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Quotes from Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen

Northanger Abbey was actually the first novel that Jane Austen completed with the hopes of publication, in 1803. It was first titled Susan and she sold the copyright to a London publisher for a pittance. The publisher held on to it without going to print. It was tied up until 1816 when Jane’s brother Henry managed to buy it back.

Jane spent some time revising the original, renaming her heroine Catherine, but by the time it was published in 1817, she died. That year, another of her novels, Persuasion, was published as well. Northanger Abbey is considered a coming-of-age novel in which Catherine Morland, the young and rather naïve heroine, learns the ways of the world.

In this, as she does in her other novels, Jane Austen critiques young women who put too much stock in appearances, wealth, and social acceptance through the character of Catherine, who values happiness but not at the cost of compromising one’s values and morals.

Set in Bath, England, the fashionable resort city where the Austens lived for a time, Northanger Abbey has been called “the most joyous of Jane Austen’s novels and is an early work conceived as a pastiche of the melodramatic excesses of the Gothic novel … the result makes the social and romantic trials of Catherine Morland a delight to follow.”

The following quotes reflect the fun Jane Austen had with her characters, though as always, it’s not just frivolous. She manages to imbue insightful commentary into every delightful line of text and dialog.

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“There is nothing I would not do for those who are really my friends. I have no notion of loving people by halves, it is not my nature.”

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“The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.” 

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“A mother would have been always present. A mother would have been a constant friend; her influence would have been beyond all other. ”

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You might also enjoy: 

Memorable Jane Austen Quotes from Her Novels and Letters

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“It is only a novel … or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language.” 

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“If adventures will not befall a young lady in her own village, she must seek them abroad.” 

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“Everybody allows that the talent of writing agreeable letters is peculiarly female. Nature may have done something, but I am sure it must be essentially assisted by the practice of keeping a journal.” 

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“No man is offended by another man’s admiration of the woman he loves; it is the woman only who can make it a torment.” 

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“I assure you. I have no notion of treating men with such respect. That is the way to spoil them.”

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See also: Quotes from Emma by Jane Austen

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“You think me foolish to call instruction a torment, but if you had been as much used as myself to hear poor little children first learning their letters and then learning to spell, if you had ever seen how stupid they can be for a whole morning together, and how tired my poor mother is at the end of it, as I am in the habit of seeing almost every day of my life at home, you would allow that to torment and to instruct might sometimes be used as synonymous words.”

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“To come with a well-informed mind is to come with an inability of administering to the vanity of others, which a sensible person would always wish to avoid. A woman especially, if she have the misfortune of knowing anything, should conceal it as well as she can.” 

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“It requires uncommon steadiness of reason to resist the attraction of being called the most charming girl in the world.”

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“To look almost pretty is an acquisition of higher delight to a girl who has been looking plain the first fifteen years of her life than a beauty from her cradle can ever receive.”

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“Friendship is certainly the finest balm for the pangs of disappointed love.” 

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“What one means one day, you know, one may not mean the next. Circumstances change, opinions alter.”

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“If I could not be persuaded into doing what I thought wrong, I will never be tricked into it.”

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“The advantages of natural folly in a beautiful girl have been already set forth by the capital pen of a sister author; and to her treatment of the subject I will only add, in justice to men, that though to the larger and more trifling part of the sex, imbecility in females is a great enhancement of their personal charms, there is a portion of them too reasonable and too well informed themselves to desire anything more in woman than ignorance.” 

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Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen on Amazon

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“Catherine hoped at least to pass uncensured through the crowd. As for admiration, it was always very welcome when it came, but she did not depend on it.”

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“You men have none of you any hearts.”

‘If we have not hearts, we have eyes; and they give us torment enough.”

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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 Quotes from Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.

Quotes from Mansfield Park, Jane Austen’s Most Controversial Novel

Mansfield Park by Jane Austen (1814) is the third published novel by the esteemed British author. It’s the story of Fanny Price, who is sent by her impoverished family to be raised in the household of a wealthy aunt and uncle. The narrative follows her into adulthood and comments on class, family ties, marriage, the status of women, and even British colonialism.

The novel went through two editions before Austen’s death in 1817, but didn’t receive any public reviews until 1821. Critical reception for this novel, from that time forward, has been the most mixed among Austen’s works, and it’s considered her most controversial.

In an introduction to a contemporary edition, Kathryn Sutherland portrays Mansfield Park as a darker work than Austen’s other novels, because it challenges “the very values (of tradition, stability, retirement and faithfulness) it appears to endorse.” Here are some quotes by Jane Austen that illuminate Mansfield Park, a novel very much worth savoring:

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“Good-humoured, unaffected girls, will not do for a man who has been used to sensible women. They are two distinct orders of being.” 

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“I am very strong. Nothing ever fatigues me, but doing what I do not like.” 

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“Give a girl an education, and introduce her properly into the world, and ten to one but she has the means of settling well, without farther expense to anybody.”

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“There will be little rubs and disappointments everywhere, and we are all apt to expect too much; but then, if one scheme of happiness fails, human nature turns to another; if the first calculation is wrong, we make a second better: we find comfort somewhere.” 

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“Family squabbling is the greatest evil of all.”

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Memorable Jane Austen Quotes From Her Novels and Letters

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“Selfishness must always be forgiven you know, because there is no hope of a cure.”

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“You have qualities which I had not before supposed to exist in such a degree in any human creature. You have some touches of the angel in you beyond what—not merely beyond what one sees, because one never sees anything like it—but beyond what one fancies might be.”

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“We have all a better guide in ourselves, if we would attend to it, than any other person can be.” 

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“Here’s harmony!” said she; “here’s repose! Here’s what may leave all painting and all music behind, and what poetry only can attempt to describe! Here’s what may tranquilize every care, and lift the heart to rapture! When I look out on such a night as this, I feel as if there could be neither wickedness nor sorrow in the world; and there certainly would be less of both if the sublimity of Nature were more attended to, and people were carried more out of themselves by contemplating such a scene.”

