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A Book Lover’s Reykjavik — Bookstores, Libraries, and Book Culture

Prior to my first visit to Iceland in the summer of 2018, when I spent the entire month of August at a writer/artist residency, I knew very little about the country generally and even less about Reykjavik specifically. And prior to my trip, I’d been so busy that I had no time to do much research. I went with good word of mouth from friends who had visited and faith that it would be a good experience.

Of course, I had seen photos of the otherworldly landscapes, but I would have only the shortest time in which to explore them; my stay was mainly within the confines of Reykjavik. And that turned out to be absolutely beyond fine. In fact, for a nerd and bookworm like myself, it was blissful. Any time I had a chance, I would explore the myriad bookstores and libraries in Reykjavik, in addition to other aspects of its very rich book culture.

I’m hardly what you call the rugged outdoorsy type; I’m more of a books-and-art-and-coffee type. Iceland offers incredible pleasures for both of these kinds of travelers. If you happen to be a combination of the two, don’t even think about spending less than two weeks there.

It’s a small country, to be sure, but it is so dense with culture, history, and natural beauty that a short hop of a few days would be (at least for me) frustrating. Even after having spent a month there, I feel like I just scratched the surface, and am ever plotting a return.

Bókabúðin Bergstaðastræti

A few things I learned that came as a surprise to me:

Reykjavik is a UNESCO City of Literature, designated in 2011. There are some 28 as of this writing.
More books are published per capita in Iceland than any other country (though this is relative in a small country of about 350,000 citizens; but still …)
Reykjavik honors its literary figures with street signs, park benches, and more, that can be explored all around the town.
Icelanders have a custom called “a book on every bed” for Christmas. It’s just what it sounds like: on Christmas morning, a wrapped book is left as a gift on every bed.

Even though I didn’t get to every book-related site during my month in Reykjavik, I did get to plenty of them. This promises to be a lengthy post, so let’s get to it! Note that all the places on this list are centrally located and you can literally walk from one to another, as I did.

Reykjavik Bookstores

Bókabúðin Bergstaðastræti

A relatively small bookstore, but an exquisitely curated one, Bókabúðin Bergstaðastræti focuses on design, culture, and food. Truly, my kind of place. The one downside is that it’s one of the few bookstores without a café, but that shouldn’t preclude a visit. The selection is unique, and most of the books are English language. Bergstaðastræti 7, 101 Reykjavík.

Ida Zimsen

This appealing bookstore-café-gift shop has such an unassuming exterior that even though it’s right in the center of the downtown area, I managed to ignore it until my last day in Reykjavik. About half the books are in Icelandic and half in English.

This place manages to be both expansive and cozy at the same time, including charming books and bookish gifts for children, and a nice table area to have coffee or work on one’s laptop (with coffee, of course). There’s also a menu of light fare and pastries. The photos above don’t nearly do credit to it, nor do many of the photos online. So I guess I’ll have to return, and take some better shots! Vesturgata 2a, Grófin, 101 Reykjavík.

Mal og Menning

Located in the center of Laugavegur, Reykjavik’s main shopping street, Mal og Menning won a place in my heart not only for their good selection of English language books but also for their café. It specializes in vegan soup-and-sourdough bread combos for a price that’s quite economical relative to other eateries (which, you may have heard, can be quite expensive).

For under $10, you can enjoy a big bowl of plant-based soup and the delicious sourdough bread that Iceland is famous for — a meal that will keep you full for hours. You can bring a book to browse through while you eat, and of course, you will carefully avoid getting any soup on it. You can read more about my vegan culinary adventures in Reykjavik on my other site, The Vegan Atlas. Above, an entire display dedicated to the Queen of Crime herself, Agatha Christie. Laugavegur 18, 101 Reykjavík.

Penninn Eymundsson 

Iceland’s largest bookstore chain (with 15 stores around the country), Penninn Eymundsson has three locations just blocks from one another in central Reykjavik. It’s also the oldest of the bookstores in the country, established in 1872. Though these bookstores may lack the visual charm of a smaller, cozier establishment, they make up for it with a great depth of offerings in both English and Icelandic.

What I found interesting is that many of the English language books seem to come from British publishers, so they were a bit different from what I see at home. There were also British editions of American bestsellers, so I got to see alternative covers and descriptions. I also loved seeing all the beautifully designed books — as well as the many books on design.

Within the stores are cafés run by the chain Te & Kaffi. Above, you’ll see that I treated myself to an oat milk latté, a vegan brownie, and The Life-Changing Magic of Not Giving a F**k. It was a nice day and not windy (somewhat of a rarity in Iceland), so I took my break on an outdoor terrace on one of the upper floors.  The bottom two photos are from the Austurstræti 18 store and the top photo is from the  Skólavörðustígur 11 location. There’s also a large branch at Laugavegur 77, and all are in Reykjavik 101.

 

Bókin

This bookstore is almost the opposite of the others on this list — it deals mostly in used books, 95% of which are in Icelandic. Piles and piles of books are everywhere, some seeming to totter almost to the ceiling. So if your interest is in poring through older books in this fascinating and challenging language, this is the place for you. Klapparstígur 25-27, 101 Reykjavik.

Reykjavik Libraries

National and University Library of Iceland

This beautiful library, just off the campus of the University of Iceland in Reykjavik, is a repository of manuscripts, archives, historical documents, and of course, books.  There are also beautifully mounted exhibits, mostly about Icelandic history and culture, throughout the building. As you can see, it’s a serene setting both inside and out, and for the book-loving traveler, this just-off-the-beaten-path site is well worth visiting. Arngrímsgötu 3, 107 Reykjavík.

Reykjavik City Library

Reykjavik’s public library has six branches around the city, with the main branch located right in the heart of the downtown area. Visitors are welcome to browse, though you need a library card to be able to borrow books.  The main branch is a has several floors, all flooded with natural light, with an array of books in Icelandic, English, and other languages. One quickly expanding area is their collection of global comic books.

The library hosts a variety of multicultural events throughout the year. Keep an eye out for the guided literary walks that beginning at the entrance during the warmer months, and make sure to visit the Reykjavik Museum of Photography on the top floor of the same building. It’s quite impressive!

Okay, I have to do a bit of a brag here. My friend and literary agent, Lisa Ekus, visited Reykjavik a few months before I did, and just happened to spot one of my books on display on the ground floor. When I went, it was still on display, but on one of the upper floors near where the cookbooks are shelved. That’s my book in the center, above — Vegan Holiday Kitchen. That was a pretty cool sight to see! Tryggvagata 15, 101 Reykjavík.

 
More Reykjavik book culture

Reykjavik City of Literature Self-Guided Walking Tour

All around the city, you’ll come across signage pertaining to Icelandic Literary Figures. The signs contain a QR code which allows visitors to partake in a self-guided tour right from their smartphones. Find out more about how to download the app here.

Art Library at Hafnarhús Art Museum 

It seems like almost any cultural institution has at least a small library, or that books are an intrinsic part of exhibits (see below). Here’s a cozy library that’s part of one of the city’s contemporary art museums. It’s packed with art books, and you can while away an hour or so if you need to take a break from touring. The main branch of the Reykjavik City Library is just a few steps away, so combining a visit to these two sites (plus the Museum of Photography on the top floor of the library building) is a relaxing and intellectually stimulating itinerary for nerds. Tryggvagata 17, 101 Reykjavík.

Culture House

As mentioned just above, books are an intrinsic part of the country’s history and culture, with the Icelandic sagas dating back to the 9th century. So books are often a part of most any major exhibit, no matter what the theme. Culture House hosts a permanent exhibition called Points of View – a journey through the visual world of Iceland.

According to Culture House’s website: “The exhibition gives visitors a unique opportunity to view the collections of six major Icelandic cultural institutions. Artworks of various styles and mediums are presented thematically alongside museum objects and archival materials such as books and maps.” Above, a couple of absolutely beautiful medieval books spotted here, among many others, as well as an exhibition of contemporary artist’s books. Hverfisgata 15, 101 Reykjavík.

 

International Literary Festival

Every other spring, Reykjavik is home to the Reykjavik International Literary Festival. From the website: “Set in cozy venues in downtown Reykjavík every two years, the festival offers interesting and entertaining programs for literature enthusiasts. Over a span of more than 30 years, the festival has welcomed Nobel-prize winners, novelists, historians, political activists, philosophers, cartoonists and more to take part in lively programs. All programs are in English and there’s no admission fee to the events.” Meet me there?

Though this post is already mile long, I have a feeling I’ve hardly scratched the surface of Reykjavik’s bookstores, libraries, and book culture. For me, it’s a subject of endless fascination and a good reason to return to this enchanting place. Updates are on the horizon …

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The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir (1949)

Simone de Beauvoir (1908 –1986) was a French author, existential philosopher, political activist, feminist, and social theorist whose most popular and enduring work is The Second Sex. Published in 1949, it was considered quite radical for its time and made de Beauvoir an intellectual force to be reckoned with. The book has inspired generations of women to question the status quo and strive to change it.

De Beauvoir, who wasn’t yet forty when her magnum opus was published, explored the history and mythology of the female gender. It was first published it in two volumes, Facts and Myths and Lived Experience (Les faits et les mythes & L’expérience vécue).

The Second Sex is a cornerstone works of feminist philosophy and the second wave feminist movement. It’s still read and studied to this day as an essential manifesto on women’s oppression and liberation. First  published in the United States in 1953, it was a time when the media’s message to women was that their place was in the home. The English translation by H.M. Parshley was often criticized as subpar, even omitting swathes of text. A new translation came out in 2009, and though most critics found it to be better than the first, it, too, has had its detractors.

Despite some snarky reviews by male reviewers, the book was an immediate success in the American market, and was recognized as an instant classic. Here’s a review of The Second Sex from 1953, when the book first appeared in print in the United States.

 

An ever timely topic

From the March 1, 1953 review by Mary Lapsley of The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir in the Cincinnati Enquirer:  It is with timidity that a reviewer who is also a woman approaches Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. If one lavishly praises it, one lends oneself to the suspicion that one does so merely through feminine complicity. If one condemns it, one lays oneself open to the charge of playing traitor to one’s sex. Yet it is perhaps through this very ambivalence — of choice, the existentialist would say — that one may arrive at a just appraisal.

When first published in France in 1949, Le Deuxieme Sexe appeared in two volumes: Facts and Myths and Lived Experiences. In Fact and Myths, Mlle. de Beauvoir states her reason for writing on a theme that has already had a large and almost always partisan literature.

“Books by women on women are in general animated in our day less by a wish to demand our rights than by an effort toward clarity and understanding. As we emerge from an era of excessive controversy, this book is offered as one attempt among others to confirm that statement.”

Indeed, the subject is timely. World War II required of women active participation in fields formerly closed to them. The UN Commission on the Status of Women maintains that the equality of sexes is now becoming a reality; that they must be regarded as equal is a necessary tenet in any Democratic challenge to totalitarianism.

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Philosophical Quotes by Simone de Beauvoir

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An existentialist perspective

Moreover, the importance of childhood environment on adults has of recent years been stressed to the point of exaggeration. The child is father to the man, and also, of necessity, the child is mother to the woman. Simone de Beauvoir is an existentialist, and it is in the terms of that philosophy that she views the history of her sex.

