorkshire, where she was sent to escape the dangerous wartime bombings. After the war, she attended school in Balham, South London. Here she frequently went on trips with her father to the Granada Cinema in Tooting, which started her life-long love of the cinema and film.
After leaving school she worked at the Croydon Advertiser for a short time, before she joined her soon-to-be husband Paul Carter in 1960. After her marriage, she moved to Bristol where she studied English with a specialization in medieval literature at Bristol University.
Carter divorced in 1974 due to Paul’s numerous battles with depression. Soon after, she settled back in south London again and got together with Mark Pearce. In 1983, she had a son named Alexander with Pearce. During the late 1970s and 80s, Carter taught at a number of universities; including Sheffield and East Anglia in Britain, Brown University in the U.S., and the University of Adelaide in Australia.
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Memorable Quotes by Angela Carter from Her Literary Works
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Carter published over two dozen pieces of literature in her lifetime. Her first novel, Shadow Dance was published in 1966 and introduced Carter’s most enigmatic characters, Honeybuzzard. After the publication of this novel, she was immediately recognized as one of Britain’s most original writers. The novel tells the tale of seducing and tormenting lovers, enemies, and friends in the back-streets of London, leaving behind a trail of broken hearts, dashed hopes, and destruction.
Her second novel, The Magic Toyshop, followed shortly after in 1967. And her third, Several Perceptions, was published in 1968. She won the Somerset Maugham award for these two, which followed themes of gothic fantasy and horror, touched with the libertine energy of the 1960s.
Carter went on to publish six more novels, four collections of short stories, a book of essays, two collections of journalism, and a volume of radio plays.
A condition of the Somerset Maugham award was that it was to be used for foreign travel. And so in 1969, Carter traveled to Japan, where she immersed herself in the Japanese culture. She wrote some of her most powerful essays during her time in Japan.
Her experiences in Japan inspired her collection of semi-autobiographical short stories such as Fireworks, Heroes and Villains, The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman, and The Passion of New Eve. Her novel, Nights at the Circus, won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. In 2012 that novel was declared the best book to have ever been awarded that prize.
Carter went on to publish nine novels in total, four collections of short stories, a book of essays, two collections of journalism, and a volume of radio plays. She also went on to write the screenplay for 1984 film The Company of Wolves, based on one of her most famous short stories.
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Angela Carter, 1976; photograph by Fay Godwin © British Library Board
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Life After DeathAngela Carter died at home in 1992 after her battle with lung cancer. After her untimely death at age fifty-one, there was a notable increase of interest in her work. There was a rapid increase in sales of her books and her stage adaptations of her work both in Britain and abroad.
Carter quickly became one of the most widely taught and researched writers in all of British fiction. Her writing has been described as occupying a unique place in twentieth-century fiction — one where myths about sexuality and gender are proven wrong, and where there’s no limit to the human imagination. In 2008, The Times of London ranked Carter tenth on their list of the 50 greatest British writers since 1945.
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Angela Carter page on Amazon
More about Angela Carter on this site
Memorable Quotes by Angela Carter from Her Literary WorksMajor works
Though Angela Carter was only fifty-one when she died, she left a large body of work. In addition to the novels, short stories, and nonfiction listed below, she also published three collections of poems, several plays and screenplays, and four children’s books. For a compete listing of her works, see this section of her Wikipedia page.
Novels
Shadow Dance (1966, aka Honeybuzzard)The Magic Toyshop (1967)Several Perceptions (1968)Heroes and Villains (1969)Love (1971)The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman (1972)The Passion of New Eve (1977)Nights at the Circus (1984)Wise Children (1991)Short stories and nonfiction
Fireworks: Nine Profane Pieces (1974)The Bloody Chamber (1979)Black Venus (1985; Saints and Strangers in the U.S.)The Sadeian Woman and the Ideology of Pornography (1979)Nothing Sacred: Selected Writings (1982)Expletives Deleted: Selected Writings (1992)Biographies
The Invention of Angela Carter by Edmund Gordon (2017)Inside the Bloody Chamber: Aspects of Angela Carter by Christopher Frayling (2015)More information
Wikipedia Reader discussion of Angela Carter’s books on Goodreads Angela Carter bio at The British Library
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March 29, 2019
Memorable Quotes by Angela Carter from Her Literary Works
Angela Carter (1940-1992), born Angela Olive Stalker, was an English novelist, short story writer, and journalist. Known as one of Britain’s most original writers, she was best known for her eclectic range of themes and influences. Her work breaks taboo, often being labeled provocative.
Carter was a strong believer in women having control over their own narrative. Most famous for her 1979 novel The Bloody Chamber, a reenvisioned version of the classic European fairy tales. She went on to publish dozens of literary works. Here are memorable quotes by Angela Carter from her novels and other literary works:
The Bloody Chamber
“She herself is a haunted house. She does not possess herself; her ancestors sometimes come and peer out of the windows of her eyes and that is very frightening.”
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“Those are the voices of my brothers, darling; I love the company of wolves.”
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“Anticipation is the greater part of pleasure.”
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“There is a striking resemblance between the act of love and the ministrations of a torturer.”
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“Love is desire sustained by unfulfillment.”
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“For all cats have this particularity, each and every one, from the meanest alley sneaker to the proudest, whitest she that ever graced a pontiff’s pillow—we have our smiles, as it were, painted on. Those small, cool, quite Mona Lisa smiles that smile we must, no matter whether it’s been fun or it’s been not. So all cats have a politician’s air; we smile and smile and so they think we’re villains.”
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“Like the wild beasts, she lives without a future. She inhabits only the present tense, a fugue of the continuous, a world of sensual immediacy as without hope as it is without despair.”
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“The girl burst out laughing; she knew she was nobody’s meat.”
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The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman
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“I desire therefore I exist.”
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“Some cities are women and must be loved; others are men and can only be admired or bargained with.”
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“Love is the synthesis of dream and actuality; love is the only matrix of the unprecedented; love is the tree which buds lovers like roses.”
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Nights at the Circus
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“We must all make do with the rags of love we find flapping on the scarecrow of humanity.”
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“Despair is the constant companion of the clown.”
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“Out of the frying pan into the fire! What is marriage but prostitution to one man instead of many? No different!”
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The Sadeian Woman
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“A free woman in an unfree society will be a monster.”
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“If women allow themselves to be consoled for their culturally determined lack of access to the modes of intellectual debate by the invocation of hypothetical great goddesses, they are simply flattering themselves into submission (a technique often used on them by men). All the mythic versions of women, from the myth of the redeeming purity of the virgin to that of the healing, reconciliatory mother, are consolatory nonsenses; and consolatory nonsense seems to me a fair definition of myth, anyway. Mother goddesses are just as silly a notion as father gods. If a revival of the myths gives women emotional satisfaction, it does so at the price of obscuring the real conditions of life. This is why they were invented in the first place.”
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“To be the object of desire is to be defined in the passive case. To exist in the passive case is to die in the passive case—that is, to be killed. This is the moral of the fairy tale about the perfect woman.”
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“In his diabolic solitude, only the possibility of love could awake the libertine to perfect, immaculate terror. It is in this holy terror of love that we find, in both men and women themselves, the source of all opposition to the emancipation of women.”
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“In a world where women are commodities, a woman who refuses to sell herself will have the thing she refuses to sell taken away from her by force.”
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Wise Children
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“Hope for the best, expect the worst.”
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“He was a lovely man in many ways. But he kept on insisting on forgiving me when there was nothing to forgive.”
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“A mother is always a mother, since a mother is a biological fact, whilst a father is a movable feast.”
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“Our fingernails match our toenails, match our lipstick match our rouge…The habit of applying warpaint outlasts the battle.”
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Wayward Girls and Wicked Women
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“She was no malleable, since frigid, substance upon which desires might be executed; she was not a true prostitute for she was the object on which men prostituted themselves.”
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“To be a wayward girl usually has something to do with premarital sex; to be a wicked woman has something to do with adultery. This means it is far easier for a woman to lead a blameless life than it is for a man; all she has to do is to avoid sexual intercourse like the plague. What hypocrisy!”