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“To know him in bits and scraps is common enough; to know him pretty thoroughly is, perhaps, not uncommon; but to read him well aloud is no everyday talent.”

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10 Memorable Quotes from Pride and Prejudice

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“Selfishness must always be forgiven you know, because there is no hope of a cure.” 

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“…  He recommended the books which charmed her leisure hours, he encouraged her taste, and corrected her judgment; he made reading useful by talking to her of what she read, and heightened its attraction by judicious praise.” 

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“Life seems but a quick succession of busy nothings.” 

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“Oh! Do not attack me with your watch. A watch is always too fast or too slow. I cannot be dictated to by a watch.”

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“Of course I love her, but there are as many forms of love as there are moments in time.”

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“Let us have the luxury of silence.”

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“I cannot think well of a man who sports with any woman’s feelings; and there may often be a great deal more suffered than a stander-by can judge of.”

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“I am worn out with civility. I have been talking incessantly all night with nothing to say.”

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“If any one faculty of our nature may be called more wonderful than the rest, I do think it is memory … The memory is sometimes so retentive, so serviceable, so obedient; at others, so bewildered and so weak; and at others again, so tyrannic, so beyond control! We are, to be sure, a miracle every way; but our powers of recollecting and of forgetting do seem peculiarly past finding out.”

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Mansfield Park by Jane Austen on Amazon

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“Human nature needs more lessons than a weekly sermon can convey.”

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“She was not often invited to join in the conversation of the others, nor did she desire it. Her own thoughts and reflections were habitually her best companions.”

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“She was of course only too good for him. But as nobody minds having what is too good for them, he was very steadily earnest in the pursuit of the blessing.”

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“So long divided and so differently situated, the ties of blood were little more than nothing.”

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“A fondness for reading, properly directed, must be an education in itself.” 

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“A large income is the best recipe for happiness I ever heard of.” 

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“There is nothing like employment, active indispensable employment, for relieving sorrow.”

 

*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 Quotes from Mansfield Park, Jane Austen’s Most Controversial Novel appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.

Lady of the Manor: Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Shuttle (1907)

When The Shuttle by Frances Hodgson Burnett was published in 1907, she was already the successful author of Little Lord Fauntleroy, The Making of a Marchioness, A Little Princess, and some two dozen other books for children and adults. In the course of her career, she produced some fifty novels. Of these, few but the children’s classics just mentioned, plus A Secret Garden, published in 1911, are still widely read.

In 2007 Persephone books republished The Shuttle, an entertaining story of American heiresses who marry English aristocrats. From the Persephone catalog:

“The Shuttle, which is five hundred pages long and a page-turner for every one of them, is about far more than the process by which an English country house can be brought back to life with the injection of transatlantic money (there is some particularly interesting detail about the new life breathed into the garden) …

Above all it is about Bettina Vanderpoel. She is the reason why this is such a successful, entertaining and interesting novel – one could almost say that she is one of the great heroines, on a par with Elizabeth Bennett, Becky Sharp, and Isabel Archer.

This is because she is so intelligent and so enterprising – she has the normal feminine qualities but a strong business sense, inherited from her father, and instinctive management skills (as we would now call them).” Read the rest of the synopsis and history of The Shuttle at Persephone Books.

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The following excerpt is excerpted and adapted from “Lady of the Manor” by Angelica Shirley Carpenter, chapter seven of the book In the Garden: Essays in Honor of Frances Hodgson Burnett, edited by Angelica Shirley Carpenter, published by The Scarecrow Press, Inc. © 2006.

In 1898 Frances Hodgson Burnett leased a country house in Kent. “It is a charming place,” she wrote to her son Vivian, who was a senior at Harvard, “with a nicely timbered park and a beautiful old walled kitchen garden.”

At Maytham Hall Frances got her first chance to live a lifestyle she had long idealized, as lady of the manor, and her first opportunity to create a garden of her own. Her experiences at Maytham, good and bad, inspired several books.

When she came to Maytham, the famous author was forty-eight years old and newly divorced. Her rouge and her dyed hair, described as hennaed or golden, were shocking for the time, as was her habit of smoking cigarettes, but her blue eyes and animated manner of talking were considered attractive. 

Frances was accompanied by Stephen Townesend, a handsome British doctor ten years her junior. Frances and Stephen had lived together on and off for a decade, as he gave up medicine to become her business manager and partner for many projects.

“Uncle Stephen takes care of my business,” Frances had written to Vivian in 1891, “. . . but as for the rest, I feel as if I was the one who had to take care of him. He is so delicate and nervous and irritable, poor boy.”

Frances recalled her arrival in Kent in The Shuttle, a novel begun at Maytham in 1900. In this book a young American bride travels by carriage from the train station to her husband’s country home in England:

“Sometimes she saw the sweet wooded, rolling lands made lovelier by the homely farmhouses and cottages enclosed and sheltered by thick hedges and trees; once or twice they drove past a park enfolding a great house guarded by its huge sentinel oaks and beeches; once the carriage passed through an adorable little village, where children played on the green and a square-towered grey church seemed to watch over the steep-roofed cottages and creeper-covered vicarage.”

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In the Garden: Essays in Honor of Frances Hodgson Burnett on Amazon

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“The house is excellent — “ Frances wrote to Vivian, “paneled, square hall, library, billiard room, morning room, stables, two entrance lodges, and a square tower on the roof, from which we can see the English Channel.”

In The Shuttle, Frances described how Maytham’s walled garden looked when she arrived, in the spring: “Paths and beds were alike overgrown with weeds, but some strong, early-blooming things were fighting for life, refusing to be strangled.

Against the beautiful old red walls, over which age had stolen with a wonderful grey bloom, venerable fruit trees were spread and nailed, and here and there showed their bloom.”