As an existentialist, Mlle. de Beauvoir finds that “the drama of woman lies in this conflict between the fundamental aspirations of every subject (ego) — who always regards the self as the essential — and the compulsions of a situation in which she is inessential.”

“Now what peculiarly signalizes the situation of the woman is that she — a free and autonomous being like all human creatures — nevertheless finds herself living in a world where men compel her to assume the status of the Other.” This masculine insistence that woman be the inessential, Mlle. de Beauvoir regards as the crying injustice; this she points out in 732 closely packed, reiterative pages.

“Men have presumed to create a feminine domain — the kingdom of life, of immanence — only in order to lock women therein.”

 

From the biological to the psychoanalytic

To this fate woman is condemned, says Mlle de Beauvoir, neither by facts of biology nor by immutable laws of her psychological makeup; her destiny is shaped by the society she lives in. As she acts in that society, according to existentialist belief, she makes herself; she chooses, by accepting a passive role, her subjugation to the male.

From biological facts, Mlle. de Beauvoir turns to the psychoanalytic. These are, of necessity, less absolute, but here too she finds nothing inherent in woman’s psychological makeup that dooms her to a role of “immanence.” In some sixty pages, there follows a brief survey of the history of woman from the nomads through the period of the French Revolution to the present day.

 

Man’s myths about women

Man has always used myths to protect himself from what he has not understood. Mlle. de Beauvoir goes to some lengths to describe man’s myths about woman. She is the Earth Mother and Death; she is Magic and the Servant; she is the Moon and Night, the Sea and Tides. In her study of the myths about woman, Mlle. de Beauvoir has chosen five writers, to show the myth makers’ varying attitudes towards that mystery — the Other. These are: Motherlant, D.H. Lawrence, Claudel, Andre Breton, and Stendhal.

D.H. Lawrence believes that “woman is not evil, she is even good — but subordinated.” Claudel finds woman to be the Handmaid of the Lord. “The more one demands complete submission of her salvation.” In the ever changing forms of his mistresses, Andre Breton holds woman to be the essence of pure poetry.

Finally, breathing a sigh of relief, Mlle. de Beauvoir presents Stendhal as the Romantic of Reality, “demanding woman’s emancipation not only in the name of liberty but also in the name of individual happiness.”

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17 Feminist Quotes from The Second Sex

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Volume two, “Woman’s Life Today”

This constitutes the sum of the first volume. The second volume, “Woman’s Life Today,” analyzes the great detail in women’s development from childhood through her formative years of young girlhood and sexual initiation to — with a bypass on Lesbianism — marriage, motherhood, and social life — and so on to maturity and old age.

Withe a degree from the Sorbonne, and a considerable career as a novelist, essayist, and teacher of philosophy, Simone de Beauvoir comes to her thesis as a dedicated soul. Her conclusions in The Second Sex are naturally existentialist: there is, she states, no physiologic reason for conflict between man and woman — “The battle of the sexes is not immediately implied in the anatomy of man and woman … The woman who is shut up in immanence endeavors to hold man in that prison also.”

Whether or not one accepts the existentialist’s view, one must find that Mlle. de Beauvoir has done a service in pulling apart the tangled strands of fact and myth about woman’s place in society. The man who is neither sociologist, historian, nor writer may well be uninterested in her report. Most intelligent women will find it rewarding.

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The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir on Amazon

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An able and serious piece of writing, if too long

Written in a style that is often declamatory, sometimes shrill, the book is too long. The first volume is better, partly because the second contains an excess of repetition. Eager as Simone de Beauvoir is to be thorough, there is really no scientific check on her statements.

Moreover, while deploring — and rightly this reviewer believes — the dogma of both Freudian and Adlerian psychoanalysts, Mlle. de Beauvoir has in her account of women’s difficulties relied too much on these same psychoanalysts, so that much that she says about presumably normal women is colored by abnormality.

Despite its occasional maddening repetitiousness, The Second Sex is an able and serious piece of writing. Incidentally, the translation is top-notch, and the translator’s notes throw further light on the subject of women in the United States. But there have been other books that in their philosophy have offered an equally good solution.

In any case, if “know thyself” is, as Socrates contended, the beginning of wisdom, Simone de Beauvoir, in having attempted to clear the air of the many hoary superstitions and misconceptions about women, has immensely helped her sex.

More about The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir

Wikipedia
Reader discussion on Goodreads
Introduction to Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex

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The Enduring Power of For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide by Ntozake Shange

“Through my tears I found god in myself and I loved her fiercely” is perhaps the most iconic quote from For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow is Enuf  by Ntozake Shange (1948 – 2018). For Colored Girls has touched many hearts since it premiered in 1976. The 2019 production of For Colored Girls  at SUNY New Paltz was one such powerful and emotional presentation of Shange’s play.

For Colored Girls was Shange’s first work and remains her most acclaimed theatre piece, consisting of twenty captivating poetic monologues representing black sisterhood in a racist and sexist society. Shange describes her work as choreopoem, a form of dramatic expression incorporating poetry, dance, music, and song. This term was coined in 1975 by Shange herself to describe this work.

The play follows the lives of seven African-American women who are identifiable based on the colors of their dresses: Lady in Red, Lady in Orange, Lady in Blue, Lady in Brown, Lady in Yellow, Lady in Purple, and Lady in Green. The nameless women battle issues concerning love, empowerment, struggle, and loss throughout the play. The ladies’ interconnected stories push their relationships to evolve into a heartwarming sisterhood that the audience is sure to feel a part of by the end of the production.

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Poster for the 2019 production of For Colored Girls … at SUNY New Paltz

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It continues to resonate in today’s world

Though Ntozake Shange first staged For Colored Girls over forty years ago, it will continue to resonate for many women who can relate to the struggles portrayed. The harrowing pieces within the play on rape, abortion, domestic violence, and abandonment have the power to touch the lives of viewers, as many women have unfortunately dealt with them at some point in their lives.

Shange allows the audience to live these dark moments, and show them that they are strong enough to make it through. As the script says at the opening of the play, “& this is for colored girls who have considered suicide but moved to the ends of their own rainbows.”

In the introduction to the second publication of For Colored Girls, Shange wrote that “the poems introduce the girls to other kinds of people of color, other worlds. To adventure, kindness, and cruelty. The cruelty that we usually think we face alone, but we don’t. We discover that by sharing with each other we find the strength to go on.” Despite some of the difficult themes, there is also a great sense of love and empowerment.

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Ntozake Shange in 1978

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A message comes through — you’re not alone

While witnessing these ladies break down from the horrific events they face, we notice that they never go through it alone. For women of color who have been in similarly dark place in their lives, this play’s power is to convey that you’re not alone. The script is extremely intense, especially in scenes where the audience learns about the rape of Lady in Green and the heart-wrenching moment when we learn that Lady in Yellow tested positive for HIV.

When one lady is speaking, the rest of the cast remains on stage and occasionally interrupt the speaker to ask a question. It’s as though they are having a conversation rather than reciting monologues, allowing the audience to realize that these experiences are universal. The emotions of these women are quite raw, as they seem to shed real tears —  the audience can forget that they’re watching a production. The impeccable acting and powerful language captivates viewers and moves them to genuinely feel each woman’s pain.

 

Addressing marginalization and trauma

Through dance and music (as well as poetic dialog), For Colored Girls addresses social issues  for women and girls who have felt marginalized, traumatized, or were stuck in a place of judgment by an unforgiving world for being colored. Shange’s words were, and are still, revolutionary. Her play speaks to all women of color who have been affected and allows them to find themselves through Shange’s choreopoem to this day as it still remains relevant.

In 2019, this is a powerful reminder that women of color are still mistreated and silenced by society. The #MeToo movement of 2018 proved just how often sexual abuse of women occurs. The hashtag was used over five hundred thousand times over the course of twenty-four hours after actress Alyssa Milano first tweeted the phrase.

Lady in Red ultimately steals the show with the recital of a night with beau Willie Brown. In this scene, Lady in Red tells the story of her dysfunctional family with her boyfriend who is dealing with PTSD and constantly abusing her and her children. The play was updated in 2010 and included references to the Iraq War as a way to address the same systematic failures that Shange was trying to bring to light in the 1970s.

 

“I found god in myself and I loved her fiercely”

The play ends with a laying of hands monologue as the ladies come together to express what they are missing. Lady in Purple finally says the iconic line, “through my tears I found god in myself and I loved her fiercely.” All ladies softly recite these lines as they close into a circle with each other. We are reminded of the fact that these social problems started deep in our history and continue to remain present in our world today.

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For Colored  Girls … A Choreopoem by Ntozake Shange on Amazon

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Here is the 1976 New York Times review of For Colored Girls after it premiered on Broadway, detailing its journey from very small stages to finally arrive on Broadway. For Colored Girls was nominated for a Tony, Grammy, and Emmy. The play was updated in 2010 with a section called “Positive.”

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Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë: A 19th-Century Synopsis

Writing as “Ellis Bell,” Emily Brontë‘s only novel,Wuthering Heights, was published in December 1847. The brooding and complex story follows the intersection of two families — the Earnshaws and the Lintons. Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff have sparked romantic imaginations as star-crossed lovers whose dramas and tragedies reverberate into the next generation.

Reviewers in Emily’s time were rather perplexed by the novel. Charlotte Brontë felt that her sister Emily’s magnum opus was poorly understood and supplied her own preface to the 1850 edition of Wuthering Heights. By this time, Emily (1818 – 1848) had already died at the age of thirty, and Charlotte had become something of a literary celebrity for the far more successful reception of Jane Eyre. She wrote:

“Whether it is right or advisable to create beings like Heathcliff, I do not know: I scarcely think it is. But this I know: the writer who possesses the creative gift owns something of which he is not always master — something that, at times, strangely wills and works for itself.”

Literary critic Angus Ross commented: “If Wuthering Heights is not approached as a ‘morbid romance’ it can be seen to have a very skillful arrangement. She deals with evil and good, not right and wrong, and the wildness and fierceness of her vision gives her one long work a kind of elemental power not matched in any other novel.”

Any synopsis of Wuthering Heights must, by necessity, mirror its long and complicated story. I found this 19th-century synopsis by Mary F. Robinson to be quite up to the task of encapsulating the narrative. The following is from the book Emily Brontë  by Mary F. Robinson (1883). This selection has been edited for clarity. Long quoted sections of dialog have been excluded.

For the unedited selection, go to Emily Brontë and scroll to Chapter XIV, Wuthering Heights: The Story. And before reading the synopsis that starts with the next paragraph, I recommend getting to know the cast of characters to understand their relationship to one another. 

 
A visitor’s nightmare

The first four chapters of Wuthering Heights are merely introductory. They relate Mr. Lockwood’s visit there, his surprise at the rudeness of the place in contrast with the foreign air and look of breeding that distinguished Mr. Heathcliff and his beautiful daughter-in-law. He also noticed the profound moroseness and ill-temper of everybody in the house.

Overtaken by a snowstorm, he was, however, constrained to sleep there and was conducted by the housekeeper to an old chamber, long unused, where (since at first he could not sleep) he amused himself by looking over a few mildewed books piled on one corner of the window-ledge. They and the ledge were scrawled all over with writing, Catherine Earnshaw, sometimes varied to Catherine Heathcliff, and again to Catherine Linton.