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Other Sayings and Quotes“Proposition one: time is a man, space is a woman.” –The Passion of New Eve
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“She was like a piano in a country where everyone has had their hands cut off.” –Saints and Strangers
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“Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself. You bring to a novel, anything you read, all your experience of the world. You bring your history and you read it in your own terms.”
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“Cities have sexes: London is a man, Paris a woman, and New York a well-adjusted transsexual.”
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“Is not this world an illusion? And yet it fools everybody.”
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“For most of human history, ‘literature,’ both fiction and poetry, has been narrated, not written—heard, not read. So fairy tales, folk tales, stories from the oral tradition, are all of them the most vital connection we have with the imaginations of the ordinary men and women whose labor created our world.”
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“Language is power, life and the instrument of culture, the instrument of domination and liberation.”
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The Woman Destroyed by Simone de Beauvoir
Simone de Beauvoir (1908 – 1986) French author, existential philosopher, political activist, and feminist was best known for The Second Sex (1949). But she also put her social theories, especially those pertaining to affairs of the heart, into several works of fiction. The Woman Destroyed, published first in French in 1967 (as La Femme Rompue) presents a trio of novellas, or long short stories.
Upon the book’s 1969 publication in English, The Sunday Herald Times (London) wrote: “In three immensely intelligent stories about the decay of passion, Simone de Beauvoir draws us into the lives of three women, all past their first youth, all facing unexpected crises … suffused with de Beauvoir’s remarkable insights into women, The Woman Destroyed gives us a legendary writer at her best.”
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See also: The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir
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ThoughThe Woman Destroyed was generally praised, not all reviewers were as enthusiastic as the one above. Following is a review of the American edition that, though critical of the book’s tone, nonetheless offers a succinct synopsis of each story:
The Woman Destroyed: Three Women in Crisis
From a review by Inna Uhlig of The Woman Destroyed by Simone de Beauvoir in The Baltimore Sun, March 23, 1969: In this English translation of La Femme Rompue, Simone de Beauvoir presents three novellas, or long short stories, that describe women over forty, each delving into her own unhappiness:
The Age of Discretion
In “The Age of Discretion,” the woman is faced with a young married son who suddenly tears himself free from her sphere of influence. She rejects him completely, refusing to see him. At the same time, she observes that she no longer seems to bring her husband any kind of happiness. She and he are not in accord over her treatment of their son.
As her marital relationship shifts into a different key, she and her spouse grow father and farther apart. At the end there is a suggestion of a new plateau of understanding, but it’s not convincing because non of the problems have been resolved.
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Learn more about Simone de Beauvoir
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The Monologue
In the middle tale, the tone is strident, the pitch continuously noisy, rising over and over again to a hysterical note. “The silly bastards!” the woman cries at the first gasp. Her accusing, despairing monologue goes on and on about the ghastly mess in which she is drowning: a woman separated from her child and “ditched” by his “swine of a father.”
She screams how she is rotting all alone, how she is being trampled underfoot. She moans that she is “bored through the ground,” alone on New Year’s Eve.
And then, there is the memory of her daughter, dead by her own hand at fifteen. She vows she would have made that daughter into a fine girl, asking nothing, only giving. When they buried their daughter, she cries out that they really buried her. The woman gives one scream after another of rage and despair and loneliness, until there is more than enough.
The Woman Destroyed
The title story, “The Woman Destroyed,” is told in a more modified tone; but the undercurrent of despair builds to uncontrolled proportions. In this monologue, the woman tells of a comfortable life that is being washed away by her husband’s affair with another woman.
The woman telling her story has two grown daughters, one of whom is married and the other pursuing an independent career in the United States. Now, as her unhappiness builds, she even questions her upbringing of her daughters.
Alone with her husband, she gradually becomes aware of his concealments and actual lies that hide the fact that he is not really “eaten up by his profession”
Running from friend to friend, the wife becomes less and less sure of herself as she allows her husband to share his life with the other woman. Where everything had been secure and tidy, suddenly everything is disintegrating.
Having devoted her whole self to her family, the wife fines herself faced with an utterly abandoned life. she is playing a losing game.
This reviewer’s conclusion
Each of these novellas is concerned with a desperately unhappy, no-longer-young woman whose life is going down the drain. Three such monologues, in succession, are an overdose. At the same time, none of the husbands or other characters in any of the stories take on a convincing life of their own.
What we have are three female voices, one louder and more strident than the other, but all disconcerting. None of them throw any real light upon the melancholy situations complained about.
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The Woman Destroyed on Amazon
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Though the reviewer above gives helpfully neat synopses of these stories, it’s evident that the she found the characters distasteful. Scanning recent reader reviews, contemporary readers find much in this book that resonates.
On the book’s discussion page on Goodreads, one reader notes, “Reading The Woman Destroyed, I was reminded that all great writing is a warning, or at the very least, veiled advice on how one might attempt to live a meaningful life.” Another writes, “Her characters make sense of life on the page and when they discover the why in the actions of others, the reader is invited along for the journey.”
Despite the brevity of the book, many readers, both female and male, leave long, thoughtful musings on how the book has resonated with them. It could be that Simone de Beauvoir was tapping into a fictional form of confessional angst that was a bit before its time, and that has aged well.
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You might also enjoy: She Came to Stay by Simone de Beauvoir
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March 28, 2019
Julia de Burgos
Julia de Burgos, born Julia Constanza Burgos Garcia (February 17, 1914 – July 6, 1953), was a Puerto Rican poet and civil rights activist for women and African/Afro-Caribbean writers. She was also an advocate for Puerto Rican independence and served as Secretary General of the Daughters of Freedom, the women’s branch of the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party.
Burgos was born and raised in Santa Cruz, a poor area of Carolina, Puerto Rico where her father owned a farm in addition to working as a member of the Puerto Rican National Guard. She was the oldest of her thirteen siblings until unfortunately, six of her younger siblings died of malnutrition. As the oldest in an underprivileged home, she was the only one that was given the opportunity to attend school.
Beginning a teaching careerBurgos graduated from Munoz Rivera Primary in 1928 and was awarded a scholarship to attend University High School, so her family moved to Rio Piedras. This would influence her later on to write her first work, Rio Grande de Loiza. She was a very intelligent student and learned to love literature at a young age. The writings of Luis Llorens Torres, Clara Lair, Rafael Alberti, and Pablo Neruda were among some of the people who influenced her career as a young poet.
Three years later, she was enrolled in the University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras Campus to become a teacher. In 1933 at the age of nineteen, she earned her teaching degree from the University of Puerto Rico and taught at Feijoo Elementary School in Barrio Cedro Arriba of Naranjito, Puerto Rico.
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Failed marriages leading to depressionHer teaching career was cut short after Burgos met her first husband, Ruben Rodriguez Beauchamp, in 1934. She started doing civil rights work in 1936 and became a member of the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party (Partido Nacionalista de Puerto Rico) and was later elected as the Secretary-General of the Daughters of Freedom, women’s branch of the Nationalist Party. The start to her new career was followed by the end of her marriage to Rodriguez. Burgos and Beauchamp divorced just three years later in 1937.
After her divorce, Burgos started an intense romantic relationship with Dominican historian, physician, and political Juan Isidro Jiménez Grullón. Little did she know he would become a big inspiration for her poems later on in her career that discusses her love for him. They traveled to Cuba together in 1939 where Burgos briefly attended school at the University of Havana. She then traveled to New York City where she worked as a journalist for Pueblos Hispanos, a progressive newspaper.
Her relationship with Grullón started to take a negative turn shortly after they arrived in Cuba. Burgos tried to save the relationship but failed to do so. She decided to leave and return to New York by herself where she worked menial jobs in order to support herself.
While starting a life of her own in New York City, Burgos met Vieques musician, Armando Marín. They got married in 1943 but this marriage also ended in divorce. As a result, Burgos fell further into depression and alcoholism.
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ThemesBurgos had already become a published writer in journals and newspapers by the early 1930s. She also published three books that contained a collection of her poems. To promote her first two books, she traveled all over Puerto Rico giving book readings. Her third book was published in 1954 and contained a collection of the intimate, land, and social struggles of those oppressed on the island.
Many critics claim that Burgos’ poetry is the work of feminist writers and poets along with that of other Latinx authors as she writes in one of her poems: “I am life, strength, woman.”