Frances had the garden cleared and then planted. Though she employed gardeners, she enjoyed doing some of the work herself. “The calm here is good for me,” she wrote to Vivian at summer’s end. As winter approached, she studied seed catalogues.

In her second spring at Maytham she planted roses to grow up walls and tree trunks. In The Secret Garden, we see her vision realized as Mary first enters the garden:

“There were . . . trees in the garden, and one of the things which made the place look strangest and loveliest was that climbing roses had run all over them and swung down long tendrils which made light swaying curtains, and here and there they had caught at each other or at a far-reaching branch and had crept from one tree to another and made lovely bridges of themselves.”

But Frances’ delight in country life was overshadowed by her growing unhappiness. “Stephen was proving exceedingly hard to handle,” Vivian wrote later. “He was taking a position with regard to their association that had in it a suggestion of domineering ownership she did not understand. It frightened her.”

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The title The Shuttle refers to steamships that sail back and forth across the Atlantic, weaving American and British cultures together. The novel tells of an unhappy marriage between a rich, innocent American girl and a nasty, older, impoverished British lord.

Though Frances was older than Stephen and hardly innocent, the book offers many insights into their relationship.

The book begins in New York, where Sir Nigel behaves himself just long enough to win the hand of young Rosalie Vanderpoel. As their ship steams away from the dock, he reveals his true colors. “‘What a deuce of a row Americans make,’ he said. “It will be a positive rest to be in a country where the women do not cackle and shriek with laughter.'”

Rosalie soon realizes that her marriage is a mistake. “Her self-reproach was as great as her terror,” Frances wrote.

The Shuttle describes “a manor house reigning over an old English village.” Rosalie helps the poor villagers, who are her husband’s tenants. “I suppose it gratifies your vanity to play the Lady Bountiful,” sneers Sir Nigel, but Rosalie’s good deeds console her, and in real life, Frances took pride in the same work. She held fêtes for the children and visited poor families, offering help.

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See also: 4 Classic Books by Frances Hodgson Burnett

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Like Sir Nigel, Stephen was moody and demanding. He behaved better in the presence of company and Frances’ house parties became famous. Her guests took tea on the lawn, strolled under parasols through the gardens, sang and danced, dressed in fancy costumes, played cards and other games, and took afternoon rides in the Victoria.

In 1900 Frances married Stephen, making headlines on both sides of the Atlantic. Soon she wrote to her sister Edith that Stephen “scarcely seems sane half the time. . . . He will work up scenes. He will not let things alone.”

“You will do as I order you,” Sir Nigel tells Rosalie in The Shuttle, “and learn to behave yourself as a decent married woman should. You will learn to obey your husband and respect his wishes and control your devilish American temper.”

Frances wrote to Edith about Stephen: “He talks about my ‘duties as a wife’ as if I had married him of my own accord — as if I had not been forced and blackguarded and blackmailed into it. It is my duty to end my acquaintance with all such people as he suspects of not admiring him … It is my duty to make my property over to him … It is my duty to work very hard and above all to love him very much and insist on his writing plays with me.”

In The Shuttle Frances described a husband’s blackmail. Sir Nigel knows that women are “trained to give in to anything rather than be bullied in public, to accede in the end to any demand rather than endure the shame of a certain kind of scene made before servants, and a certain kind of insolence used to relatives and guests.” Stephen used the same techniques, raving in front of her butler and making scenes before her maid.

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The Shuttle by Frances Hodgson Burnett on Amazon

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All the classic signs of abuse, not so well known in Frances’ lifetime, are catalogued in The Shuttle. Sir Nigel isolates Rosalie from her family and friends, refusing to let her parents see her when they travel to England. Stephen tried to do this with Frances, too.

In The Shuttle, after twelve terrible years, Rosalie’s younger sister comes from America to England to rescue her. It must have satisfied Frances to show the courageous Betty standing up to her villainous brother-in-law. “All your life,” she tells him, “you have counted upon getting your own way because you saw that people–especially women–have a horror of public scenes, and will submit to almost anything to avoid them …

That is true very often, but not always … I, for instance, would let you make a scene with me anywhere you chose–in Bond Street–in Piccadilly–on the steps of Buckingham Palace … and you would gain nothing you wanted by it—nothing.”

“Damn her!” Sir Nigel cries out later. “If I had hung her up and cut her into strips she would have died staring at me with her big eyes–without uttering a sound” In the book’s climax, Betty hides in a hedge as he hunts her, to rape her or kill her or both. Frances lets the reader imagine his exact plan.

In 1902, Frances fled to New York, checking herself into a sanitarium. Stephen soon followed, but in this refuge Frances finally found the courage to tell him that the marriage was over. Probably she paid him off.

With Stephen gone, Frances returned to Kent. Elegantly attired in white gowns and hats, she spent summers writing in her rose garden. The only disturbance came from a robin. It perched on her hat, she said, and took crumbs from her hand. 

Frances had to leave Maytham in 1908 when her landlord put it up for sale. She could not afford to buy it, but she soon built a home of her own, at Plandome, on Long Island. The Shuttle, that painful and most difficult novel, paid for the whole place. The New York house had a wonderful garden, but nothing would ever compare to her rose garden at Maytham. So she recreated it for herself and her readers in The Secret Garden.

Sources for this essay may be found in the book, In the Garden: Essays in Honor of Frances Hodgson Burnett, edited by Angelica Shirley Carpenter.

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Angelica Shirley Carpenter has master’s degrees from the University of Illinois in education and library science. Curator emerita of the Arne Nixon Center for the Study of Children’s Literature at California State University, Fresno, she lives in Fresno.

She has published five previous books about authors: Frances Hodgson Burnett (two books), Robert Louis Stevenson, Lewis Carroll, and L. Frank Baum, who was Matilda’s son-in-law. A past president of the International Wizard of Oz Club, she is active in the Lewis Carroll Society of North America and the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators. Find out more about her at angelicacarpenter.com.