Nothing save these three names was written on the ledge, but the books were covered in every fly-leaf and margin with a pen-and-ink commentary, a sort of diary, as it proved, scrawled in a childish hand. Mr. Lockwood spent the first portion of the night in deciphering this faded record; a string of childish mishaps and deficiencies dated a quarter of a century ago.

Evidently this Catherine Earnshaw must have been one of Heathcliff’s kin, for he figured in the narrative as her fellow-scapegrace, and the favorite scapegoat of her elder brother’s wrath. After some time Mr. Lockwood fell asleep, to be troubled by harassing dreams, in one of which he fancied that this childish Catherine Earnshaw, or rather her spirit, was knocking and scratching at the fir-scraped window-pane, begging to be let in.

Overcome with the intense horror of nightmare, he screamed aloud in his sleep. Waking suddenly up he found to his confusion that his yell had been heard, for Heathcliff appeared, exceedingly angry that any one had been allowed to sleep in the oak-closeted room.

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Image: https://www.wuthering-heights.co.uk/l...

You may also enjoy: Quotes from Wuthering Heights

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An unwelcome foundling

The story of Wuthering Heights is the story of Heathcliff. It begins with the sudden journey of the old squire, Mr. Earnshaw, to Liverpool one summer morning at the beginning of harvest. He had asked the children each to choose a present, “only let it be little, for I shall walk there and back, sixty miles each way” —  and the son Hindley, a proud, high-spirited lad of fourteen, had chosen a fiddle; six-year-old Cathy, a whip, for she could ride any horse in the stable; and Nelly Dean, their humble servant, had been promised a pocketful of apples and pears.

It was the third night since Mr. Earnshaw’s departure, and the children, sleepy and tired, had begged their mother to let them sit up a little longer—yet a little longer—to welcome their father, and see their new presents. At last, just about eleven o’clock Mr. Earnshaw came back, laughing and groaning over his fatigue; and opening his greatcoat, which he held bundled up in his arms, he cried:

“‘See here, wife! I was never so beaten with anything in my life: but you must e’en take it as a gift of God; though it’s as dark almost as if it came from the devil.”

So the child entered ‘Wuthering Heights,’ a cause of dissension from the first. Mrs. Earnshaw grumbled herself calm; the children went to bed crying, for the fiddle had been broken and the whip lost in carrying the little stranger for so many miles. But Mr. Earnshaw was determined to have his protégé respected; he cuffed saucy little Cathy for making faces at the newcomer, and turned Nelly Dean out of the house for having set him to sleep on the stairs because the children would not have him in their bed. And when she ventured to return some days afterwards, she found the child adopted into the family, and called by the name of a son who had died in childhood —Heathcliff.

Mrs. Earnshaw disliked the little interloper and never interfered in his behalf when Hindley, who hated him, thrashed and struck the sullen, patient child, who never complained, but bore all his bruises in silence. This endurance made old Earnshaw furious when he discovered the persecutions to which this mere baby was subjected; the child soon discovered it to be a most efficient instrument of vengeance.

 

Young Heathcliff continues to sow discord

So the division grew. This malignant, uncomplaining child could only breed discord in that Yorkshire home … Insensible, it seemed, to gratitude … cruel, and violently passionate. One soft and tender speck there was in this dark and sullen heart; it was an exceedingly great and forbearing love for the sweet, saucy, naughty Catherine.

But this one affection only served to augment the mischief that he wrought. He who had estranged son from father, husband from wife, severed brother from sister as completely; for Hindley hated the swarthy child who was Cathy’s favorite companion. When Mrs. Earnshaw died, two years after Heathcliff’s advent, Hindley had learned to regard his father as an oppressor rather than a friend, and Heathcliff as an intolerable usurper. So, from the very beginning, he bred bad feeling in the house.

In the course of time Mr. Earnshaw began to fail. His strength suddenly left him, and he grew half childish, irritable, and extremely jealous of his authority. He considered any slight to Heathcliff as a slight to his own discretion; so that, in the master’s presence, the child was deferred to and courted from respect for that master’s weakness, while, behind his back, the old wrongs, the old hatred, showed themselves unquenched. And so the child grew up bitter and distrustful.

 

The death of Mr. Earnshaw does nothing to allay a bitter rivalry

Matters got a little better for a while, when the untamable Hindley was sent to college; yet still there was disturbance and disquiet, for Mr. Earnshaw did not love his daughter Catherine, and his heart was yet further embittered by the grumbling and discontent of old Joseph the servant.

But Catherine, though slighted for Heathcliff, and nearly always in trouble on his account, was much too fond of him to be jealous … Suddenly this pretty, mischievous sprite was left fatherless; Mr. Earnshaw died quietly, sitting in his chair by the fireside one October evening. Mr. Hindley, now a young man of twenty, came home to the funeral, to the great astonishment of the household bringing a wife with him.

A rush of a lass, spare and bright-eyed, with a changing, hectic color, hysterical, and full of fancies, fickle as the winds, now flighty and full of praise and laughter, now peevish and languishing. For the rest, the very idol of her husband’s heart. A word from her, a passing phrase of dislike for Heathcliff, was enough to revive all young Earnshaw’s former hatred of the boy.

Heathcliff was turned out of their society, no longer allowed to share Cathy’s lessons, degraded to the position of an ordinary farm-servant. At first Heathcliff did not mind. Cathy taught him what she learned, and played or worked with him in the fields. Cathy ran wild with him, and had a share in all his scrapes; they both bade fair to grow up regular little savages, while Hindley Earnshaw kissed and fondled his young wife utterly heedless of their fate.

 

Encountering the Lintons

An adventure suddenly changed the course of their lives. One Sunday evening Cathy and Heathcliff ran down to Thrushcross Grange to peep through the windows and see how the little Lintons spent their Sundays. They looked in, and saw Isabella at one end of the, to them, splendid drawing-room, and Edgar at the other, both in floods of tears, peevishly quarreling. So elate were the two little savages from Wuthering Heights at this proof of their neighbors’ inferiority, that they burst into peals of laughter.

The little Lintons were terrified, and, to frighten them still more, Cathy and Heathcliff made a variety of frightful noises; they succeeded in terrifying not only the children but their silly parents, who imagined the yells to come from a gang of burglars, determined on robbing the house.

They let the dogs loose, in this belief, and the bulldog seized Cathy’s bare ankle, for she had lost her shoes in the bog. While Heathcliff was trying to throttle off the brute, the man-servant came up, and, taking both the children prisoner, conveyed them into the lighted hall.

 

Cathy is transformed

Cathy stayed five weeks at Thrushcross Grange, by which time her ankle was quite well, and her manners much improved. Young Mrs. Earnshaw had tried her best, during this visit, to endeavor by a judicious mixture of fine clothes and flattery to raise the standard of Cathy’s self-respect. She went home, then, a beautiful and finely-dressed young lady, to find Heathcliff in equal measure deteriorated; the mere farm-servant, whose clothes were soiled with three months’ service in mire and dust, with unkempt hair and grimy face and hands.

From this time Catherine’s friendship with Heathcliff was checkered by intermittent jealousy on his side and intermittent disgust on hers; and for this evil turn, far more than for any coarser brutality, Heathcliff longed for revenge on Hindley Earnshaw.

 

Hindley Earnshaw’s reputation grows ever more terrible

Meanwhile Edgar Linton, greatly smitten with the beautiful Catherine, went from time to time to visit at Wuthering Heights. He would have gone far oftener, but that he had a terror of Hindley Earnshaw’s reputation, and shrank from encountering him.

For this fine young Oxford gentleman, this proud young husband, was sinking into worse excesses than any of his wild Earnshaw ancestors. A defiant sorrow had driven him to desperation. In the summer following Catherine’s visit to Thushcross Grange, his only son and heir had been born. An occasion of great rejoicings, suddenly dashed by the discovery that his wife, his idol, was fast sinking in consumption.

Hindley refused to believe it, and his wife kept her flighty spirits till the end; but one night, while leaning on his shoulder, a fit of coughing took her—a very slight one. She put her two hands about his neck, her face changed, and she was dead. Hindley grew desperate, and gave himself over to wild companions, to excesses of dissipation, and tyranny. “His treatment of Heathcliff was enough to make a fiend of a saint.”

Heathcliff bore it with sullen patience, as he had borne the blows and kicks of his childhood; the aches and wants of his body were redeemed by a fierce joy at heart, for in this degradation of Hindley Earnshaw he recognized the instrument of his own revenge.

 

Cathy is engaged to Edgar Linton, but not in love

Time went on, ever making a sharper difference between his gypsy soul and his beautiful young mistress time went on, leaving the two fast friends enough, but leaving also in the heart of Heathcliff a passionate rancor against the man who had made him unworthy of Catherine’s hand, and of the other man on whom it was to be bestowed.

For Edgar Linton was infatuated with the naughty young beauty of Wuthering Heights. Her violent temper did not frighten him, although his own character was singularly sweet, placid, and feeble; her compromising friendship with such a mere boor as young Heathcliff was only a trifling annoyance easily to be excused. And when his own father and mother died of a fever caught in nursing her he did not love her less for the sorrow she brought.

A fever she had wilfully taken in despair, and a sudden sickness of life. One evening pretty Cathy came into the kitchen to tell Nelly Dean that she had engaged herself to marry Edgar Linton. Heathcliff, unseen, was seated on the other side the settle, on a bench by the wall, quite hidden from those at the fireside.

Cathy was elated, but not at all happy. Edgar was rich, handsome, young, gentle, passionately in love with her; still she was miserable. Nelly Dean, who was nursing the baby Hareton by the fire, finally grew out of patience with her whimsical discontent.

“Your brother will be pleased,” she said; “the old lady and gentleman will not object, I think; you will escape from a disorderly, comfortless home into a wealthy, respectable one; and you love Edgar, and Edgar loves you. All seems smooth and easy; where is the obstacle?“

“Here! and here!” replied Catherine, striking one hand on her forehead and the other on her breast. “In whichever place the soul lives. In my soul and in my heart I’m convinced I’m wrong.”

Heathcliff, who had walked out of the house, her rejection burning in his ears, not to enter it till he was fitted to exact both love and vengeance. He did not come back that night, though the thunder rattled and the rain streamed over Wuthering Heights; though Cathy, shawl-less in the wind and wet, stood calling him. Through the violent storms that drowned and baffled her cries.

All night she would not leave the hearth, but lay on the settle sobbing and moaning, all soaked as she was, with her hands on her face and her face to the wall. A strange augury for her marriage, these first dreams of her affianced love—not dreams, indeed, but delirium; for the next morning she was burning and tossing in fever, near to death’s door as it seemed.

But she won through, and Edgar’s parents carried her home to nurse. They took the infection and died within a few days of each other. Nor was this the only ravage that the fever made. Catherine, always hasty and fitful in temper, was henceforth subject at rare intervals to violent and furious rages, which threatened her life and reason by their extremity.

The doctor said she ought not to be crossed; she ought to have her own way, and it was nothing less than murder in her eyes for any one to presume to stand up and contradict her. But the strained temper, the spoiled, authoritative ways, the saucy caprices of his bride, were no blemishes in Edgar Linton’s eyes.

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Emily Brontë page on Amazon

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A happy marriage at first, and the return of Heathcliff

Despite so many gloomy auguries the marriage was a happy one at first. Catherine was petted and humored by everyone, with Edgar for a perpetual worshipper; his pretty, weak-natured sister Isabella as an admiring companion; and for the necessary spectator of her happiness, Nelly Dean, who had been induced to quit her nursling at Wuthering Heights.