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“Soldaderas” by Yasmin Hernandez, 2011. . . . . . . . . .
Awards and HonorsIn July 1940, Burgos was awarded a Puerto Rican literary prize for her second collection of poems, Canción de la Verdad Sencilla (Song of the Simple Truth).
In 1986, Julia de Burgos was awarded by the Spanish Department of the University of Puerto Rico and was granted a doctorate in Human Arts and Letters.
In 2002, a documentary about the life of Julia de Burgos was created titled “Julia, Toda en mi…” directed and produced by Ivonne Belén. In 1978 another biopic of her life titled “Vida y poesía de Julia de Burgos,” was filmed and released in Puerto Rico.
In 2006, a mosaic mural titled “Remembering Julia,” by artist Manny Vega was inaugurated. It is located between 106th Street between Lexington and Third Avenue in East Harlem.
On September 14, 2010, the United States Postal Service held a ceremony in San Juan in honor of Burgos’s life and literary work. They issued a first-class postage stamp which was the 26th release in the postal system’s Literary Arts series. Toronto-based artist Jody Hewgill created the stamp’s beautiful portrait.
In 2011, Yasmin Hernandez created a mural called “Soldaderas” (Women Soldiers) that was inaugurated at the community garden Modesto Flores Garden on Lexington Avenue between 104th and 105th street. Interestingly, just one block away inside the old building of P.S. 72 is the Julia Burgos Latino Cultural Center. This is of great importance to the Latinx community as it is one of the mainstays of cultural life in El Barrio. This year, she was also inducted into the New York Writers Hall of Fame.
On May 29, 2014, twelve notable women were honored with plaques in the “La Plaza en Honor a la Mujer Puertorriqueña” (Plaza in Honor of Puerto Rican Women) in San Juan. Burgos was among the twelve who were honored who, according to their plaques, stand out by virtue of their merits and legacies.
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Portrait of Julia de Burgos by Jody Hewgill, 2010. . . . . . . . . .
An early deathOn June 28, 1953, Julia de Burgos left a relative’s home in Brooklyn where she had been living. She was nowhere to be found until July 6, 1953 when she had collapsed on a sidewalk in the Spanish Harlem section of Manhattan.
After being taken to a hospital in Harlem, she died of pneumonia at the young age of thirty-nine. Burgos was not wearing any ID when she passed away and was buried as “Jane Doe” at the public cemetery on Hart Island.
Her friends began to look for her after noticing that she had been missing. Her disappearance was even recognized by El Diario/La Prensa as they published a notice an an effort to find her. After various days of extreme searching, her body was unearthed and sent to Carolina, her hometown, for a proper burial.
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“Remembering Julia” by Manny Vega, 2006Major Works
Song of the Simple Truth: The Complete Poems of Julia de Burgos (dual-language edition: Spanish, English), trans. Jack Agueros. Curbstone Books – 1997 Yo misma fui mi ruta, Ediciones Huracán (“I myself was my route, Hurricane Editions”) – 1986Amor y soledad, Ediciones Torremozas (“Love and loneliness, Torremozas Editions”) – 1994El Mar Y Tu, Ediciones Huracán (“The Sea and You, Hurricane Editions”) – 1981Canción De La Verdad Sencilla (Vortice Ser), Ediciones Huracán (“Song of the Simple Truth (Vortex Be), Hurricane Editions”) – 1982Poema en Veinte Surcos, Ediciones Huracán (“Poem in Winding Furrows, Hurricane Editions”) – 1983Poema Río Grande de Loíza (“Great River Poem of Loiza”)Poemas exactos de mí misma (“Exact poems of myself”)Dame tu hora perdída (“Give me your lost time”)Ay, ay, ay de la grifa negra (“Oh, oh, oh of the black grif”)Biographies
Becoming Julia de Burgos: The Making of a Puerto Rican Icon by Vanessa Perez Rosario (2014)Julia: Cuando Los Grandes Eran Pequeños by Georgina Lázaro (2006)More Information
Wikipedia Voices of NY The New York Times Discussion of Julia de Burgos’ life on NYR Daily. . . . . . . . .
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March 27, 2019
The Professor by Charlotte Brontë: A 19th Century Analysis
Though Jane Eyre was Charlotte Brontë‘s first published novel, The Professor was actually the first novel that she wrote. It wasn’t published until 1857, two years after her death and having secured her literary reputation.
The resounding failure of a book of poems she produced with sisters Emily and Anne in 1846 didn’t stop Charlotte from spearheading an effort to find a publisher for the novels that they had been working on. They continued to use the assumed masculine names that appeared on their book of poetry. They styled themselves as Currer Bell (Charlotte), Ellis Bell (Emily), and Acton Bell (Anne).
At first, and for some time, they had no luck. Charlotte described their efforts: “We each set to work on a prose tale: Ellis Bell produced Wuthering Heights, Acton Bell, Agnes Grey, and Currer Bell also wrote a narrative in one volume [referring to The Professor]. These MSS. were perseveringly obtruded upon various publishers for the space of a year and a half; usually, their fate was an ignominious and abrupt dismissal …”
Many rejections
Charlotte Brontë’s manuscript for The Professor made its rounds and was rejected (or ignored) by half a dozen London publishers. With nowhere near the houses as there are today, each disappointment was significant. Adding to the pain was that her sisters’ novels found a home, while hers didn’t. Yet Charlotte did what any savvy would-be author would. Instead of sitting idly, pining for news, she worked on her next novel.
At last, finally getting some encouragement from Messers Smith and Elder that her next submission might get some honest attention, her next manuscript was at the ready to submit and she dispatched it, post haste. That new manuscript was none other than Jane Eyre.
The publisher must have sensed a winner; the book was hastily brought out just six weeks after acceptance, and became an immediate bestseller. The Professor, meanwhile, continued to languish, and was published posthumously, remaining one of Brontë’s more obscure works.
The Professor was something of a roman à clef, based on Charlotte’s experiences while studying and teaching in Brussels. The title character was based on Constantin Héger, the headmaster of the school, a married man with children with whom Charlotte had fallen in love. Usually no-nonsense and practical, if not entirely level-headed, she became obsessed with Héger and made something of a fool of herself — though that is a subject for a different post entirely.
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Learn more about Charlotte Brontë
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This excellent analysis of The Professor is by Mary Augusta Ward (1851 – 1920), an early and avid Brontë biographer. It originally appeared in The Brontë Prefaces, 1899 – 1900.
It is in April 1846 that we discover a first mention of The Professor in a letter from Charlotte Brontë to Messrs. Aylott & Jones, the publishers of the little volume of ‘Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell’ which made its modest appearance in that year. Miss Brontë consults Messrs. Aylott & Co. “on behalf of C., E. and A. Bell” as to how they can best publish three tales already written by them—whether in three connected volumes or separately. The advice given was no doubt prudent and friendly—but it did not help The Professor.
The story went fruitlessly to many publishers. It returned to Charlotte, from one of its later quests, on the very morning of the day on which Mr. Brontë underwent an operation for cataract at Manchester — August 25, 1846. That evening, as we have seen, she began Jane Eyre.
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Jane Eyre: A Late 19th-century analysis by Mary A. Ward
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After the great success of the first two books, she would have liked to publish The Professor. But Mr. Smith and Mr. Williams dissuaded her; and to their dissuasion we owe Villette; for if The Professor had appeared in 1851, Miss Brontë could have made no such further use of her Brussels materials as she did actually put them to in Villette.
The story was finally published after the writer’s death, and when the strong interest excited by Mrs. Gaskell’s Memoir led naturally to a demand for all that could yet be given to the public from the hand of Currer Bell.
There is little to add to the writer’s own animated preface. As she herself points out, the book is by no means the book of a novice. It was written in the author’s thirtieth year, after a long apprenticeship to the art of writing. Those innumerable tales, poems, and essays, composed in childhood and youth, of which Mrs. Gaskell and Mr. Shorter between them give accounts so suggestive and remarkable, were the natural and right foundation for all that followed.
The Professor shows already a method of composition almost mature, a pronounced manner, and the same power of analysis, within narrower limits, as the other books. What it lacks is color and movement.