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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 Lady of the Manor: Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Shuttle (1907) appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.

Memorable Jane Austen Quotes From Her Novels and Letters

Jane Austen (1775 – 1817), the beloved British author, was deeply invested in her craft as a wordsmith. Her talent was recognized early on and valued by her family.

Jane’s father, a country rector, and her brothers played key roles in getting her works published at a time when it was considered unseemly for women to put themselves forth in business.

She longed to see her work in print, regardless of whether or not it would gain her fame or fortune — but getting it published was important to her, contrary to the myth about her extreme modesty.

Many memorable quotes emerged from her six published books and surviving letters. Here are some of our favorite Jane Austen quotes.

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Sense and Sensibility (1811)

More quotes from Sense and Sensibility

“People always live forever when there is an annuity to be paid them.” 

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“Know your own happiness. You want nothing but patience— or give it a more fascinating name, call it hope.” 

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“It isn’t what we say or think that defines us, but what we do.” 

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“The more I know of the world, the more I am convinced that I shall never see a man whom I can really love. I require so much!”

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“Know your own happiness. You want nothing but patience — or give it a more fascinating name, call it hope.”

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“It is not time or opportunity that is to determine intimacy;—it is disposition alone. Seven years would be insufficient to make some people acquainted with each other, and seven days are more than enough for others.” 

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“I wish, as well as everybody else, to be perfectly happy; but, like everybody else, it must be in my own way.”

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Pride and Prejudice (1813)

More quotes from Pride and Prejudice

“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.”

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“I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading! How much sooner one tires of any thing than of a book! When I have a house of my own, I shall be miserable if I have not an excellent library.” 

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“A lady’s imagination is very rapid; it jumps from admiration to love, from love to matrimony in a moment.” 

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“There are few people whom I really love, and still fewer of whom I think well. The more I see of the world, the more am I dissatisfied with it; and every day confirms my belief of the inconsistency of all human characters, and of the little dependence that can be placed on the appearance of merit or sense.”

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“I must learn to be content with being happier than I deserve.” 

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“Vanity and pride are different things, though the words are often used synonymously. A person may be proud without being vain. Pride relates more to our opinion of ourselves, vanity to what we would have others think of us.”

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“An unhappy alternative is before you, Elizabeth. From this day you must be a stranger to one of your parents. Your mother will never see you again if you do not marry Mr. Collins, and I will never see you again if you do.”

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“I dearly love a laugh… I hope I never ridicule what is wise or good. Follies and nonsense, whims and inconsistencies do divert me, I own, and I laugh at them whenever I can.”

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Mansfield Park (1814)

“Good-humoured, unaffected girls, will not do for a man who has been used to sensible women. They are two distinct orders of being.” 

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“Nothing ever fatigues me, but doing what I do not like.” 

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“There will be little rubs and disappointments everywhere, and we are all apt to expect too much; but then, if one scheme of happiness fails, human nature turns to another; if the first calculation is wrong, we make a second better: we find comfort somewhere.” 

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“We have all a better guide in ourselves, if we would attend to it, than any other person can be.” 

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“Selfishness must always be forgiven you know, because there is no hope of a cure.” 

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“Life seems but a quick succession of busy nothings.” 

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“Oh! Do not attack me with your watch. A watch is always too fast or too slow. I cannot be dictated to by a watch.”

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Emma (1815)

More quotes from Emma

“There is no charm equal to tenderness of heart,’ said she afterwards to herself.  ‘There is nothing to be compared to it.  Warmth and tenderness of heart, with an affectionate, open manner, will beat all the clearness of head in the world, for attraction: I am sure it will.” 

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“I always deserve the best treatment because I never put up with any other.” 

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“Why not seize the pleasure at once, how often is happiness destroyed by preparation, foolish preparations.”

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“It is very difficult for the prosperous to be humble.”

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“Seldom, very seldom, does complete truth belong to any human disclosure; seldom can it happen that something is not a little disguised or a little mistaken.” 

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“Were I to fall in love, indeed, it would be a different thing! but I have never been in love; it is not my way, or my nature; and I do not think I ever shall. And, without love, I am sure I should be a fool to change such a situation as mine.”

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Northanger Abbey (1817)

 

“There is nothing I would not do for those who are really my friends. I have no notion of loving people by halves, it is not my nature.”

“The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.” 

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“It is only a novel … or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language.” 

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“No man is offended by another man’s admiration of the woman he loves; it is the woman only who can make it a torment.” 

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“A woman, especially, if she have the misfortune of knowing anything, should conceal it as well as she can.”

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“To look almost pretty is an acquisition of higher delight to a girl who has been looking plain the first fifteen years of her life than a beauty from her cradle can ever receive.”

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“Friendship is certainly the finest balm for the pangs of disappointed love.” 

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You might also like: Jane Austen’s Literary Ambitions

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From Jane Austen’s letters

“I do not want people to be agreeable, as it saves me the trouble of liking them.” (from a letter to her sister Cassandra, 1798)

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“An artist cannot do anything slovenly.” (From a letter to her sister Cassandra, 1798)

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“The pleasures of friendship, of unreserved conversation, of similarity and taste and opinions will make good amends for orange wine.” (From a letter to her sister Cassandra, 1808)

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“I begin already to weigh my words and sentences more than I did, and am looking about for a sentiment, an illustration or a metaphor in every corner of the room. Could my Ideas flow as fast as the rain in the Store closet it would be charming.” (from a letter to her sister Cassandra, 1809)

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“The work [Pride and Prejudice] is rather too light and bright and sparking; it wants shade; it wants to be stretched out here and there with a long chapter — of senses if it could be had; if not, of solemn specious nonsense — about something unconnected with the story… anything that would form a contrast, and bring the reader with increased delight to the playfulness and epigrammatism of the general style.” (From a letter to her sister Cassandra, 1813)