Suddenly Heathcliff returned, not the old Heathcliff, but a far more dangerous enemy, a tall, athletic, well-formed, man, intelligent, and severe. Cathy, though she was really attached to her husband, gave him cruel pain by her undisguised and childish delight at Heathcliff’s return; he had a presentiment that evil would come of the old friendship thus revived, and would willingly have forbidden Heathcliff the house; but Edgar, so anxious lest any cross be given to his wife, with a double reason then for tenderly guarding her health, could not inflict a serious sorrow upon her with only a baseless jealousy for its excuse.

Thus, Heathcliff became intimate at Thrushcross Grange, the second house to which he was made welcome, the second hearth he meant to ruin. At this time he was lodging at Wuthering Heights. On his return he had first intended, he told Catherine, “just to have one glimpse of your face, a stare of surprise, perhaps, and pretended pleasure; afterwards settle my score with Hindley; and then prevent the law by doing execution on myself.”

 

Settling scores with Hindley

Catherine’s welcome changed this plan; her brother was safe from Heathcliff’s violence; but not from his hate. The score was being settled in a different fashion. Hindley—who was eager to get money for his gambling and who had drunk his wits away—was only too glad to take Heathcliff as lodger, boon-companion, and fellow card-player at once.

And Heathcliff was content to wait and take his revenge sip by sip, encouraging his old oppressor in drink and gaming, watching him lose acre after acre of his land, knowing that sooner or later Earnshaw would lose everything, and he, Heathcliff, be master of Wuthering Heights, with Hindley’s son for his servant. Revenge is sweet. Meanwhile, Wuthering Heights was a handy lodging, at walking distance from the Grange.

 

Isabella Linton falls in love with Heathcliff

But soon his visits were cut off. Isabella Linton—a charming girl of eighteen with a thin sweetness of disposition that could easily turn sour—fell in love with Heathcliff. To do him justice he had never dreamed of marrying her, until one day Catherine, in a fit of passion, revealed the poor girl’s secret. Heathcliff pretended not to believe her, but Isabel was her brother’s heir, and to marry her, inherit Edgar’s money, and ill-use his sister, would, indeed, be a fair revenge on Catherine’s husband.

One day, when he had been detected in an experimental courting of Isabel, Edgar Linton, glad of an excuse, turned him out of doors. Then, in a paroxysm of hatred, never-satisfied revenge, and baffled passion, Heathcliff struck with the poisoned weapon ready to his hand. He persuaded Isabel to run away with him—no difficult task—and they eloped together one night to be married.

Isabella—poor, weak, romantic, sprightly Isabel—was not missed at first; for very terrible trouble had fallen upon the Grange.

 

Catherine tries to starve herself

Catherine, in a paroxysm of rage at the dismissal of Heathcliff, quarreled violently with Edgar, and shut herself up in her own room.

For three days and nights she remained there, eating nothing; Edgar, secluded in his study, expecting every moment that she would come down and ask his forgiveness; Nelly Dean, who alone knew of her determined starving, resolved to say nothing about it, and conquer, once for all, the haughty and passionate spirit which possessed her beautiful young mistress.

So three days went by. Catherine still refused all her food. On the third day Catherine unbarred her door and asked for food; and now Nelly Dean was too frightened to exult. Her mistress was wasted, haggard, wild, as if by months of illness; the too-presumptuous servant remembered the doctor’s warning, and dreaded her master’s anger, when he should discover Catherine’s real condition.

It is characteristic of Emily Brontë’s genius that she should choose so very simple and homely a means production of most terrible results. A fit she had had alone and untended during those three days of isolated starvation had unsettled Catherine’s reason.

This scene was the beginning of a long and fearful brain-fever, from which, owing to her husband’s devoted and ceaseless care, Catherine recovered her life, but barely her reason. That hung in the balance, a touch might settle it on the side of health or of madness.

Isabella’s flight is discovered

Not until the beginning of this fever was Isabella’s flight discovered. Her brother was too concerned with his wife’s illness to feel as heart-broken as Heathcliff hoped. He was not violent against his sister, nor even angry; only, with the mild steady persistence of his nature, he refused to hold any communication with Heathcliff’s wife.

But when, at the beginning of Catherine’s recovery, Nelly Dean received a letter from Isabella, declaring the extreme wretchedness of her life at Wuthering Heights, where Heathcliff was master now, Edgar Linton willingly accorded the servant permission to go and see his sister.

Arrived at Wuthering Heights, she found that once plentiful homestead sorely ruined and deteriorated by years of thriftless dissipation; and Isabella Linton, already metamorphosed into a wan and listless slattern, broken-spirited and pale. Nelly Dean, unhindered by the sight of Isabella’s misery, or by the memory of the wrongs her master already suffered from this estimable neighbor, was finally cajoled into taking a letter from him to the frail half-dying Catherine, appointing an interview.

The letter was taken and given; the meeting came about one Sunday when all the household save Nelly Dean were at church.

 

Cathy dies after giving birth to her namesake daughter

Catherine, pale, apathetic, but more than ever beautiful in her mazed weakness of mind and body; Heathcliff, violent in despair, seeing death in her face, alternately upbraiding her fiercely for causing him so much misery, and tenderly caressing the altered, dying face.

Never was so strange a love scene. It is not a scene to quote, not noticeable for its eloquent passages or the beauty of casual phrases, but for its sustained passion, desperate, pure, terrible. 

At last they parted: Catherine unconscious, half-dead. That night her puny, seven-months’ child was born; that night the mother died, unutterably changed from the bright imperious creature who entered that house as a kingdom, not yet a year ago. By her side, in the darkened chamber, her husband lay, worn out with anguish. Outside, dashing his head against the trees, Heathcliff raged, not to be consoled.

From this time a slow insidious madness worked in Heathcliff. When it was at its height he was not fierce, but strangely silent, scarcely breathing; hushed, as a person who draws his breath to hear some sound only just not heard as yet, as a man who strains his eyes to see the speck on the horizon which will rise the next moment, the next instant, and grow into the ship that brings his treasure home.

 

Isabella gives birth to Heathcliff’s son Linton

Soon after the birth of the baby Catherine, Isabella Heathcliff escaped from her husband to the South of England. He made no attempt to follow her, and in her new home she gave birth to a son, Linton—the fruit of timidity and hatred, fear and revulsion—from the first she reported him to “be an ailing, peevish creature.”

Meanwhile little Catherine grew up the very light of her home, an exquisite creature with her father’s gentle, constant nature inspired by a spark of her mother’s fire and lightened by a gleam of her wayward caprice. She had the Earnshaws’ handsome dark eyes and the Lintons’ fair skin, regular features and curling yellow hair. Cathy was in truth a charming creature, though less passionate and strange than her mother, Catherine Earnshaw, not made to be loved as wildly nor as deeply mistrusted.

Edgar, grown a complete hermit, devoted himself to his child, who spent a life as happy and secluded as a princess in a fairy story, seldom venturing outside the limits of the park and never by herself. Edgar had never forgotten his sorrow for the death of his young wife; he loved her memory with steady constancy.

Heathcliff takes possession of Wuthering Heights

The years passed, nothing happened, save that Hindley Earnshaw died, and Heathcliff—to whom every yard had been mortgaged, took possession of the place; not Hareton, who should have been the first gentleman in the neighborhood.

The eventless years went by till Catherine was thirteen, when Mrs. Heathcliff died, and Edgar went to the South of England to fetch her son. Little Cathy, during her father’s absence, grew impatient of her confinement to the park; there was no one to escort her over the moors, so one day she leapt the fence, got lost, and was finally sheltered at Wuthering Heights, of which place and of all its inmates she had been kept in total ignorance.

She promised to keep the visit a secret from her father, lest he should dismiss Nelly Dean. She was very indignant at being told that rudely-bred Hareton was her cousin; and when that night Linton—delicate, pretty, pettish Linton—arrived, she infinitely preferred his cousinship.

The next morning she found Linton gone, his father having sent for him to Wuthering Heights; Edgar Linton, however, did not tell his daughter that her cousin was so near, he would not for worlds she should cross the threshold of that terrible house. But one day, Cathy and Nelly Dean met Heathcliff on the moors, and he half-persuaded, half-forced them to come home and see his son, grown a most despicable, ailing creature, half-violent, half-terrified.

 

Cathy’s secret engagement to Linton

Cathy’s kind little heart did not see the faults, she only saw that her cousin was ill, unhappy, in need of her; she was easily entrapped, one winter, when her father and Nelly Dean were both ill, into a secret engagement with this boy-cousin, the only lad, save uncouth Hareton, whom she had ever seen.

Every night, when her day’s nursing was done, she rode over to Wuthering Heights to pet and fondle Linton. Heathcliff did all he could to favor the plan. He knew his son was dying, notwithstanding that every care was taken to preserve the heir of Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange. It is true that Cathy had a rival claim; to marry her to Linton would be to secure the title, get a wife for his dying son to preserve the line of inheritance, and certainly to break Edgar Linton’s heart. Heathcliff’s love of revenge and love of power combined to make the scheme a thing to strive for and desire.

He grew desperate as the boy got weaker and weaker; it was but too likely that he would die before his dying uncle, and, if Edgar Linton survived, Thrushcross Grange was lost to Heathcliff. As a last resource he made his son write to Edgar Linton and beg for an interview on neutral ground.

Edgar, who, ignorant of Linton Heathcliff’s true character, saw no reason why Cathy should not marry her cousin if they loved each other, allowed Nelly Dean to take her little mistress, now seventeen years old, on to the moors where Linton Heathcliff was to meet them.

Cathy was loathe to leave her father even for an hour, he was so ill; but she had been told Linton was dying, so nerved herself to go once more on the moors: they found Linton in a strange state, terrified, exhausted, despondent, making spasmodic love to Cathy as if it were a lesson he had been beaten into learning.

She wished to return, but the boy declared himself, and looked too ill to go back alone. They escorted him home to the Heights, and Heathcliff persuaded them to enter, saying he would go for a doctor for his sick lad. But, once they were in the house, he showed his hand. The doors were bolted.

The  death of Linton Heathcliff

Neither tears nor prayers would induce him to let his victims go till Catherine was Linton’s wife, and so, he told her, till her father had died in solitude. But five days after, Catherine Linton, now Catherine Heathcliff, contrived an escape in time to console her father’s dying hours with a false belief in her happiness; a noble lie, for Edgar Linton died contented, kissing his daughter’s cheek, ignorant of the misery in store for her.

The next day Heathcliff came over to the Grange to recapture his prey, but now Catherine did not mind; her father dead, she received all the affronts and stings of fate with an enduring apathy; it was only her that they injured. A few days after Linton died in the night, alone with his bride. After a year’s absolute misery and loneliness, Catherine’s lot was a little lightened by Mr. Heathcliff’s preferring Nelly Dean to the vacant post of housekeeper at Wuthering Heights.

For the all-absorbing presence of Catherine Earnshaw had nearly secluded Heathcliff from enmity with the world; he was seldom violent now. He became yet more and more disinclined to society, sitting alone, seldom eating, often walking about the whole night. His face changed, and the look of brooding hate gave way to a yet more alarming expression—an excited, wild, unnatural appearance of joy.