The characters — Crimsworth, Hunsworth, and Frances Henri
Crimsworth as the lonely and struggling teacher, is inevitably less interesting — described, at any rate, by a woman — than Lucy Snowe under the same conditions, and in the same surroundings. His rôle is not particularly manly; and he does not appeal to our pity.
The intimate autobiographical note, which makes the spell of Villette, is absent; we miss the passionate moods and caprices, all the perennial charm of variable woman, which belongs to the later story. There are besides no vicissitudes in the plot. Crimsworth suffers nothing to speak of; he wins his Frances too easily; and the reader’s emotions are left unstirred.
Hunsworth is really the critical element in the story. If he were other than he is, The Professor would have stood higher in the scale. For the conception of him is both ambitious and original. But it breaks down. He puzzles us; and yet he is not mysterious. For that he is not human enough. In the end we find him merely brutal and repellent, and the letter to Crimsworth, which accompanies the gift of the picture, is one of those extravagances which destroy a reader’s sense of illusion.
Great pains have been taken with him; and when he enters he promises much; but he is never truly living for a single page, and half way through the book he has already become a mere bundle of incredibilities. Let the reader put him beside Mr. Helstone of Shirley, beside even Rochester, not to speak of Dr. John or Monsieur Paul, and so realize the difference between imagination working at ease, in happy and vitalizing strength, and the same faculty toiling unprofitably and half-heartedly with material which it can neither fuse nor master.
On the other hand Frances Henri, the little lace-mender, is a figure touched at every point with grace, feeling and truth. She is an exquisite sketch — a drawing in pale, pure color, all delicate animation and soft life. She is only inferior to Caroline Helstone because the range of emotion and incident that her story requires is so much narrower than that which Caroline passes through. One feels her thrown away on The Professor.
An ampler stage and a warmer air should have been reserved for her; adventures more subtly invented; and a lover less easily victorious. But the scene in which she makes tea for Crimsworth — so at least one thinks as one reads it—could hardly be surpassed for fresh and tender charm; although when the same material is used again for the last scenes of Villette, it is not hard to see how the flame and impetus of a great book may still heighten and deepen what was already excellent before.
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Villette — a Portrait of a Woman in Shadow
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The Professor indeed is grey and featureless compared with any of Charlotte Brontë’s other work. The final impression is that she was working under restraint when writing it, and that her proper gifts were consciously denied full play in it.
In the preface of 1851, she says, as an explanation of the sobriety of the story: “In many a crude effort destroyed almost as soon as composed, I had got over any such taste as I might once have had for ornamented and redundant composition, and come to prefer what was plain and homely.”
In other words, she was putting herself under discipline in The Professor; trying to subdue the poetical impulse; to work as a realist and an observer only.
According to her own account of it, the publishers interfered with this process. They would not have The Professor; and they welcomed Jane Eyre with alacrity. She was therefore thrown back, so to speak, upon her faults; obliged to work in ways more “ornamented” and “redundant;” and thus the promise of realism in her was destroyed.
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The Professor by Charlotte Brontë on Amazon
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The explanation is one of those which the artist will always supply himself with on occasion. In truth, the method of The Professor represents a mere temporary reaction — an experiment — in Charlotte Brontë’s literary development. When she returned to that exuberance of imagination and expression which was her natural utterance, she was not merely writing to please her publishers and the public. Rather it was like Emily’s passionate return to the moorland —
I’ll walk where my own nature would be leading,
It vexes me to choose another guide …
The strong native bent reasserted itself, and with the happiest effects.
But because of what came after, and because the mental history of a great and delightful artist will always appeal to the affectionate curiosity of later generations, The Professor will continue to be read both by those who love Charlotte Brontë, and by those who find pleasure in tracking the processes of literature. It needs no apology as a separate entity; but from its relation to Villette it gains an interest and importance the world would not otherwise have granted it.
It is the first revelation of a genius which from each added throb of happiness or sorrow, from each short after-year of strenuous living,—per damna, per cœdes—was to gain fresh wealth and steadily advancing power.
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March 26, 2019
Anne Brontë
Anne Brontë (January 17, 1820 – May 28, 1849) was a British author born in Thornton, West Yorkshire, the daughter of Patrick Brontë, a clergyman, and Maria Branwell. She followed in her older sisters’ (Charlotte and Emily Brontë) paths by delving into the literary world as a novelist and poet.
Along with her sisters and brother Branwell, Anne grew up in Haworth, an isolated town on the moors of Yorkshire. Anne Brontë was one of six, raised by her father after the death of her mother a year after Anne was born. The children’s aunt Elizabeth Branwell acted as their mother and helped inspire Anne spiritually as their relationship was the closest of all. The two oldest Brontë sisters died young.
The four surviving siblings received little formal education and grew up in imaginative play, constructing a make-believe world called Angria, putting on plays, and creating journals and magazines. Anne’s make-believe world, Gondal, became the setting for many of her literary pieces. She and Emily created the kingdom of Gondal, yet another fictional world that lay in the North Pacific.
In her sisters’ footstepsLike her sisters, Anne spent much of her life at the family parsonage in Haworth, England, on the Yorkshire moors. She left home briefly to attend a boarding school while in her teens, and at age nineteen, began working as a governess. These experiences wove themselves into her first novel, Agnes Grey.
Following in the footsteps of her sisters, she studied at Roehead School, where she began to write poetry. Her work had themes of emotional attachment to her home, which she ultimately had to leave, determined to support herself.
It is suspected that Anne and William Weightman, a curate in Haworth where she grew up, fell in love. Poetry exchanged and character inspiration suggests that their relationship was built on mutual fondness. When William died, Anne’s poetry contained motifs of grief and longing for connection.
Her poetry, though skillful, wasn’t nearly as brilliant as Emily’s, became part of a volume of poems, along with Charlotte’s, and published in 1846. Titled Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell, the volume, sold a humiliating total of two copies, did not dampen the sisters’ desired to continue writing and pursuing publication.
Agnes GreyAgnes Grey, Anne’s debut novel (1847) took inspiration from her time teaching at the Ingham family’s Blake Hall. She worked as a governess, caring for and teaching children who were badly behaved. Dissatisfied with her performance, the Ingham family let Anne go after a year, but the experience influenced her writings later on.
Unlike her sisters, Anne spent more time traveling, which allowed for her experiences with religion and society to come through in her writing. She expressed progressive observations for her time, as well as a feminist bent.
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Quotes from Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
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The Tenant of Wildfell HallAnne’s second novel, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) was more popular than Agnes Grey, yet never achieved the renown of Charlotte’s novels. Like Agnes Grey, it was written under the pen name of “Action Bell” so as to disguise her gender. Both of Anne’s novels, as well as her poems, contain many autobiographical elements that correspond with events and people prominent in her life. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, now considered a groundbreaking feminist novel, appeared in 1848.
All through the late 19th and early 20th century, fascination with the Brontë sisters continued on both sides of the Atlantic. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, as part of a May 1900 article on the literary sisters’ lives, offered these insights on The Tenant of Wildfell Hall:
Mary A. Ward [1851 – 1920; a Brontë biographer] says of Anne Brontë that she “serves a twofold purpose in the study of what the Brontë wrote and were. In the first place, her gentle and delicate presence; her sad, short story; her hard life and early death, enter deeply into the poetry and tragedy that have always been entwined with the memory of the Brontë, as women, and as writers.
In the second, the books and poems that she wrote serve as a matter of comparison by which to test the greatness of her two sisters. She is the measure of their genius — like them, yet not with them.”
It is Mrs. Ward’s opinion that The Tenant of Wildfell Hall shows the effect of Bramwell Brontë’s dissipations. He was a victim of both opium and drink, and he seems to have led his sisters to believe that he was the possessor of all manner of dark and guilty secrets. They did not know enough of the world to differentiate between the frenzied dreams of an opium drunkard and the reality; there is no reason to think that the offenses of which he accused himself had any other origin than in his own disordered mind.
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall bears traces of these supposed forbidding revelations — revelations that had a most unhappy effect on his three sisters. Their brother’s fate could be borne by Charlotte and Emily; it crushed Anne.