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“I must make use of this opportunity to thank you, dear Sir, for the very high praise you bestow on my other novels. I am too vain to wish to convince you that you have praised them beyond their merits. My greatest anxiety at present is that this fourth work should not disgrace what was good in the others.” (From a letter to a librarian, 1815)  

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“I think I may boast myself to be, with all possible Vanity, the most unlearned, & uninformed Female who ever dared to be an Authoress.” (from a letter to James Stainer, 1815)

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“Wisdom is better than wit, and in the long run will certainly have the laugh on her side.” (From a letter to her niece, 1814)

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Jane Austen page on Amazon 

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Learning to See: A Novel of Dorothea Lange by Elise Hooper

Dorothea Lange‘s influential photography has been collected and displayed in museums and institutions everywhere, yet few know the story of how Dorothea Nutzhorn became Dorothea Lange, social justice activist and pioneering photojournalist. In Elise Hooper’s much anticipated second novel, Learning to See (William Morrow, 2019), Dorothea Lange and her legacy is reimagined in a riveting new light.

In 1918, a fearless 22-year-old arrives in San Francisco with nothing but a friend, her camera, and determination to make her own way as an independent woman. In no time, Dorothea goes from camera shop assistant to celebrated owner of the city’s most prestigious and stylish portrait studio. 

At a time when women were supposed to keep the home fires burning, Dorothea was forging her own path and gaining popularity while doing it.

Shortly after finding her own success, she meets the talented but volatile painter, Maynard Dixon, and becomes his wife. Their early days are colored by their blissful Bohemian lifestyle and mutual artistic inspiration. But by the early 1930s their marriage mirrors the collapse of the American economy and Dorothea must find ways to support her two young sons single-handedly.

As her personal life implodes, she becomes more determined than ever to expose the horrific conditions of the nation’s poor. Taking to the road with her camera, Dorothea creates images that would go on to inspire, reform, and define the era.

Then, when the United States enters World War II, Dorothea chooses to confront the incarceration of thousands of innocent Japanese Americans.

Her ambition and refusal to turn away from the injustices of the world shape her entire catalogue of work, and Learning to See spans the decades of this tumultuous era of American History. Elise Hooper provides a gripping account of the unwavering woman behind the camera who risked everything for art, activism, and love, even when her choices came at a steep price. (— from the publisher)

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You might also enjoy:

A Conversation with Elise Hooper, Author of The Other Alcott

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Q: Why did you decide to write about Dorothea Lange?

A: After I finished writing The Other Alcott, I decided to be practical and find a new story set closer to home. I’d always found Oregon-born Imogen Cunningham’s abstracted flower photographs to be beautiful and wanted to learn more about her. During my research, I discovered that her best friend, Dorothea Lange, had also been a pioneering photographer, although the women had very different views on the purpose of art and photography.

When I learned Lange had photographed the internment of Japanese Americans and that these photos had been impounded due to their subversive points of view, I decided to shift my focus from Cunningham to her best friend, Lange.

In the Pacific Northwest where I live, the internment’s legacy is particularly relevant since many of Seattle’s residents were forced to leave their homes and businesses after FDR issued Executive Order 9066. I wanted to know more about this woman who dared to believe the government was making an unconscionable mistake at a time when some Americans actively participated in discrimination against Japanese Americans or looked the other way.

Midway through writing this novel, the political climate of the United States shifted with the results of the 2016 presidential election. Women took to the streets in January 2017 to express many grievances over the direction of the nation’s policies and values.

This energy and rising political consciousness made me believe Dorothea Lange was more relevant than ever since she was a woman who had experienced a political awakening in her late thirties and acted on it.

As a result of the worsening economic conditions in California and the breadlines threading down the sidewalk underneath her studio window in the 1930s, she became an activist for democratic values and social justice.

Though she sometimes denied any political angle to her art, she often spoke about her desire for her work to prompt conversations about labor, social class, race, and the environment. Her awakening as an activist breathed new life into this project for me and made me more excited than ever to tell her story.

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Migrant Mother (1936) is Dorothea Lange’s most iconic photograph

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Q: It’s interesting that a woman who is best known for taking such poignant images of women and children had such a conflicted family life.

A: Dorothea’s complex and seemingly contradictory feelings about motherhood fascinated me. Her own father abandoned her family when she was twelve, and this left her with a powerful sense of rejection. So deep was her hurt that she rarely spoke of it to anyone. In fact, it wasn’t until after her death that Paul Taylor learned the truth of her father’s absence in her life.

Yet despite the anguish that her father’s abandonment caused her, she fostered her own sons out during the Great Depression, a choice for which her children never forgave her.

No one faulted Maynard and Paul for not attending to their children, but people questioned Dorothea’s choices and this criticism stung her. Her ambitions and talents put her at odds with many of the norms of the time when few women were the breadwinners in their families.

So, although she sometimes felt guilty and selfish, she persevered with work she believed was necessary and important. This tension between ambition and parental duty drew me into her story.

While I wrote this story, there were times when I struggled to make sense of Dorothea’s choices to foster her children out to strangers, especially after she married Paul Taylor, but I had to remember that in the early 1900s commonly accepted ideas about child-rearing and child development differed from today.

People tended to emphasize the resilience of children and overlook their emotional needs. In some ways Dorothea reminded me of another woman from the same era who is celebrated for her humanitarian work: Eleanor Roosevelt.

Like Lange, Roosevelt had a fraught relationship with her children stemming largely from her active political career outside the home. The fact is that women who chose to pursue careers in the early 1900s lacked role models, mentors, affordable childcare options, and other supports that are now widely accepted to be critical to balancing motherhood with work outside the home.

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Dorothea Lange in the 1930s

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Q: Given that Lange carried such psychic scars surrounding her own father’s abandonment, how did she justify her choices?

A: To be clear, there were some major differences between Dorothea’s father’s departure and her decision to entrust her boys to someone else’s care. She didn’t fully understand the causes for her father’s departure until years later when her mother provided more context.