At last his mysterious absorption, the stress of his expectation, became so intense that he could not eat. Animated with hunger, he would sit down to his meal, then suddenly start, as if he saw something, glance at the door or the window and go out. Weary and pale, he could not sleep; but left his bed hurriedly, and went out to pace the garden till break of day. 

 

Heathcliff’s revenge plots crumbling

Meanwhile the schemes of a life, the deeply-laid purposes of his revenge, were toppling unheeded all round him, like a house of cards. His son was dead. Hareton Earnshaw, the real heir of Wuthering Heights, and Catharine, the real heir of Thrushcross Grange, had fallen in love with each other.

A most unguessed-at and unlikely finale; yet most natural. For Catharine was spoiled, accomplished, beautiful, proud—yet most affectionate and tender-hearted: and Hareton rude, surly, ignorant, fierce; yet true as steel, staunch, and with a very loving faithful heart, constant even to the man who had, of set purpose, brutalized him and kept him in servitude. 

This odd, rough love story, as harshly sweet as wortle-berries, as dry and stiff in its beauty as purple heather-sprays, is the most purely human, the only tender interest of Wuthering Heights. It is the necessary and lawful anti-climax to Heathcliff’s triumph, the final reassertion of the pre-eminence of right.

“Conquered good, and conquering ill” is often pitiably true; but not an everlasting law, only a too frequent accident. Perceiving this, Emily Brontë shows the final discomfiture of Heathcliff, who was in the end compelled to see the property he has so cruelly amassed descend to his hereditary enemies.

And he was baffled, not so much by Cathy’s and Hareton’s love affairs as by this sudden reaction from violence, this slackening of the heartstrings, which left him nerveless and anaemic, a prey to encroaching monomania. He had spent his life in crushing the berries for his revenge, in mixing that dark and maddening draught; and when the final moment came, when he lifted it to his lips, desire had left him, he had no taste for it.

Isabella Linton was the most pitiable sufferer. Victim we can scarcely call her, who required no deception, but courted her doom. And after all, a marriage chiefly desired in order to humiliate a sister-in-law and show the bride to be a person of importance, was not intolerably requited by three months of wretched misery; after so much she is suffered to escape.

From Edgar Linton, as we have seen, Heathcliff’s blows fell aside unharming, as the executioner’s strokes from a legendary martyr. He never learnt how secondary a place he held in his wife’s heart, he never knew the misery of his only daughter—misery soon to be turned into joy. He lived and died, patient, happy, trustful, unvisited by the violence and fury that had their centre so near his hearth.

The younger Catharine and Hareton suffered but a temporary ill; the misery they endured together taught them to love; the tyrant’s rod had blossomed into roses. And he, lonely and palsied at heart, eating out his soul in bitter solitude, he saw his plans of vengeance all frustrated, so much elaboration so simply counteracted; it was he that suffers … Heathcliff let them go on, frightening them more by his strange mood of abstraction than by his accustomed ferocity.

 

The demise of Heathcliff

He could give them no attention any more. For four days he could neither eat nor rest, till his cheeks grew hollow and his eyes bloodshot, like a person starving with hunger, and growing blind with loss of sleep.

At last one early morning, when the rain was streaming in at Heathcliff’s flapping lattice, Nelly Dean went in to shut it. The master must be up or out, she said. But pushing back the panels of the enclosed bed, she found him there, laid on his back, his open eyes keen and fierce; quite still, though his face and throat were washed with rain; quite still, with a frightful, lifelike gaze of exultation under his brows, with parted lips and sharp white teeth that sneered—quite still and harmless now; dead and stark.

Dead, before any vengeance had overtaken him other than the slow, retributive sufferings of his own breast; dead, slain by too much hope, and an unnatural joy. Never before had any villain so strange an end; never before had any sufferer so protracted and sinister a torment, “beguiled with the spectre of a hope through eighteen years.”

Hareton passionately mourned his lost tyrant, weeping in bitter earnest, and kissing the sarcastic, savage face that every one else shrunk from contemplating. And Heathcliff’s memory was sacred, having in the youth he ruined a most valiant defender. Even Catharine might never bemoan his wickednesses to her husband.

His violence was not strong enough to reach that final peace and mar its completeness. His grave is next to Catharine’s, and near to Edgar Linton’s; over them all the wild bilberry springs, and the peat-moss and heather. They do not wreak of the passion, the capricious sweetness, the steady goodness that lie underneath. It is all one to them and to the larks singing aloft.

“I lingered round the graves under that benign sky; watched the moths fluttering among the heath and harebells, listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass; and wondered how any one could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth.”

So ends the story of Wuthering Heights.

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See also: 1939 Film Adaptation of Wuthering Heights

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The Novels of Willa Cather, Master of American Literature

Willa Cather (1873 – 1947) was born near Winchester, VA, where her family had lived and farmed for generations. The course of her life was altered when she was nine years old. Her father bought a ranch in Nebraska, uprooting the family and leaving behind the genteel, tranquil, and traditional life they had been accustomed to. The prairie was wild and free, yet more hazardous, with the struggle to tame the land and its attendant blizzards, droughts, and storms.

This new way of life made a deep impression on Cather, and would come to inspire some of her most iconic novels later in her life. After abandoning her initial ambition to study medicine, she embarked on a life of letters, first working as a journalist, critic, and editor. Her first published book was a collection of poems titled April Highlights (1903), remaining her only volume of poetry.

Next came The Troll Garden (1905), a collection of short stories. The author was nearly forty years old when her first novel, Alexander’s Bridge, was published in 1912. 

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Learn more about Willa Cather

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New England author Sarah Orne Jewett had become Willa Cather’s mentor and persuaded her to stop trying to write like Henry James and instead, to draw from memories of her youth in Red Cloud, Nebraska. Life on the prairie and the immigrant families she had encountered inspired O Pioneers!, The Song of the Lark, and My Antonia, which came in quick succession in the nineteen-teens. Several novels came out in the twenties including One of Ours (1922), which won a Pulitzer Prize despite mixed reviews. 

Sapphira and the Slave Girl (1940) was Cather’s last published, and was arguably her least well-reviewed novel. Still, it was the final addition to a body of work that has become one of the most respected in American literature.

In a 1961 essay about Cather’s novels, eminent critic Brooks Atkinson wrote in the New York Times: “In the 1920s, Willa Cather’s sober fiction was overwhelmed by the showmanship of Sinclair Lewis and Ernest Hemingway. In the 1960s, her novels are more readable than theirs … Her spare and supple writing has a classical simplicity. But her signature is bold on every page.” Now, decades after this assessment, Willa Cather’s novels are still in print, still read and studied, and deservedly so. 

The Novels of Willa Cather



Growing up among hardworking European immigrants who worked the land was the inspiration for some of Willa Cather's best-known works, though they weren't limited to the Nebraska of her childhood. In the post-World War I years, Cather was distressed by the growth of materialism and the loss of the pioneering spirit of the country that had informed so many of her most successful works. Here is a listing of the novels of Willa Cather for which you'll find reviews or descriptions here on Literary Ladies Guide.







O Pioneers! (1913)

O Pioneers! is one of Cather’s most iconic novels. One of her earliest full-length works, it was published in 1913. Written in the kind of spare, lyric prose that would become her trademark, the story explores themes of destiny, chance, love, and perseverance.

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The Song of the Lark (1915)

Thea Kronborg, born into the family of a Swedish Methodist minister in a Colorado village, has a voice, an ambition, and a native sense of the true and fine — qualities all in contrast with the cheapness and tawdriness about her.

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My Antonia (1918)

The story is My Antonia and the scene is that part of Nebraska in which Miss Cather passed her girlhood; the Nebraska in which Swedes, Russians, Bohemians, and Poles settled putting their vigor into the virgin land.

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One of Ours (1922)

One of Ours tells the story of Claude Wheeler, the son of a Nebraska farmer and a religious mother. He drifts through what seems to be a predictable life, devoid of purpose, until he goes to war in Europe. Though it won the 1923 Pulitzer Prize for the Novel, it received mixed reviews.

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A Lost Lady (1923)

A Lost Lady (1923) is a shining example of Willa Cather’s gift for concise expression and talent for vivid character studies. Marian Forrester, a young woman of beauty and grace, brings an uncommon air of sophistication to the frontier town of Sweet Water.

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The Professor’s House (1925)

This a masterly study in introspection tells the story of Godfrey St. Peter, a scholarly professor in a Middle Western university. He is passing through the critical, uneasy period between middle age and old age.

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My Mortal Enemy (1926)

Cather sketches a character study of a woman and a life not particularly well-lived. In this slim work, the story of an ill-considered marriage unfolds. My Mortal Enemy is considered a minor work by Cather, and there has been debate as to whether it has stood the test of time.

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Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927)

Here is the story, not of death, but of life, for Miss Cather’s Archbishop Latour died of having lived. She is concerned, not with any climactic moment in a career, but with the whole broad view of the career.

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Shadows on the Rock (1931)

Cécile Auclair is a child in the Quebec of the waning seventeenth century, when both Louis de Buade, Comte de Frontenac, Governor of French Canada, and François-Xavier de Laval-Montmorency, the first Roman Catholic Bishop of Quebec, are very old men living their last days.

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Lucy Gayheart (1935)

Lucy Gayheart gropes a wistful way back to the time of the horse and buggy, when some men and some women loved deeply and truly and make themselves miserable and hugged their misery.

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Sapphira and the Slave Girl (1940)

Willa Cather’s last novel was the only book the Virginia-born author set in her home state. An actual incident from her own family history provided the seed of the story, which concerns the troubled marriage of Henry and Sapphira Colbert, who own and operate a small farm and mill near Winchester, Virginia, before the years of the Civil War.

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Fascinating Facts About Zora Neale Hurston

Zora Neale Hurston (January 7, 1891 – January 28, 1960), was an African-American novelist, memoirist, and folklorist. Zora was a natural storyteller. As she grew up, she had listened to the stories of people she encountered. Her love of story would lead her not only to create her own, but to collect stories from the oral traditions of the African-American South and the Black cultures of the Caribbean.

With her determined intelligence and humor, she quickly became a big name in the Harlem Renaissance movement of the 1920s. She had a dual career as a writer (producing novels, short stories, plays, and essays) and as an anthropologist.

She held odd jobs to support her education and writing

In order to start saving money for all of her future academic endeavors, Zora held many jobs. In the summer of 1918 Zora worked as a waitress in a nightclub, and as a manicurist in a black-owned barbershop that served only whites. 

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Zora Neale Hurston Interview (1934)

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She was Fannie Hurst’s assistant

Hurston worked as an assistant to one of the most successful writers of the era, Fannie Hurst. The two met at Opportunity‘s literary awards event in 1925, where Hurston won numerous awards.

The role of employment was extremely controversial at the time due to the fact that Hurston was black, and Hurt was white and Jewish. Despite this, the two had a friendship that lasted the duration of their life. Both Fannie and Zora wrote about their marginalized identities and oppression as underlying themes in their stories. Ironically, though Fannie Hurst was one of the era’s most famous and well-paid writers, today her work is largely forgotten, while Zora’s is revered. Read more about the friendship of these two literary women.