It seems strange that so gentle a creature as Anne — “Acton Bell” — should have written such a book as The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. She is said to have written it as a warning, and the necessity for it is believed to have had its origin in her belief in her brother’s fancied revelations of his own moral turpitude.
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The Brontë sisters’ path to publication
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An early deathUnfortunately, the literary career of this talented writer was cut short, as she hadn’t yet turned thirty when she died of was called consumption (pulmonary tuberculosis) in 1849.
Following Branwell’s death in September of 1848 at the age of thirty-one, Emily became ill. Though she was wracked with misery, she refused medical attention until it was too late, and died in mid-December of that same year at the age of thirty.
The shock of Emily’s death weakened Anne, and she caught what was thought to be the flu. But alas, it was also consumption. Anne, characteristically, faced the news with courage, though she was disappointed that she would not have the chance to further her ambition as a writer. Her last poem was “A Dreadful Darkness Closes In” — describing an imminent death. She wrote to Ellen Nussey, a dear friend she shared with Charlotte:
“I have no horror of death: if I thought it inevitable I think I could quietly resign myself to the prospect … But I wish it would please God to spare me not only for Papa’s and Charlotte’s sakes, but because I long to do some good in the world before I leave it. I have many schemes in my head for future practice — humble and limited indeed — but still I should not like them all to come to nothing, and myself to have lived to so little purpose. But God’s will be done.”
Over the next few months, Anne regained some strength and was even able to travel to Scarborough. It was hoped that a change of scene and fresh sea air would improve her health, but it was not to be. When death was at hand, she was unable to travel back to Haworth and died in Scarborough on May 28, 1849, at the age of twenty-nine.
LegacyA year after Anne’s death, Charlotte did something that was quite surprising, bordering on unforgivable: She prevented the re-publication of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. She remarked in 1850, “Wildfell Hall it hardly appears to me desirable to preserve. The choice of subject in that work is a mistake, it was too little consonant with the character, tastes and ideas of the gentle, retiring inexperienced writer.”
The result was that Anne’s work received far less critical attention for many decades, and was viewed as a rather minor Brontë, without the genius of her sisters. Much later, her work was reassessed, and more contemporary biographies and criticism have given her more of her due as an important literary figure.
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is now viewed as a major contribution to literature. In 2013, Sally McDonald of the Brontë Society noted that Anne Brontë is “now viewed as the most radical of the sisters, writing about tough subjects such as women’s need to maintain independence and how alcoholism can tear a family apart.”
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Anne Brontë page on Amazon
More about Anne Brontë on this site
Quotes from Agnes Grey & The Tenant of Wildfell Hall Without the Veil Between — Anne Brontë: A Fine and Subtle Spirit The Brontë Sisters’ Path to PublicationMajor Works
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall Agnes GreyThe Complete Poems of Anne BrontëPoems by Currer, Ellis and Acton BellBiographies about Anne Brontë
A Life of Anne Brontë by Edward ChithamMore Information
Wikipedia Reader discussion of Anne Brontë’s books on GoodreadsFilm adaptation
Tenant of Wildfell Hall mini-seriesRead and listen online
Audio versions of Anne Brontë’s works on Librivox Anne Brontë on Project GutenbergVisit the Brontë’s Birthplace and Home
Brontë Parsonage , Haworth, UK. . . . . . . . . .
Anne Brontë’s grave at Scarborough. The gravestone mistakenly
gives her age of death as 28; she was actually 29.
Photo: Wikimedia Commons
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March 24, 2019
Dorothy Thompson, Trailblazing Correspondent & Broadcaster
Dorothy Thompson (1893 – 1961) used her charm, wit, sense of adventure, and strong work ethic to create an incredibly illustrious career in journalism. Born in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, she studied politics and economics at Syracuse University.
After completing her degree in 1914, a rarity for a woman in her time, she felt an obligation to contribute to the public good. Her cause of choice was the women’s women’s suffrage movement. After women won the right to vote in 1920, she moved to Europe to pursue journalism and became one of America’s first foreign correspondents.
In her heyday, she reported from across the European continent and at the same time enjoyed a fabulous social life. Her circle of friends included many writers and artists as well as some of the most notable journalists in the field.
A trusted American journalist
By the time she had returned to the U.S. in the1930s Dorothy was one of the most trusted American journalists. Her “On the Record” column in the New York Tribune was syndicated, with more than ten million readers. She also wrote a column, from 1937 to 1961, for the enormously popular magazine Ladies’ Home Journal. Though in that forum she steered clear of political topics in favor of domestic ones, it serve to gain her an even larger and devoted readership.
Dorothy’s heart was in the international political arena. Never sugar-coating the truth, she sounded the alarm against the rise of fascism, and for that she was thrown out of Germany in 1933 as Hitler and the Third Reich were rising.
As a news commentator for NBC radio in the 1930s, Dorothy’s show, “On the Record” was heard by millions. When Nazi Germany invaded Poland in 1939, legend has it that Dorothy stayed on the air for fifteen days and nights in a row (it’s not clear what she did about sleep!). The June 12, 1939 issue of Time magazine featured her on the cover, speaking into an NBC radio microphone.
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A trailblazer whose life inspired a film and a musical
Dorothy Thompson’s life and work inspired the 1942 film Woman of the Year. Katherine Hepburn plays Tess Harding, a character based on Dorothy. It also became a Broadway musical, with Lauren Bacall as Tess.
Thompson was considered the most influential American woman, second only to first lady Eleanor Roosevelt. With all she accomplished, and being immortalized in a movie and a musical, isn’t it amazing that few people today have heard of her?
Here’s more on this legendary journalist from the 1973 edition of Dorothy Thompson: A Legend in Her Time by Marion K. Sanders (Houghton Mifflin Co.):
An extraordinary woman in a tumultuous time
Dorothy Thompson was an extraordinary woman in an extraordinary time. Her marriage to Sinclair Lewis was the most celebrated literary union of the century, but it was in her own right that she became “the First Lady of American Journalism.”
She was a highly talented reporter who covered the tumultuous happenings of the era preceding and during World War II; more importantly, she played a prominent role in helping to shape her countrymen’s attitudes toward the crucial events of those times.
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Sinclair Lewis and Dorothy Thompson in 1928
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Going wherever history was being made
This is the first full story of what Dorothy herself called her “love affair with life.” It spans a long and controversial professional career and a stormy private one that included three marriages and a succession of attachments to both sexes. It is a far journey that begins in a poor parsonage in western New York State and goes forth to range through the capitals of the western world.
Beginning in the 1920s, Dorothy managed to be in the right place at the right time — wherever history was being made. “She swept though Europe like a blue-eyed tornado, said her colleague John Gunther. In Vienna and Berlin, Moscow, Budapest, and London, she was the center of a brilliant, glamorous group of foreign correspondents.
By 1934, when she was expelled from Germany by Hitler’s personal order, she had become an international celebrity. She returned to America as a columnist and commentator whose political opinions and eloquent warnings on the rise of the Third Reich were read and heard and heeded by millions.
“She and Eleanor Roosevelt are undoubtedly the most influential women in the U.S.,” stated a magazine cover story featuring Dorothy Thompson.
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Has “The First Lady of American Journalism” been forgotten?
Dorothy’s friends and personal brain trust of the succeeding years formed a roster of distinguished Americans and refugee European intellectuals, and her farm in Vermont, along with various elegant homes in New York, became the social axis of her influential court. Her powerful public presence, however, masked an emotional vulnerability that sometimes led her to contradictory passions and allegiances.
Marion K. Sanders’ candid and compassionate biography, based on Dorothy Thompson’s journals and personal papers and on extensive interviews with friends and associates on two continents, brings a tremendous immediacy to her life story and the several worlds she moved in. One has the sense sharing the excitements and heartbreak of these crowded legendary years, of witnessing first hand the unfolding of a complex and always fascinating woman.
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Quotes by Dorothy Thompson
“There is nothing to fear except the persistent refusal to find out the truth.”
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“Peace is not the absence of conflict but the presence of creative alternatives for responding to conflict — alternatives to passive or aggressive responses, alternatives to violence.”
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“Courage, it would seem, is nothing less than the power to overcome danger, misfortune, fear, injustice, while continuing to affirm inwardly that life with all its sorrows is good; that everything is meaningful even if in a sense beyond our understanding; and that there is always tomorrow.”