He had fled his wife and children in 1907 because he was in trouble with the law as a result of some unsavory business practices. Dorothea’s mother hid it from her children, but she continued to meet with him in secret until they finalized their divorce on the grounds of abandonment in 1919.

Dorothea believed she was keeping her boys safe from a life of poverty that was unfolding around her on San Francisco’s streets and beyond. The 1930s represent an era of hard times that almost defies comprehension to us today. People were desperate to feed their families. Orphanages were packed with children whose mothers and fathers couldn’t support them.

Families disintegrated. It was a period of vulnerability and danger for many children. So, while Dan and John never forgave Dorothea for leaving them with strangers, she felt she was doing the best she could to keep them cared for and safe.

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Learning to See by Elise Hooper is available on Amazon 

and wherever books are sold

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Q: Why didn’t Maynard or Paul do more to help with the care of their children?

A: The expectations of the time were that women tended to children. It was that simple. Regardless of social class, it never appears to have entered into people’s consideration that men could have played a hands-on role with raising their sons and daughters.

And this trickled down to the children of this generation. Interviews with Dan Dixon when he was an adult reflect that his hurt feelings were aimed mostly at his mother. He never seemed to hold Maynard accountable in the same way that he blamed his mother for leaving him.

Q: What happened to Dorothea’s two closest friends?

A: Fronsie’s life is mostly fictionalized in this novel. After she helped to settle Dorothea in the photography studio on Sutter Street, she mostly disappears from Lange’s biographies with the exception of reappearing as a guest at Dorothea’s wedding to Maynard.

Based on a note by Paul Taylor in the transcript of Dorothea’s oral history with Suzanne Riess, it seems Fronsie ended up living in Los Angeles during the 1960s.

Imogen led a brilliant career as a photographer and lived until 1976, when she died at ninety-three years of age. She produced many books and mentored other photographers, and her work has been exhibited around the world.

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Japanese children pledging allegiance at an internment camp, 1942

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Q: What happened to Dorothea Lange’s impounded photos of the Japanese American internment?

A: The army impounded the images until after the war and then they were quietly placed in the National Archives. In 1972, Richard Conrat, one of Lange’s assistants, published some of them when he produced Executive Order 9066 for the UCLA Asian American Studies Center. It wasn’t until 2006 when Linda Gordon and Gary Y. Okihiro published their book Impounded that the photos received widespread attention.

In 2017, the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum produced an exhibit entitled Images of Internment: The Incarceration of Japanese Americans During World War II to commemorate the seventy-fifth anniversary of FDR’s infamous Executive Order 9066. I visited the show and viewed photographs by Dorothea Lange, Ansel Adams, and others.

Seventy-five years later these photos are still relevant and serve as a powerful reminder of the importance of maintaining civil liberties in our democracy.

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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 Learning to See: A Novel of Dorothea Lange by Elise Hooper appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.

Inspiring Speeches by Frances Watkins Harper, 19th-Century Reformer & Author

Frances Ellen Watkins ( 1825 – 1911), later known as Frances Watkins Harper or Frances E.W. Harper, built her reputation on her various talents, including fiction, essays, poetry, and public speaking. One of America’s first and most successful African-American authors, she was also an active abolitionist, feminist, and conductor on the Underground Railroad.

She launched her writing career in the late 1830s by publishing essays in antislavery journals. At age twenty, her first collection of poems, Autumn Leaves, was published in 1845. She was the first black author to have a short story published (“The Two Offers”) and one of the first to publish a novel (Iola Leroy, 1892). 

It was during the 1850s, after the Fugitive Slave Act was passed, that Harper found her voice as a speaker. From that time on, she was in great demand as an orator — hers was a powerful voice promoting African-American and women’s rights. Here are some inspiring excerpts from speeches by Frances Watkins Harper, a 19th-century crusader for justice who shouldn’t be forgotten.

“We are all bound up together in one great bundle of humanity, and society cannot trample on the weakest and feeblest of its members without receiving the curse in its own soul. You tried that in the case of the Negro…

You white women speak here of rights. I speak of wrongs. I, as a colored woman, have had in this country an education which has made me feel as if I were in the situation of Ishmael, my hand against every man, and every man’s hand against me…

While there exists this brutal element in society which tramples upon the feeble and treads down the weak, I tell you that if there is any class of people who need to be lifted out of their airy nothings and selfishness, it is the white women of America.”  

(from a speech at the National Women’s Rights Convention, 1866)

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Learn more about Frances Watkins Harper

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“I deem it a privilege to present the Negro, not as a mere dependent asking for Northern sympathy or Southern compassion, but as a member of the body politic who has a claim upon the nation for justice, simple justice, which is the right of every race, upon the government for protection, which is the rightful claim of every citizen, and upon our common Christianity for the best influences which can be exerted for peace on earth and goodwill to man.”

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“There are some rights more precious than the rights of property or the claims of superior intelligence: they are the rights of life and liberty, and to these the poorest and humblest man has just as much right as the richest and most influential man in the country.

Ignorance and poverty are conditions which men outgrow. Since the sealed volume was opened by the crimson hand of war, in spite of entailed ignorance, poverty, opposition, and a heritage of scorn, schools have sprung like wells in the desert dust.

It has been estimated that about two millions have learned to read…. Millions of dollars have flowed into the pockets of the race, and freed people have not only been able to provide for themselves, but reach out their hands to impoverished owners.”  

(this and the except above are from a speech before the meeting of the National Council of Women, February 23, 1891, later reprinted in Black Women in Nineteenth-Century American Life: Their Words, Their Thoughts, Their Feelings , edited by Bert James Loewenberg, and Ruth Bogin)

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8 Poems by Frances Watkins Harper

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“The tendency of the present age, with its restlessness, religious upheavals, failures, blunders, and crimes, is toward broader freedom, an increase of knowledge, the emancipation of thought, and a recognition of the brotherhood of man; in this movement woman, as the companion of man, must be a sharer …

So close is the bond between man and woman that you can not raise one without lifting the other. The world can not move without woman’s sharing in the movement, and to help give a right impetus to that movement is woman’s highest privilege.”