 

She was an accomplished anthropologist

Hurston turned heads in 1925, as she won awards for her work “Spunk” and “Color Struck” after submitting it to Opportunity magazine’s literary contest. That same year, Hurston became the first black student at Bernard College, the women’s college connected to Columbia University. During her time here, she studied anthropology.

In 1936 Hurston won the Guggenheim fellowship. Under this she traveled to Jamaica and Haiti to study and practice voodoo rituals for her research. During her stay on the fellowship, Hurston wrote what would be her most famous work: Their Eyes Were Watching God. Although the novel was criticized when first published, it would later become a highly acclaimed work of fiction. 

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Quotes from Their Eyes Were Watching God

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She was 10 years older than she claimed to be

Hurston lied about her age, claiming she was 16, when in reality she was ten years older. This was done at a time where you needed to be a teenager in order to qualify for free public schooling. And so thats just what she did, living as a 16-year-old in order to finish high school.

Hurston would never correct the change in age she made for herself, continuing to present herself as 10 years younger for the rest of her life. 

 

She grew up in America’s first planned black community

Eatonville, Florida was the first planned black community in the United States.  Hurston described it as “a city of five lakes, three croquet courts, three hundred brown skins, three hundred good swimmers, plenty guavas, two schools, and no jailhouse.”

The community was established in 1887, and it was filled with black excellence at every corner.  Black men filled Town Hall, including Hurston’s own father, who was the mayor of the small community. With all of the Black pride and accomplishment around her, Hurston was destined for greatness.

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Crazy for This Democracy

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She barely made money from her work

Hurston lived in poverty for most of her life. This forced her to take up other jobs that strayed from her true passion. Unfortunately her passion didn’t prove to be frugal. Being a black female author didn’t pay her dues.

The largest royalty she had ever received from any of her literary works was $943. Due to her steady lack of financial reward, she had to work as a maid for extra income, even though she was a well established author. 

 

Her grave remained unmarked for over a decade

Dying in abject poverty, there was no money to  afford a headstone when she passed in 1960. Due to these lack of finances, her grave remained unmarked for many years.

In 1973 Alice Walker, then a young author who drew inspiration from Hurston, traveled to her gravesite and marked. She believed that Zora was deserved to be rediscovered, and dubbed her “Genius of the South.” Walker would go on to publish an essay In Search of Zora Neale Hurston, which helped introduce Zora’s legacy to new generations of readers. In turn, this encouraged publishers to print new editions of Hurston’s novels and other writings.

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Books, Publishing, & Publishers

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She was controversial within the black literary community

Hurston used entirely black southern vernacular in a number of her literary works.  For this she received a lot of criticism in the black community. This was because many felt her work was a form of entertainment for white audiences. 

Author Richard Wright referred to Hurston’s style as a “minstrel technique” designed to appeal to the white community. 

The post Fascinating Facts About Zora Neale Hurston appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.

My Mortal Enemy by Willa Cather — Two Opposing Reviews

My Mortal Enemy by Willa Cather is a novella by this eminent American author, published in 1926. Cather sketches a character study of a woman and a life not particularly well-lived. In this slim work, the story of an ill-considered marriage unfolds. My Mortal Enemy is considered a minor work by Cather, and there has been debate as to whether it has stood the test of time.

Unlike the nearly universal praise for her major works —My Ántonia, Death Comes for the Archbishop , and O Pioneers!  among others, My Mortal Enemy has been received with praise as well as met with disappointment.

In a later edition, this question was posed: “Has the author tried to undo A Lost Lady?  There is a definite mark of similarity between the two books, but one feels that she has not come up to her earlier mark, though she has done so admirably.”

This being said, most anything by Willa Cather is worth reading. Even her lesser efforts are on a par with the finest of other authors (notably, male authors) who are still read and studied. It’s always fascinating to see how classic works were received when they were first came out. Following are two reviews from 1926, when the work was first published, stating opposing views.

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You might also enjoy: A 1918 Review of My Antonia

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This reviewer likes My Mortal Enemy’s brevity

From The Ithaca Journal, December 31, 1926: Anyone who overlooks Willa Cather’s My Mortal Enemy is cheating themselves. It is to be classed among the truly fine literature of this year. A small book it is, with not a word to spare, and consumes not more than two hours in the most thorough-going reading. Its space proportions are scarcely more than those of a magazine short story, but its literary proportions are greater than almost any novel of the year.

Willa Cather is a recognized artist. If she were not so recognized previously, this novelette would give her the stamp. Almost any hack writer can sit down and tap off a story of voluminous proportions, but it takes a Willa Cather to compress what most would make into a lengthy tome. Subtract or add a word and you would spoil the effect.

My Mortal Enemy is a poignant character study of an extraordinary woman she is the woman of commanding personality and unaccountable moods, of impulsive action and acquisitive intelligence. She lives and she dies, and Willa Cather knew her, in her imagination.

A cumulative series of incidents, on the surface seemingly trivial build up the powerful climax. Every one of them is essential to the portrait. My mortal enemy suggests the most desirable prospect for the novel of the future. Why must novels be often so inordinately longer than the material within them warrants, padded out with all manner of unnecessary incident and comment by the author?

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See also: 7 Later Novels by Willa Cather

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This reviewer finds the story fragmentary

From The Cincinnati Enquirer, November 6, 1926: When Willa Cather wrote My Antonia she put herself in the way of a challenge. Since the richness and glow of Antonia burst upon her public she probably has been one of the for most victims of self-comparison. Most of these — justly, all of them — have been unfavorable. Willa Cather has run a descending scale. Each succeeding book — A Lost Lady, One of Ours, The Professor’s House — has been more noticeably inferior. Inferior, that is, to the magnificent My Antonia.

My Mortal Enemy is the latest and the least of them all. In size it is nothing more than a fairly long short story; in effect, it is hardly more than a suggestion, without roundness and without body. It is scarcely even a skeleton. Selection and compression are great virtues in a literary artist, but like the virtue of renunciation, they can be carried too far.

Myra Driscoll, the subject of My Mortal Enemy, carried renunciation beyond the power of her temperament to survive the loss. She was reared in luxury, was denied nothing, and in colloquial expression, spoiled. After all, her wealthy uncle did deny her one thing — the love of Oswald Henshaw. The uncle told her that she could marry Henshaw or inherit her fortune, but not both.

She chose Henshaw and eloped with him; never thereafter did she forgive her husband for the loss he had caused her.

The story is told by one Nellie Birdseye, who is quite extraneous to the story and has no real business in it. The author employed the same method in My Antonia and A Lost Lady, but in those cases, the interpreters bore an actual relationship to the characters and their doings. Not so Nellie.

She tells us of two periods in the life the Henshaws. The first narrative, with a recapitulation of earlier affairs, comes when the pair have been married twenty years. They had been deeply in love, at Henshaw’s income could not keep Myra, who was used to luxury, at all content. Myra wanted to make a show; the thought another woman possessed advantages beyond her own aroused her violent nature.

She was also extremely generous, as a poseur is generous, for she was very vain. She would give away anything that she had — and then demand that her husband replace it. Therefore, they were always in straitened circumstances.

There’s a lapse of ten years and Nellie Birdseye again takes up the interpretation of the Henshaws. They are in the West; also, they are in poverty. Myra is broken in health and in spirit. She hates her husband and all the circumstances of her life. Except for her regrets and her husband she is alone. Yet before her death, she turns upon him and accuses him of having ruined her life.

“Why,” she asks him — and she is still the selfish poseur that she has been throughout her life — “must I die like this, alone with my mortal enemy?”

The question is not answered, and the book is put aside with the feeling that Myra is not at all realized. Her character, like her story, is fragmentary. She is presented without the significant incident that at times has made Willa Cather’s work so vital. Though the reader is told that Myra is generous and imaginative, she is made to do nothing to prove these qualities. One loses sympathy with her, and that is fatal.

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My Mortal Enemy by Willa Cather on Amazon

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

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10 Poems by Gabriela Mistral About Life, Love, and Death

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

Mistral stopped formally attending school at the age of fifteen to care for her sick mother, but continued to write poetry. Just two years later, heart completely broke after the sad deaths of her lover, Romeo Ureta, and a close nephew.

This heartbreak gave her the inspiration to create some of her best works, including Sonetos de la muerte (1914). Much of her later poetry was focused on the theme of death, as you’ll read in some of her poems, following. Here are ten poems by Gabriela Mistral about life, love, and death, both in their original Spanish, and in English translation.

Canción de la Muerte (Song of Death), 1914

La vieja Empadronadora,

la mañosa Muerte,

cuando vaya de camino,

mi niño encuentre.

La que huele a los nacidos

y husmea su leche,

encuentre sales y harinas,

mi leche no encuentre.

La Contra-Madre del Mundo,

la Convida-gentes,

por las playas y las rutas

no halle al inocente.

El nombre de su bautismo

– la flor con que crece –

lo olvide la memoriosa,

lo pierda, la Muerte.

De vientos, de sal y arenas

se vuelve demente,

y trueque, la desvariada,

el Oeste, y el Este.

Niño y madre los confunda

los mismo que peces,

y en el dia y en la hora

a mi sola encuentre.

 

Song of Death 

Old Woman Census-taker, 

Death the Trickster,

when you’re going along,

don’t you meet my baby.

Sniffing at newborns,

smelling for the milk,

find salt, find cornmeal,

don’t find my milk.

Anti-Mother of the world, 

People-Collector — 

on the beaches and byways,

don’t meet that child.

The name he was baptized, 

that flower he grows with, 

forget it, Rememberer. 

Lose it, Death.

Let wind and salt and sand 

drive you crazy, mix you up

so you can’t tell

East from West,

or mother from child,

like fish in the sea. 

And on the day, at the hour, 

find only me.

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See also: 8 Fascinating Facts about Gabriela Mistral

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Dame la Mano (Give Me Your Hand)

Dame la mano y danzaremos; 

dame la mano y me amarás. 

Como una sola flor seremos, 

como una flor, y nada más…

El mismo verso cantaremos, 

al mismo paso bailarás. 

Como una espiga ondularemos,

como una espiga, y nada más.

Te llama Rosa y yo Esperanza:

pero tu nombre olvidarás,

porque seremos una danza

en la colina, y nada más…

 
Give Me Your Hand

Give me your hand and give me your love,

give me your hand and dance with me.

A single flower, and nothing more,

a single flower is all we’ll be.

Keeping time in the dance together,

you’ll be singing the song with me.

Grass in the wind, and nothing more,

grass in the wind is all we’ll be.

I’m called Hope and you’re called Rose:

but losing our names we’ll both go free,

a dance on the hills, and nothing more,

a dance on the hills is all we’ll be.

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Canto que Amabas (What You Loved)

Yo canto lo que tú amabas, vida mía,

Por si te acercas y escuchas, vida mía,

por si te acuerdas del mundo que viviste,

al atardecer yo canto, sombra mía.

Yo no quiero enmudecer, vida mía.

¿Cómo sin mi grito fiel me hallarías?

¿Cuál señal, cuál me declara, vida mía?

Soy la misma que fue tuya, vida mía.

Ni lenta ni trascordada ni perdida.

Acude al anochecer, vida mía,

ven recordando un canto, vida mía,

si la canción reconoces de aprendida

y si mi nombre recuerdas todavía.

Te espero sin plazo y sin tiempo.

No temas noche, nebline ni aguacero.

Acude con sendero o sin sendero.

Llámame a donde tú eres, alma mía,

y marcha recto hacia mí, compañero.