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“Peace has to be created, in order to be maintained. It is the product of Faith, Strength, Energy, Will, Sympathy, Justice, Imagination, and the triumph of principle. It will never be achieved by passivity and quietism.”
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“When liberty is taken away by force, it can be restored by force. When it is relinquished by default it can never be recovered.”
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“Only when we are no longer afraid do we begin to live.”
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“The most destructive element in the human mind is fear.”
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More about Dorothy Thompson
Wikipedia
Dorothy Thompson: The Real Woman of the Year
Americans and the Holocaust: Dorothy Thompson
… and read more about trailblazing women journalists on this site.
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March 22, 2019
Keeper: Emily Brontë’s Fiercely Devoted Dog
Though Emily Brontë (1818 – 1848) only lived to the age of thirty, she produced one of the most iconic novels in the English literary canon. Wuthering Heights is a decidedly dark study of romantic obsession that takes a rather dim view of human nature.
The sister of Charlotte and Anne Brontë, Emily was beyond introverted. She didn’t care for company outside of her immediate family, and any time she ventured from her beloved Yorkshire moors, she became sick with longing to return. Emily Brontë’s dog Keeper, a large and rather menacing dog, was among the most faithful companions of her adult life.
There were other dogs and cats in residence at the Parsonage over the years, including Cavalier King Charles Spaniel named Flossy who belonged to Anne. Like her mistress, Flossy could be both gentle and strong willed. She was as solely devoted to Anne as Keeper was to Emily.
The mutual devotion between Emily Brontë and her dog was surprising, given the brutal way in which Emily asserted her role as the “alpha” of the two. This part of the story isn’t pretty, and hints at a violent nature that may have been part of Emily’s psyche. Given her sheltered upbringing and limited contact with the outside world, this hidden part of herself allowed her to create a character like Heathcliff. But once dog and mistress settled on who was in charge, it became a story of a dog’s undying loyalty for his mistress, and hers for him.
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Sketch of Keeper by Emily Brontë (later colorized from the original)
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First, we’ll hear the story as told by by Albert Payson Terhune as it appeared in The Baltimore Sun, January 9, 1927. Though the Brontë had been long gone, there was still, at the time, an incredible amount of fascination with them on both sides of the pond:
Three strange literary geniuses
Up in the bleakest corner of the Yorkshire moors, the little village of Haworth clings to its bare hillside. It is like a hundred other desolate hamlets in the same region; except that once it was the dwelling place of the Brontë sisters, three strange literary geniuses whose fame became worldwide.
They were the daughters of the local clergyman, Patrick Brontë, whose life was soured by the drunkenness and early each of his only son, Branwell. I spent a few days at Haworth and visited the parsonage long after the last of the Brontës died. That visit made me understand the gloom of the three Brontë girls’ lives.
Charlotte Brontë is best remembered for her novel, Jane Eyre. Emily wrote one grippingly powerful book, Wuthering Heights. Anne was the gentlest of the trio, yet had a fortitude of her own. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is her masterwork. Emily was the most unapproachable of the trio.
Affection for a dog with “the nature of a brute”
The bulk of Emily’s affection was lavished on a gigantic dog, half mastiff, half bulldog. His name was Keeper and in at least one of the Brontë books his character is drawn with wondrous skill. The man who gave Keeper to Emily also gave him a doubtful reputation by writing to her the following account of the big dog:
“Though he is faithful to the depths of his nature as long as he is with friends, yet who strikes him rouses the relentless nature of the brute who flies at such man’s throat, therewith, and holds him there until one or the other is at the point of death.
Emily knew little about dogs, and such a warning as came with Keeper would have scared a less courageous woman that she. But she welcomed Keeper and set about to win his love and confidence.
It was a hard job, but less hard perhaps if both dog and mistress had not been of the same stubborn nature. Presently a strong friendship grew between them. Keeper became Emily’s shadow, following her everywhere.
But the presence of the great dog in the primly quiet parsonage was not an unmixed pleasure to anyone. He did whatever he chose to, and none dared punish him for fear of a murderous attack.
For instance, he would pick out the cleanest and most comfortable bed in the house and would go to sleep on it, refusing to move when ordered to. A growl would accompany his refusal, and with it, a savage show of teeth.
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Illustration of Emily and Keeper from the 1920s
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Showing Keeper who was in charge
Emily did not chance to discover him lying thus on her bed until the rest of the household had complained often and bitterly. But when one day she did discover him stretched out on her counterpane with his muddy paws smearing it she went into immediate action.
She ordered Keeper to get down from the bed. As usual he merely snarled and showed his teeth. Emily rushed at him and seized him by the neck, dragging him off the bed and out of the room and down the stairs. As no whip was handy she beat him furiously about the head with her bare fists until his eyes were swollen and his nose bleeding.
So sudden and so ferocious was her assault on him, and so fearless was it, that Keeper did not so much as try to defend himself from the beating. He stood snarling and growling, but making no move to attack his assailant while the stinging rain of frantic fist-blows landed on his shaggy head and face.
When the beating was over it was Emily herself who bathed and sponged his swollen face. From that hour Emily and Keeper were perfect chums.
She even undertook to teach him a single trick. The trick consisted of roaring furiously at at man who called at the parsonage and leaping at the guest’s throat. The roar and the leap were merely playful, though they did not give that impression.
Emily said she used to judge men by the way they behaved under such nerve-shaking treatment. He who shrank from the dog’s noisy assault was deemed by her a coward and unworthy of future notice.
The Yorkshire Moorland around Haworth was lonely and frequented sometimes by doubtful characters. But Emily used to walk over it for miles with Keeper at her side. She was as safe with such an escort as if she had been guarded by a troop of cavalry.
Loyalty to Emily beyond the grave
When Emily Brontë died, Keeper insisted on crouching close beside her coffin until the hour of burial. Then, as chief mourner, he followed it to the grave in the nearby churchyard. With great difficulty he was induced to leave the filled-in grave and follow the mourners back to the parsonage.
There, heavily, he made his way to the door of the room that had been Emily’s. The door was shut. Keeper lay down on the threshold, lifted his head, and shook the silent house with a series of unearthly howls. Nor for weeks thereafter would he move from that closed door of his own accord. To the time of his death, he slept there every night.
Charlotte was the last survivor of the Brontë siblings. She did what she could for Keeper’s happiness, but he never accepted her mastery nor ceased to grieve for Emily. You will find a character sketch of him in Charlotte’s novel, Shirley, where he appears under the name of Tartar.
Gradually, steadily, the old dog pined away. Charlotte tells of his end in a letter which is published in her biography. She wrote: “Keeper died last Monday. After being ill all night he gently went to sleep. We laid his old faithful head in the garden.”
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The Brontë sisters, in a painting by their brother, Branwell.
She wrote much about their paths to publication
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Elizabeth Gaskell’s view of Keeper
From The Life of Charlotte Brontë by Elizabeth Gaskell (1857): The same tawny bull-dog (with his “strangled whistle”), called “Tartar” in Shirley, was “Keeper” in Haworth parsonage; a gift to Emily. With the gift came a warning. Keeper was faithful to the depths of his nature as long as he was with friends; but he who struck him with a stick or whip, roused the relentless nature of the brute, who flew at his throat forthwith, and held him there till one or the other was at the point of death.
Now Keeper’s household fault was this. He loved to steal upstairs, and stretch his square, tawny limbs, on the comfortable beds, covered over with delicate white counterpanes. But the cleanliness of the parsonage arrangements was perfect; and this habit of Keeper’s was so objectionable, that Emily, in reply to Tabby’s remonstrances, declared that, if he was found again transgressing, she herself, in defiance of warning and his well-known ferocity of nature, would beat him so severely that he would never offend again.
In the gathering dusk of an autumn evening, Tabby came, half-triumphantly, half-tremblingly, but in great wrath, to tell Emily that Keeper was lying on the best bed, in drowsy voluptuousness. Charlotte saw Emily’s whitening face, and set mouth, but dared not speak to interfere; no one dared when Emily’s eyes glowed in that manner out of the paleness of her face, and when her lips were so compressed into stone.