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“The tendency of the present age, with its restlessness, religious upheavals, failures, blunders, and crimes, is toward broader freedom, an increase of knowledge, the emancipation of thought, and a recognition of the brotherhood of man; in this movement woman, as the companion of man, must be a sharer …

So close is the bond between man and woman that you can not raise one without lifting the other. The world can not move without woman’s sharing in the movement, and to help give a right impetus to that movement is woman’s highest privilege.”  

(this and the excerpt above are from a speech titled “Woman’s Political Future,” Columbian Exposition in Chicago, 1893. Published in The World’s Congress of Representative Women, edited by May Sewall, 1894)

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“The Two Offers” by Frances Watkins Harper

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“I do not believe in unrestricted and universal suffrage for either men or women. I believe in moral and educational tests. I do not believe that the most ignorant and brutal man is better prepared to add value to the strength and durability of the government than the most cultured, upright, and intelligent woman.

I do not think that willful ignorance should swamp earnest intelligence at the ballot box, nor that educated wickedness, violence, and fraud should cancel the votes of honest men. The unsteady hands of a drunkard can not cast the ballot of a freeman.

The hands of lynchers are too red with blood to determine the political character of the government for even four short years.

The ballot in the hands of woman means power added to influence. How well she will use that power I can not foretell. Great evils stare us in the face that need to be throttled by the combined power of an upright manhood and an enlightened womanhood; and I know that no nation can gain its full measure of enlightenment and happiness if one-half of it is free and the other half is fettered.”

(from a speech titled “Woman’s Political Future,” Columbian Exposition in Chicago, 1893. Published in The World’s Congress of Representative Women, edited by May Sewall, 1894)

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Frances Watkins Harper

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (September 24, 1825 – February 22, 1911) combined her talents as a writer, poet, and public speaker with a deep commitment to abolition and social reform. She sustained a long and prolific publishing career at a time when it was rare for women, particularly women of color, to have a voice. She used her in a multitude of powerful ways, and as a result, she’s been referred to as “the mother of African-American journalism.”

The 1854 collection Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects (1854) was possibly her most successful, having gone through many editions. “The Two Offers” was the first published short story by an African-American woman. And Iola Leroy (1892) was one of the first novels by a black woman to be published.

Born in Baltimore, Maryland, Frances Ellen Watkins was the only child of free African American parents. Orphaned at age three, she was raised by Henrietta and Reverend William Watkins, her maternal aunt and uncle. Under their care, she attended the Academy for Negro Youth, a school run by Reverend Watkins, an active abolitionist. Quite likely, he was an inspiration for Frances’s later work.

At age 14, she went to work as a domestic and seamstress for a Quaker family, in whose home she had access to a wide array of literature.

 

Abolitionist, poet, essayist, and speaker

Frances launched her writing endeavors in the late 1830s, publishing essays in antislavery journals. Autumn Leaves, her first collection of poems, was published in 1845 when she was just twenty. This foray into print made her one of the first published African-American writers.

A great shift came in 1850 when the Fugitive Slave Act was passed by Congress. The new law made free blacks vulnerable to capture. Frances was compelled to move from Maryland to Ohio for her safety. The following year, she began helping escaping slaves on the Underground Railroad, joining forces with William Still of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society. At the same time, she continued to write regularly for anti-slavery newspapers.

After joining the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1853, Frances embarked on another significant phase of her career as sought-after lecturer. As an effective orator, she spoke out against slavery, the subjugation of women, and other injustices.

 

A prolific pen

Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects, first published in 1854, would go on to become one of Frances’s most successful titles, going through at least twenty printings. In her writings and speeches, she argued for equality and justice. Her poetry, fiction, essays, and speeches intertwined as a body of work that sought justice and truth.

In 1858, one hundred years before Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, Frances Watkins refused to give up her seat in the white section of a segregated trolley car in Philadelphia. This incident inspired one of her most enduring poems, “Bury Me in a Free Land,” first published in The Anti-Slavery Bugle.

Among her other literary achievements was the 1859 short story “The Two Offers” (which you can read in full here). Its publication in Anglo-African Magazine, as noted in the introduction to this biography, made it the first short story published by an African-American woman.

In 1860, Frances married a widower named Fenton Harper, a farmer, and briefly retired from public speaking. The couple had one daughter, Mary. When her husband died four years later in 1864, Frances, now using the surname Harper, returned to the lecture circuit. She was left with their daughter and his three children from a previous marriage.

After the Civil War ended in 1865, Frances moved South and worked as a teacher for newly-freed black people. In her encounters with them, she learned firsthand of the hardships they endured during Reconstruction and expressed their stories through poems. These were eventually collected in her book Sketches of Southern Life (1872). She created a fictional ex-slave named Aunt Chloe to serve as a narrator in some of these touching works.

In her lifetime, Harper published 80 poems. “The Slave Mother” is one of her most famous, telling of the heart-wrenching separation of enslaved children from their mothers:

He is not hers, although she bore

     For him a mother’s pains;

He is not hers, although her blood

     Is coursing through his veins!

He is not hers, for cruel hands

     May rudely tear apart

The only wreath of household love

     That binds her breaking heart.

Read the rest of “The Slave Mother” and several others in this selection of poems by Frances Watkins Harper.

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8 Poems by Frances Watkins Harper, 19th Century Author and Reformer

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Iola Leroy

The well-received novel Iola Leroy, or Shadows Uplifted (1892) was one of the first published full-length novels by an African-American writer. Though it follows the conventional formula for sentimental women’s literature of the late 19th century, Frances wouldn’t have been content with such shallow treatment.