 
What You Loved

Life of my life, what you loved I sing.

If you’re near, if you’re listening,

think of me now in the evening:

shadow in shadows, hear me sing.

Life of my life, I can’t be still.

What is a story we never tell?

How can you find me unless I call?

Life of my life, I haven’t changed,

not turned aside and not estranged.

Come to me as the shadows grow long,

come, life of my life, if you know the song

you used to know, if you know my name.

I and the song are still the same.

Beyond time or place I keep the faith.

Follow a path or follow no path,

never fearing the night, the wind,

call to me, come to me, now at the end,

walk with me, life of my life, my friend.

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Learn more about Gabriela Mistral

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Elogio de la sal (In Praise of Salt)

La sal que, en los mojones de la playa de Eva del año 3000,

parece frente cuadrada y hombros cuadrados,

sin paloma tibia ni rose viva en la mano

y de la roca que brilla

más que la foca de encima,

capaz de volver toda joya.

La sal que blanquea,

vientre de gaviota y cruje en la pechuga del pingüino

y que en la madreperla juega

con los colores que no son suyos.

La sal es absoluta y pura como la muerte.

La sal que clavetea en la corazón de los buenos

y hasta el de N.S.J.  hará que no se disuelvan en la piedad.

 

In Praise of Salt

The salt, in great mounds on the beach of Eve in the year 3,000,

seems squared off in front and squared off in the back,

holding no warm dove nor living rose in its hand,

and the salt of the rock salt that gleams,

even more than the seal on its peak,

capable of turning everything into a jewel.

The salt that bleaches the seagull’s belly

and crackles in the penguin’s breast,

and that in mother-of-pearl plays

with colors that are not its own.

The salt is absolute and pure as death.

The salt nailed through the hearts of good people,

even the heart of our Lord Jesus Christ, keeps them from dissolving in piety.

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Los cabellos de los niños (Children’s Hair)

Cabellos suaves, cabellos que son toda la suavidad del mundo:

Que seda gozaría yo si no os tuviera sobre el regazo?

Dulce por ella el dia que pasa, dulce el sustento,

dulce el antiguo dolor, solo por unas horas que ellos resbalan entre mis manos.

Ponedlos en mi mejilla;

Revolvedlos en mi regazo como las flores;

dejadme trenzar con ellos, par suavizarlo, mi dolor;

aumentar la luz con ellos, ahora que es moribunda.

Cuando ya sea con Dios, que no me de el ala de un ángel,

para frescar la magulladura de mi corazón;

extienda sobre el azul las cabelleras de los niños que ame,

y pasen ellas en el viento sobre mi rostro eternamente!

 
Children’s Hair

Soft hair, hair that is all the softness of the world:

without you lying in my lap, what silk would I enjoy?

sweet the passing day because of that silk, sweet the sustenance,

sweet the ancient sadness, at least for the few hours it slips between my hands.

Touch it to my cheek;

wind it in my lap like flowers;

let me braid it, to soften my pain,

to magnify the light with it, now that it is dying.

When I am with God someday, I do not want an angel’s wing

to cool my heart’s bruises;

I want, stretches against the sky, the hair of the children I loved,

to let it blow in the wind against my face eternally!

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Poemas de las madres (Poems of the Mothers)

Me ha besado y yo soy otra;

por el latido que duplica el de mis venas;

otra; por el aliento que se percibe entre el aliento.  

Mi vientre ya es noble como mi corazón …

Y hasta encuentro en mi hálito una exhalación de flores:

¡todo por aquel que descansa en mis entrañas blandamente,

como el rocío sobre la hierba!

 

Poems of the Mothers

I was kissed, and I am othered: another,

because of the pulse that echoes the pulse in my veins;

another, because of the breath I feel within my breath.

My belly, now, is as noble as my heart …

And now I feel in my own breathing an exhalation of flowers:

all because of the one who rests inside me gently,

as the dew on the grass!

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El arte (Art)

I. La belleza

Una canción es una herida amor que nos abrieron las cosas.

A ti, hombre, basto, solo te turba un vientre de mujer,

un montón de carne de mujer. Nosotros vamos turbados,

nosotros recibimos la lanzada de toda la belleza del mundo,

porque la noche estrellada nos fue amor tan agudo como un amor de carne.

Una canción es una respuesta que damos a la hermosura del mundo.

Y la damos con un temblor incontenible,

como el tuyo delante de un seno desnudo.

Y de volver en sangre esta caricia de la Belleza,

y de responder al llamamiento innumerable de ella por los caminos,

vamos más febriles, vamos más flagelados que tú,

nosotros, los puros.

 
Art

I. Beauty

A song is the wound of love that things open in us.

Coarse man, the only thing that arouses you is the woman’s womb,

a mass of female flesh. But our disquiet is continuous;

we feel the thrust of all the beauty of the world,

because the starry night was for us a love as sharp as carnal love.

A song is a response we offer to the beauty of the world.

And we offer that response with an uncontainable tremor,

just as you tremble before a naked breast.

And because we return, in blood, this caress of Beaut,

and because we respond to Beauty’s infinite calling through the paths,

we walk more timorously, more reviled than you:

we, the pure.

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El girasol (The Sunflower)

“Ya se el de arriba. Pero las hierbas enanas no lo ven

y creen que soy yo quien las calienta

y les da la lamedura de la tarde”.

Yo –ya veis que mi tallo es duro– no les contestado

ni con una inclinación de cabeza.

Nada engaño mio, pero las dejo encarnarse

porque nunca alcanzarán a aquel que, por otra parte,

las quemaría, y a mi en cambio hasta me tocan los pies.

Es bastante esclavitud hacer el son. Este volverse al Oriente y al ocaso

y ester terriblemente atento a la posición de aquel,

cansa mi nunca, que no agil.

Ellas, las hierbas, siguen cantando allá abajo:

“El sol tiene cuatrocientos hojas de oro,

un gran disco oscuro al centro y un tallo soberano”.

Las oigo, pero no les doy señal de afirmación con mi cabeza.

Me callo; pero se, para mi, que es el de arriba.

 
The Sunflower

“I know for certain it is he, the one up above. But the little plants don’t see him,

and they believe it is I who warms them

and licks them all afternoon.”

I –whose stem is hard, as you can see– I never answer them,

not even with a nod of the head.

It’s no deception on my part, but I let them deceive themselves,

because they will never reach him, who would burn them in any case.

As for me, on the other hand, they hardly even reach my feet.

It’s a form of great servitude to be the sun.

This turning towards the East and towards the sunset,

constantly attending to his position,

tires my neck, which is not so limber.

And they, the little grasses, they continue to sing down there:

“The sun has four hundred golden leaves,

a great dark disc at the center, and a sovereign stem.”

I hear them, but I offer them no confirming sign with my head.

I keep quiet, but as for me. I know for certain it is he, the one up above.

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Pan (Bread)

Vicio de la costumbre. Maravilla de la infancia,

sentido mágico de las materias y los elementos:

harina, sal, aceite, agua, fuego.

Momentos de vision pura, de audicion pura, de palpacion pura.

La conciencia de la vida en un momento.

Todos los recuerdos en torno de un pan.

Una sensación muy fuerte de vida trae consigo

por no se que aproximacion interior, un pensamiento igualmente poderoso de la muerte.

El pensamiento de la vida banaliza desde el momento en que no se mezcla al de la muerte.

Los vitales puros son grandes superficiales o pequeños paganos.

El pagano se ocupó de las dos cosas.

 

Bread

Vice of habituation. Wonder of childhood,

magical feeling of raw materials and elements:

flour, salt, oil, water, fire.

Moments of pure vision, pure hearing, pure touch. 

Consciousness of life at one moment.

All the memories revolve around bread.

It carries an intense sense of life, and also,

through I don’t know what internal association, an equally strong sense of death.

The thought of life turns banal from the moment it isn’t blended with the thought of death.

The pure essentials are superficial giants or little pagans.

The pagan paid attention to both.

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Elogio de la sal (In Praise of Salt)

La sal que, en los mojones de la playa de Eva del año 3000,

parece frente cuadrada y hombros cuadrados,

sin paloma tibia ni rosa viva en la mano

y de la roca que brilla más que la foca encima,

capaz de volver toda joya.

La sal que blanquea, vientre de gaviota

y crujie en la pechuga del pingüino

y que en la madreperla juega con los colores que no son suyos.

La sal es absoluta y pura como la muerte.  

La sal que clavetea en la corazón de los buenos

y hasta el de N.S.J. hará que no se disuelvan en la piedad.

 

In Praise of Salt

The salt, in great mounds on the beach of Eve in the year 3,000,

seems squared off in front and squared off in the back,

holding no warm dove nor living rose in its hand,

and the salt of the rock salt that gleams,

even more than the seal on its peak,

capable of turning everything into a jewel.

The salt that bleaches the seagull’s belly

and crackles in the penguin’s breast,

and that in mother-of-pearl plays with colors that are not its own.

The salt is absolute and pure as death.

The salt nailed through the hearts of good people,

even the heart of our Lord Jesus Christ, keeps them from dissolving in piety.

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Gabriela Mistral page on Amazon

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

The post 10 Poems by Gabriela Mistral About Life, Love, and Death appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.

8 Fascinating Facts About Gabriela Mistral, Latina Nobel Prize Winner

Gabriela Mistral, born Lucila Godoy Alcayaga (April 7, 1889 – January 10, 1957), was a Chilean poet, educator, diplomat, and feminist. She grew up living in poverty with her family in a small Andean village of Montegrande and developed her father’s gift for teaching despite having dropped out of school at age fifteen.

After multiple notable works including Sonetos de la muerte (1914) and Lagar (1954), Mistral received national recognition and praise as her was translated into various languages from her native Spanish. Though she is best known for being the first Latin American woman to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, she did so much more during her remarkable life. Here are some fascinating facts about Gabriela Mistral that may inspire you to learn more about her, and better yet, to read her work.

She was involved in diplomatic activity

Mistral was heavily involved with diplomatic activity as she served as honorary consul at Madrid, Lisbon, Nice, Brazil, and in Los Angeles. In addition, she also served as a representative of Latin America in the Institute for Intellectual Cooperation of the League of Nations and the United Nations. Thanks to her participation in these activities, she was able to travel to nearly every major country in Europe and Latin America.

 
Her work was influenced by heartbreak

Mistral met her first love, a young railroad worker named Romelio Ureta, in 1906. Sadly, he killed himself in 1909. After Ureta’s death, she found love again, though it didn’t last very long —  her second love married somebody else.

After getting her heart badly broken twice, she felt inspired to write about her painful emotions . Writing about her lover’s suicide allowed her to gain a different perspective on death than the previous generations of Latin American poets. This is when she created her first recognized literary work in 1914, Sonetos de la muerte.

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Learn more about Gabriela Mistral

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Much of her later poetry was focused on the theme of death

After winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1945, Mistral’s heart completely broke once again after the suicide of her nephew who she adopted and raised as her son. Around the same time, her good friends Stefan Zweig and his wife also committed suicide.

While trying to cope with the loss of many loved ones, Mistral was dealing with a health issue as well. As a result of her diabetes diagnosis, most of her last works implied that she was awaiting death and had complete faith in God to leave it in his hands.