She went upstairs, and Tabby and Charlotte stood in the gloomy passage below, full of the dark shadows of coming night. Down-stairs came Emily, dragging after her the unwilling Keeper, his hind legs set in a heavy attitude of resistance, held by the “scuft of his neck,” but growling low and savagely all the time.
The watchers would fain have spoken, but durst not, for fear of taking off Emily’s attention, and causing her to avert her head for a moment from the enraged brute.
She let him go, planted in a dark corner at the bottom of the stairs; no time was there to fetch stick or rod, for fear of the strangling clutch at her throat—her bare clenched fist struck against his red fierce eyes, before he had time to make his spring, and, in the language of the turf, she “punished him” till his eyes were swelled up, and the half-blind, stupified beast was led to his accustomed lair, to have his swollen head fomented and cared for by the very Emily herself.
And upon Emily’s death:
… her old father, Charlotte, the dying Anne; and as they left the doors, they were joined by another mourner, Keeper, Emily’s dog. He walked in front of all, first in the rank of mourners; and perhaps no other creature had known the dead woman quite so well.
When they had lain her to sleep in the dark, airless vault under the church, and when they had crossed the bleak churchyard, and had entered the empty house again, Keeper went straight to the door of the room where his mistress used to sleep, and lay down across the threshold. There he howled piteously for many days; knowing not that no lamentations could wake her any more.
The generous dog owed her no grudge; he loved her dearly ever after; he walked first among the mourners to her funeral; he slept moaning for nights at the door of her empty room, and never, so to speak, rejoiced, dog fashion, after her death. He, in his turn, was mourned over by the surviving sister.
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March 21, 2019
Duty and Desire: Quotes from The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
The Age of Innocence (1920) by Edith Wharton (1862 – 1937) is considered one of this classic American author’s finest works. In 1921, it earned Wharton the distinction as the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.
The story is set in the 1870s and centers on Newland Archer, an upper-class New Yorker. Archer’s conflicted desires between duty to his staid but loving wife and his passion for scandal-plagued divorcée Countess Ellen Olenska are central to the narrative. The overarching conflict explored by the novel is the extent to which an individual should allow the rules of society to overrule what the heart desires.
A reflection of Wharton’s privileged world
The story’s setting reflects the world of wealth and privilege in which Edith Wharton grew up. Despite all the advantages that she shared with her fictional characters, neither she nor they were spared from heartache and love affairs gone wrong. An original 1920 review expressed the nearly universal praise for this novel:
“With deft and certain touch Mrs. Wharton builds her sort around the society of the day, showing the absolutely artificial lives led by its members, their abject submission to rules and restriction prescribed by convention, and their distrust of, and hostility to, such of their people as evinced any desire for freedom of thought or action.”
Much of the novel delves into Archer’s innermost thoughts and his conflicting feelings about duty to marital vows and the desires of the heart. Here is a selection of quotes from The Age of Innocence that capture its essence.
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“With a shiver of foreboding he saw his marriage becoming what most of the other marriages about him were: a dull association of material and social interests held together by ignorance on the one side and hypocrisy on the other.”
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“He took refuge in the comforting platitude that the first six months were always the most difficult in marriage. ‘After that I suppose we shall have pretty nearly finished rubbing off each other’s angles,’ he reflected; but the worst of it was that May’s pressure was already bearing on the very angles whose sharpness he most wanted to keep.”
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“The real loneliness is living among all these kind people who only ask one to pretend!”
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“He had married (as most young men did) because he had met a perfectly charming girl at the moment when a series of rather aimless sentimental adventures were ending in premature disgust; and she had represented peace, stability, comradeship, and the steadying sense of an unescapable duty.”
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The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton: A 1920 Review
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“I swear I only want to hear about you, to know what you’ve been doing. It’s a hundred years since we’ve met-it may be another hundred before we meet again.”
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“We can’t behave like people in novels, though, can we?”
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“Once more it was borne in on him that marriage was not the safe anchorage he had been taught to think, but a voyage on uncharted seas.”
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“The worst of doing one’s duty was that it apparently unfitted one for doing anything else.”
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“The persons of their world lived in an atmosphere of faint implications and pale delicacies, and the fact that he and she understood each other without a word seemed to the young man to bring them nearer than any explanation would have done.”
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“The young man felt that his fate was sealed: for the rest of his life he would go up every evening between the cast-iron railings of that greenish-yellow doorstep, and pass through a Pompeian vestibule into a hall with a wainscoting of varnished yellow wood. But beyond that his imagination could not travel.”
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“To the general relief, the Countess Olenska was not present in her grandmother’s drawing-room . . . it spared them the embarrassment of her presence, and the faint shadow that her unhappy past might seem to shed on their radiant future.”
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“Ah, good conversation – there’s nothing like it, is there? The air of ideas is the only air worth breathing.”
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“In reality they all lived in a kind of hieroglyphic world, where the real thing was never said or done or even thought, but only represented by a set of arbitrary signs.”
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“His whole future seemed suddenly to be unrolled before him; and passing down its endless emptiness he saw the dwindling figure of a man to whom nothing was ever to happen.”
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“But after a moment a sense of waste and ruin overcame him. There they were, close together and safe and shut in; yet so chained to their separate destinies that they might as well been half the world apart.”
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“Women ought to be free — as free as we are,’ he declared, making a discovery of which he was too irritated to measure the terrific consequences.”
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Too busy to read the book? Look for the wonderful 1993 film version of The Age of Innocence
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“His own exclamation: ‘Women should be free—as free as we are,’ struck to the root of a problem that it was agreed in his world to regard as nonexistent. ‘Nice’ women, however wronged, would never claim the kind of freedom he meant, and generous-minded men like himself were therefore—in the heat of argument—the more chivalrously ready to concede it to them. Such verbal generosities were in fact only a humbugging disguise of the inexorable conventions that tied things together and bound people down to the old pattern.”
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“He had known the love that is fed on caresses and feeds them; but this passion that was closer than his bones was not to be superficially satisfied.”
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“He had built up within himself a kind of sanctuary in which she throned among his secret thoughts and longings. Little by little it became the scene of his real life, of his only rational activities; thither he brought the books he read, the ideas and feelings which nourished him, his judgments and his visions. Outside it, in the scene of his actual life, he moved with a growing sense of unreality and insufficiency, blundering against familiar prejudices and traditional points of view as an absent-minded man goes on bumping into the furniture of his own room.”
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“I shan’t be lonely now. I was lonely; I was afraid. But the emptiness and the darkness are gone; when I turn back into myself now I’m like a child going at night into a room where there’s always a light.”
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“And you’ll sit beside me, and we’ll look, not at visions, but at realities.”
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“He simply felt that if he could carry away the vision of the spot of earth she walked on, and the way the sky and sea enclosed it, the rest of the world might seem less empty.”
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“He had her in his arms, her face like a wet flower at his lips, and all their vain terrors shriveling up like ghosts at sunrise.”
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The Age of Innocence on Amazon
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“A smiling, bantering, humoring, watchful and incessant lie. A lie by day, a lie by night, a lie in every touch and every look; a lie in every caress and every quarrel; a lie in every word and in every silence.”
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“When we’ve been apart, and I’m looking forward to seeing you, every thought is burnt up in a great flame. But then you come; and you’re so much more than I remembered, and what I want of you is so much more than an hour or two every now and then, with wastes of thirsty waiting between, that I can sit perfectly still beside you, like this, with that other vision in my mind, just quietly trusting it to come true.”
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“There was no use in trying to emancipate a wife who had not the dimmest notion that she was not free.”
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“What’s the use? You gave me my first glimpse of a real life, and at the same moment you asked me to go on with a sham one. It’s beyond human enduring—that’s all.”
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“Something he knew he had missed: the flower of life. But he thought of it now as a thing so unattainable and improbable that to have repined would have been like despairing because one had not drawn the first prize in a lottery.”
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“The longing was with him day and night, an incessant undefinable craving, like the sudden whim of a sick man for food and drink once tasted and long since forgotten. . . He simply felt that if he could carry away the vision of the spot of earth she walked on, and the way the sky and sea enclosed it, the rest of the world might seem less empty.”