 
Her pen name was inspired by two of her favorite poets

After winning the Juegos Florales in the Chilean capital, Santiago, she used her given name, Lucila Godoy, at times for her publications. Shortly after, she then formed her pseudonym from two of her favorite poets, Gabriele D’Annunzio and Frédéric Mistral in 1908. From then on, she has been using the pen name, Gabriela Mistral, for most of her writing.

 
Some believe she was a “closet lesbian”

During the 1970s and 80s, Gabriela Mistral’s image was presented by the military dictatorship of Pinochet as the symbol of “submission to the authority” and “social order.” Licia Fiol-Matta, an assistant professor of Spanish and Latin American Cultures at Barnard College challenges her saint-like celibate image and claims that she was a closet lesbian.

Chilean poet Volodia Teitelboim claims that he hasn’t found any indications that she might be a lesbian in her writing. In the early 2000s, some love letters were discovered between Mistral and a male poet after a thesis of the lesbianism of Mistral was put forward. She died in 1957 with Doris Dana by her side. Dana inherited her estate after Mistral’s death.

 
She used her poetry as a voice for the voiceless

Growing up in poverty made Mistral sympathetic to those who were vulnerable. She also defended the freedoms of democracy and pushed for peace during social, political, and ideological conflicts, not only in Latin America but around the world.

She took the side of those who were mistreated by society, including children, women, Native Americans, Jews, workers, war victims, and the poor. She turned to poetry, newspaper articles, letters, and her actions as she was a Chilean representative in international organizations. Her main concern was the future of Latin America and its cultures, specifically in native groups.

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The Bible was one of the books that influenced her the most

Mistral’s grandmother was an extremely religious person. As a child, Mistral was encouraged by her grandmother to learn and recite passages from the Bible, specifically the Psalms of David. Eventually, she was able to recite passages by heart. Mistral later said in her poem, Mis Libros, that the Bible was one of the books that influenced her writing the most.

 
She died of pancreatic cancer in New York City

Toward the end of an active life, Mistral became unable to travel due to her declining health. She developed diabetes in 1944 and sought medical aid in the United States in 1946.

Later on, she was given more devastating news. Mistral was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and passed away in Hempstead Hospital in New York City at the age of sixty-seven in 1967. She was buried in Chile where thousands of Chileans gathered together to mourn the death of a spectacular woman. 

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Was Charlotte Brontë’s “Shirley” an Idealized Portrait of Her Sister Emily?

Shirley, the second published novel by Charlotte Brontë, was published in 1849, still under the pseudonym Currer Bell.  Charlotte had already achieved fame and notoriety with the wildly successful Jane Eyre under her masculine nom de plume. The question we’ll be exploring here is how much of Shirley’s character did Charlotte draw from her sister Emily’s.

A more challenging novel to read than Jane Eyre, Shirley: A Tale is now considered a prime example of the mid-19th century “social novel.” The social novels that emerged from that period were works of fiction dealing with themes like labor injustice, abuse of and bias against women, and poverty.

Shirley is set in Charlotte’s native Yorkshire in 1811 and 1812, and takes place against the scene of the Luddite uprisings in the Yorkshire textile industry. It must have been a lonely endeavor for Charlotte, who, having gotten used to her sisters Anne and Emily as writing companions, was now the only surviving sibling. Anne, Emily, and their brother Branwell had not long before et their untimely deaths.

 

The rise of the social novel

A fellow novelist who became known for the genre of social novel was Elizabeth Gaskell, who, incidentally, was also well known for her Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857). This posthumous biography that helped cement its subject’s literary legacy shortly after her death. Her novel Mary Barton, which preceded Shirley by just a year, and termed an “industrial novel,” explored the relationships between workers and their employers.

Since Charlotte may have already been hard at work on Shirley, it’s hard to tell how much she may have been influenced by Mrs. Gaskell’s book by the time of its publication.

What makes Shirley fascinating is that Charlotte had told Mrs. Gaskell that the character of Shirley is how she imagined Emily may have turned out if she had enjoyed the benefits of wealth and privilege. Another character, Caroline Helstone, may have been loosely inspired by Anne, though others thought she may have been based on Charlotte’s dear friend Ellen Nussey.

Following is an excerpt from Emily Brontë by Mary F. Robinson. Diving back to 1883, it presents an insightful exploration of the parallel between the real-life Emily, in all her odd complexity, and the character of Shirley:

 

A novel with a grace and beauty of its own

Exxcerpted and condensed from Emily Brontë by Mary F. Robinson, 1883: Shirley has never attained the steady success of her masterpiece, Villette, neither did it meet with the furor which greeted the first appearance of Jane Eyre. It is, indeed, inferior to either work; a very quiet study of Yorkshire life, almost pettifogging in its interest in ecclesiastical squabbles, almost absurd in the feminine inadequacy of its heroes.

And yet Shirley has a grace and beauty of its own. This it derives from the charm of its heroines—Caroline Helstone, a lovely portrait in character of Charlotte’s dearest friend, and Shirley herself, a fancy likeness of Emily Brontë.

Emily Brontë, but under very different conditions. No longer poor, no longer thwarted, no longer acquainted with misery and menaced by untimely death; not thus, but as a loving sister would fain have seen her, beautiful, triumphant, the spoiled child of happy fortune.

Yet in these altered circumstances Shirley keeps her likeness to Charlotte’s hardworking sister; the disguise, haply baffling those who, like Mrs. Gaskell, “have not a pleasant impression of Emily Brontë,” is very easily penetrated by those who love her …

Charlotte’s portrait gives us another view, and fortunately there are still a few alive of the not numerous friends of Emily Brontë. Every trait, every reminiscence paints in darker, clearer lines, the impression of character which Shirley leaves upon us. Shirley is indeed the exterior Emily, the Emily that was to be met and known thirty-five years ago, only a little polished, with the angles a little smoothed, by a sister’s anxious care …

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The Brontë sisters, in a painting by their brother, Branwell

Charlotte wrote much about their paths to publication

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An echo of Emily and her fierce dog

But to know how Emily Brontë looked, moved, sat and spoke, we still return to Shirley. A host of corroborating memories start up in turning the pages. Who but Emily was always accompanied by a “rather large, strong, and fierce-looking dog, very ugly, being of a breed between a mastiff and a bulldog?” it is familiar to us as Una’s lion; we do not need to be told, Currer Bell, that she always sat on the hearth rug of nights, with her hand on his head, reading a book; we remember well how necessary it was to secure him as an ally in winning her affection.

Has not a dear friend informed us that she first obtained Emily’s heart by meeting, without apparent fear or shrinking, Keeper’s huge springs of demonstrative welcome?

How characteristic, too, the touch that makes her scornful of all that is dominant, dogmatic, avowedly masculine in the men of her acquaintance; and gentleness itself to the poetic Philip Nunnely, the gay, boyish Mr. Sweeting, the sentimental Louis, the lame, devoted boy-cousin who loves her in pathetic canine fashion. That courage, too, was hers.

Not only Shirley’s flesh, but Emily’s, felt the tearing fangs of the mad dog to whom she had charitably offered food and water; not only Shirley’s flesh, but hers, shrank from the light scarlet, glowing tip of the Italian iron with which she straightway cauterized the wound, going quickly into the laundry and operating on herself without a word to any one.

Emily, also, singlehanded and unarmed, punished her great bulldog, Keeper, for his household misdemeanors, in defiance of an express warning not to strike the brute, lest his uncertain temper should rouse him to fly at the striker’s throat. And it was she who fomented his bruises. This prowess and tenderness of Shirley’s is an old story to us.

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Shirley by Charlotte Brontë on Amazon

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More parallels between Shirley and Emily

And Shirley’s love of picturesque and splendid raiment is not without an echo in our memories. It was Emily who, shopping in Bradford with Charlotte and her friend, chose a white stuff patterned with lilac thunder and lightning, to the scarcely concealed horror of her more sober companions.

And she looked well in it; a tall, lithe creature, with a grace half-queenly, half-untamed in her sudden, supple movements, wearing with picturesque negligence her ample purple-splashed skirts; her face clear and pale; her very dark and plenteous brown hair fastened up behind with a Spanish comb; her large grey-hazel eyes, now full of indolent, indulgent humor, now glimmering with hidden meanings, now quickened into flame by a flash of indignation, “a red ray piercing the dew.”

She, too, had Shirley’s taste for the management of business. We remember Charlotte’s disquiet when Emily insisted on investing Miss Branwell’s legacies in York and Midland Railway shares.

“She managed, in a most handsome and able manner for me when I was in Brussels, and prevented by distance from looking after our interests, therefore I will let her manage still and take the consequences. Disinterested and energetic she certainly is; and, if she be not quite so tractable or open to conviction as I could wish, I must remember perfection is not the lot of humanity, and, as long as we can regard those whom we love, and to whom we are closely allied, with profound and never-shaken esteem, it is a small thing that they should vex us occasionally by what appear to us headstrong and unreasonable notions.”

So speaks the kind elder sister, the author of Shirley. But there are some who will never love either type or portrait. Sydney Dobell spoke a bitter half-truth when, ignorant of Shirley’s real identity, he declared: “We have only to imagine Shirley Keeldar poor to imagine her repulsive.”

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See also:Villette by Charlotte Brontë — a Portrait of a Woman in Shadow

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The world has no use for a poor and plain woman

The silenced pride, the thwarted generosity, the unspoken power, the contained passion of such a nature are not qualities which touch the world when it finds them in an obscure and homely woman. Even now, very many will not love a heroine so independent of their esteem. They will resent the frank imperiousness, caring not to please, the unyielding strength, the absence of trivial submissive tendernesses, for which she makes amends by such large humane and generous compassion.

“In Emily’s nature,” says her sister, “the extremes of vigor and simplicity seemed to meet. Under an unsophisticated culture, inartificial taste and an unpretending outside, lay a power and fire that might have informed the brain and kindled the veins of a hero; but she had no worldly wisdom—her powers were unadapted to the practical business of life—she would fail to defend her most manifest rights, to consult her legitimate advantage. An interpreter ought always to have stood between her and the world. Her will was not very flexible and it generally opposed her interest. Her temper was magnanimous, but warm and sudden; her spirit altogether unbending.”

 

Terrible difference between ideas and truth

Disinterested, headstrong, noble Emily Brontë, at this time, while your magical sister was weaving for you, with golden words, a web of fate as fortunate as dreams … you were never to see the brightest things in life. Sisterly love, free solitude, unpraised creation, were to remain your most poignant joys. No touch of love, no hint of fame, no hours of ease, lie for you across the knees of Fate. Neither rose nor laurel will be shed on your coffined form. Meanwhile, your sister writes and dreams for Shirley. Terrible difference between ideas and truth; wonderful magic of the unreal to take their sting from the veritable wounds we endure!

Neither rose nor laurel will we lay reverently for remembrance over the tomb where you sleep; but the flower that was always your own, the wild, dry heather. You, who were, in your sister’s phrase, “moorish, wild and knotty as a root of heath,” you grew to your own perfection on the waste where no laurel rustles its polished leaves, where no sweet, fragile rose ever opened in the heart of June.

But now you live, still singing of freedom, the undying soul, of courage and loneliness, another voice in the wind, another glory on the mountain-tops, Emily Brontë, the author of Wuthering Heights.

Condensed from Emily Brontë by Mary F. Robinson, 1883. Follow this link to read the entire chapter.

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