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“During that time he had been living with his youthful memory of her; but she had doubtless had other and more tangible companionship. Perhaps too had kept her memory of him as something apart; but if she had, it must have been like a relic in a small dim chapel, where there was not time to pray every day … “
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“Their long years together had shown him that it did not so much matter if marriage was a dull duty, as long as it kept the dignity of a duty: lapsing from that, it became a mere battle of ugly appetites. Looking about him, he honored his own past, and mourned for it. After all, there was good in the old ways.”
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The post Duty and Desire: Quotes from The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.
March 20, 2019
Mary Wollstonecraft
Mary Wollstonecraft (April 27, 1759 – September 10, 1797) was a British author of fiction and nonfiction, philosopher, and women’s rights advocate. Though her body of work was fairly substantial, including many essays, a history of the French Revolution, and some fiction, she’s now almost exclusively known for A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. She was the mother of Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (later known as Mary Shelley), the author of Frankenstein; sadly, she died a few days after giving birth to her namesake.
Born in the Spitalfields section of London, her father, Edward John Wollstonecraft, frittered away his inherited fortune. He bullied his children and beat his wife, Elizabeth Dixon, during drunken rages. While in her teens, Mary sat guard at her mother’s door to try to protect her from her father.
An unstable childhood and youth
There were six siblings in the household. The eldest, Edward, eventually became an attorney who practiced in London. There were two other brothers, and three sisters, Mary, Everina, and Eliza. Their father continued to make life intolerable for his family as his fortunes deteriorated with each failed venture.
Of the Wollstonecraft children, Mary and Eliza were thought to be quite talented, but they acquired little in terms of formal education. When their mother died in 1780, Mary, at age 21, resolved with her sister to become a teacher.
Finding her father’s household intolerable, she moved in with her friend Fanny Blood, only to find that her friend’s father was just as nefarious as her own. She derived some comfort in assisting Fanny’s mother in doing needlework as a trade, but not many years later, lost her dear friend when she died in childbirth
Her sister Everina went to work keeping house for their brother Edward. Eliza accepted an offer of marriage while still quite young as a way to escape her miserable home life. Marriage was no salve, as her husband, a Mr. Bishop, was abusive.
Eliza’s misfortune was portrayed later in Mary’s thinly veiled novel fragment, The Wrongs of Woman, or Maria. Things got so bad that Eliza went into hiding until she could obtain a legal separation. In 1783, Mary and Everina started a school at Newington Green, though it lasted only two years.
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Beginning a literary career
After this short stint as a teacher, Mary worked as a lady’s companion and governess, and quickly realized that she was ill-suited for these traditional female occupations. She was frustrated at the lack of options for women to make a living and wrote of this quandary in one of her first published works, Thoughts on the Education of Daughters.
Mary was determined to do what she most wanted — to become a writer. There were few women who were able to support themselves by their pen, so her ambition was nothing less than radical. But as she wrote to Everina, she wished to become “the first of a new genus.”
Mary settled in London and found a position with the progressive publisher Joseph Johnson as a reader and translator. The occupation not only suited her well, but had other benefits. It gave her the opportunity to connect with the literary circles of the day, and with her earnings, she helped her siblings, especially Everina.
In 1792, Mary published A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: With Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects. It enjoyed some initial success and was translated into French. Its central thesis was an argument for equality of men and women: Men and women, in her view, are born with the ability to reason, and therefore power and influence should be equally available to all regardless of gender. This was quite a unique and radical view for its time.
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman is considered one of the earliest works of feminist philosophy. In her preface to Mary Wollstonecraft: A Biography (1972), women’s studies pioneer Eleanor Flexner wrote that her subject “articulated her protest and her ideas of what education and equality of opportunity might do for society as a whole … It is not given to many books to exert as powerful an influence as A Vindication has done, although its effect was delayed and for decades it was largely unread.” Read more of this appreciation of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.
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Quotes from A Vindication of the Rights of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft
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Gilbert Imlay: Obsessive love
Later in 1792, traveling to Paris alone, Mary met and fell in love with Gilbert Imlay, a commercial speculator, adventurer, and former American army captain during the Revolutionary War.
Getting married in France would have been virtually impossible during the Reign of Terror. King Louis XVI had recently been guillotined, and Britain and France were on the brink of war. So Mary lived openly with Imlay without marrying. Marriage was unimportant to her, as evidenced in her Letters to Imlay (a posthumously published collection); still, to live with a man as his wife without being married was shocking. And of course, it was the woman who suffered all the societal consequences.
By the end of 1793, the two were living in Havre, France, and on May 14, 1794, Mary gave birth to a daughter, who they named Fanny. Mary continued to write, publishing Historical View of the French Revolution not long after her daughter’s birth. Imlay was deeply involved in business speculations, which necessitated long periods of separation. Mary’s letters from this time hint at doubts about his feelings for her and suspicions of his infidelity. She recognized the perils of being so attached to a man whose feelings have grown cool:
“I have gotten into a melancholy mood, you perceive. You know my opinion of men in general; you know that I think them systematic tyrants, and that it is the rarest thing in the world to meet with a man with sufficient delicacy of feeling to govern desire. When I am thus sad, I lament that my little darling, fondly as I dote on her, is a girl. I am sorry to have a tie to a world that for me is ever sown with thorns.”
Mary’s suspicions proved correct. Imlay’s letters grew less frequent and less ardent as he embarked on a new love affair. Mary tried to kill herself with laudanum, but recovered.
The story of this tortured, increasingly one-sided affair continued for some time. When their final separation came, Mary, still passionately in love with Imlay, tried to drown herself by plunging off a bridge, but was rescued by a boat that was passing by. Even after that, she made several pathetic attempts to reconcile.
Eventually, Mary came to her senses and broke off with Imlay in 1796, refusing to take any financial support from him other than a bond that would benefit their daughter. She continued to write as a means of support as well as a way to return to London’s literary society.
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Mary Wollstonecraft page on Amazon
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A brief marriage and a fatal birth
She resumed her friendship with William Godwin, who she had met a few years earlier upon beginning to work for Joseph Johnson. Their relationship soon turned romantic. Though both of them were philosophically opposed to traditional marriage, they wed on March 29, 1797. Mary was by then expecting a child.
It was to be a brief marriage. After giving birth to a healthy baby girl, Mary contracted an infection and died eleven days later, on September 10, 1797. She was buried in the Old St. Pancras churchyard and in 1851, her remains were moved to Bournemouth.
Legacy
Mary Wollstonecraft was described as impulsive and enthusiastic, with charm of manner and brilliance of mind. A year after her death, Godwin published the simply titled Memoir. Though it wasn’t his intent to besmirch her reputation, he revealed intimate details of his late wife’s life. The book detailed her love affairs, illegitimate daughter Fanny, and suicide attempts, and more. All of it was deemed deeply immoral and appalled late-18th-century society, even the more progressive literati. In the preface, Godwin wrote:
“I cannot easily prevail on myself to doubt, that the more fully we are presented with the picture and story of such persons as the subject of the following narrative, the more generally shall we feel in ourselves an attachment to their fate and a sympathy in their excellencies. There are not many individuals with whose character the public welfare and improvement are more intimately connected than the author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.”
Despite Godwin’s intentions of cementing her legacy, the book instead completely destroyed Mary Wollstonecraft’s reputation for the better part of a century. Female novelists of the 19th century, ironically, were the most vicious. They created unlikeable, amoral female characters and didn’t hide the fact that they were modeled from what they knew of Mary.
Fortunately, Mary Wollstonecraft’s legacy as a pioneering feminist philosopher was restored during the second-wave feminist movement of the 1970s, and she is often credited as an important influence on modern-day feminist theory.
More about Mary Wollstonecraft on this site
Quotes from A Vindication of the Rights of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: An Appreciation
Major works
Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1787)
Mary: A Fiction (1788)
Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790)
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792)
Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution (1794)
Letters Written in Norway, Sweden, and Denmark (1796)
Letters to Imlay (1879; posthumous)
The Wrongs of Women, or Maria (novel fragment; posthumous, 1798)
More information
Wikipedia
Mary Wollstonecraft: Online Library of Liberty
BBC: Britain’s First Feminist
Read and listen
Mary Wollstonecraft’s works on Librivox
Public domain ebook of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
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