The story also weaves in themes of social justice, temperance, abolition, education, passing, and mixed marriage. Through the character of Iola Leroy, a beautiful young mixed-race woman, Frances Harper illuminates hardships endured during the Civil War Years, including being the target of lecherous sexual predators. Yet in the end, the story becomes an illustration of what was called “racial uplift.”

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Frances Watkins Harper page on Amazon

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A long life well lived

Post-Civil War, Harper became more involved with women’s suffrage. Race issues were still her foremost concern, though, as she continued to witness the rise of lynching and the horrendous living conditions of former slaves.

Harper was active in several organizations, not only founding some of them, but holding office. One was the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, on whose behalf she lectured in support of prohibition. She was a co-founder and Vice President of the National Association of Colored Women. She was also a devoted member of the Unitarian Church.

Frances Harper moved to 1006 Bainbridge Street in Philadelphia around 1870 and lived there until her death in 1911. She died of heart failure at the age of 85. She is buried in Eden Cemetery next to her daughter Mary, who had died two in 1909.

In an editorial following her death, W.E.B. DuBois wrote in The Crisis: “It is … for her attempts to forward literature among colored people, that Frances Harper deserves to be remembered … She was, above all, sincere. She took her writing soberly and earnestly; she gave her life to it.”

An excerpt from Harper’s poem “Bury Me in a Free Land” is on a wall of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture’s Contemplative Court. It reads: “I ask no monument, proud and high to arrest the gaze of the passers-by; all that my yearning spirit craves is bury me not in a land of slaves.”

In Drumvoices: The Mission of Afro-American Poetry, A Critical History, Eugene B. Redmond wrote: “Up until the Civil War, Mrs. Harper’s favorite themes were slavery, its harshness, and the hypocrisies of America. She is careful to place graphic details where they will get the greatest result, especially when the poems are read aloud … Critics generally agree that Mrs. Harper’s poetry is not original or brilliant. But she is exciting and comes through with powerful flashes of imagery and statement.”

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6 Fascinating African-American Women Writers of the 19th Century

More about Frances Watkins Harper on this site

8 Poems by Frances Watkins Harper, 19th Century Author and Reformer

Selected Works

Frances Watkins Harper’s output was vast when taking into account essays, reportage, and speech transcripts. She even wrote three serialized novels that were printed in magazines before the publication of Iola Leroy, the only one of her novels published as a full book. The following selection lists only the works published in book form:

Forest Leaves  (1845)
Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects (1854)
The Two Offers (1859)
Moses: A Story of the Nile (1869)
Sketches of Southern Life (1872)
Light Beyond the Darkness, 1890

The Sparrow’s Fall and Other Poems (1894)
The Martyr of Alabama and Other Poems (1894)
 Atlanta Offering (1895)
Iola Leroy, or Shadows Uplifted  (1892)
Idylls of the Bible (1901)

Biographies

Surprisingly, there has never been a full-scale biography of Frances Watkins Harper, her life and work are referenced in the following books, among them:

Black Women Abolitionists: A Study in Activism, 1828-1860 by Shirley J. Yee, 1992
Outspoken Women: Speeches by American Women Reformers by Judith Anderson, 1984
Black Women in White America: A Documentary History, Gerda Lerner, editor, 1972
Black Women in Nineteenth-Century American Life, Loewenberg and Bogin, editors, 1976
Drumvoices: The Mission of Afro-American Poetry, A Critical History by Eugene B. Redmond, 1976.

More information

Wikipedia
Poetry Foundation
Biography/Your Dictionary

Read and listen online

Listen to Frances E.W. Harper’s works on Librivox
Read Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s books on Project Gutenberg

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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 Frances Watkins Harper appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.

8 Poems by Frances Watkins Harper, 19th-Century Author and Reformer

Frances Watkins Harper (1825 – 1911) was an ardent suffragist, social reformer, and abolitionist in addition to her renown as a poet and author.

She wrote prolifically from the time she published her first collection of poetry in 1845, at the age of twenty. A freeborn African-American from Baltimore, Maryland, she was also known as Frances E. W. Harper and by her full name of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper.

The dynamic Frances Harper became involved in anti-slavery societies in the early 1850s and was a conductor on the Underground Railroad.

As she began lecturing on the subjects that she was passionate about, her skills as a compelling public speaker were widely praised. Her 1854 collection Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects was one her most successful publications. Her heartbreaking poem “The Slave Mother” is arguably her best known.

Much later, the novel Iola Leroy, or Shadows Uplifted (1892) was another critical and commercial success. 

The eighty poems published during her lifetime along with her fiction and nonfiction works should have earned her a prominent place in American literature. Without a doubt, she deserves to be better known. Here, presenting a taste of her deeply thoughtful and moving work, is a selection of 8 poems by Frances Watkins Harper. Most were written and published in the 1850s and 1860s.

Bury Me in a Free Land 

Make me a grave where’er you will,

In a lowly plain, or a lofty hill; 

Make it among earth’s humblest graves,

But not in a land where men are slaves.

I could not rest if around my grave

I heard the steps of a trembling slave;

His shadow above my silent tomb

Would make it a place of fearful gloom.

I could not rest if I heard the tread

Of a coffle gang to the shambles led,

And the mother’s shriek of wild despair

Rise like a curse on the trembling air.

I could not sleep if I saw the lash

Drinking her blood at each fearful gash,

And I saw her babes torn from her breast,

Like trembling doves from their parent nest.

I’d shudder and start if I heard the bay

Of bloodhounds seizing their human prey,

And I heard the captive plead in vain

As they bound afresh his galling chain.

If I saw young girls from their mother’s arms

Bartered and sold for their youthful charms,

My eye would flash with a mournful flame,

My death-paled cheek grow red with shame.

I would sleep, dear friends, where bloated might

Can rob no man of his dearest right;

My rest shall be calm in any grave

Where none can call his brother a slave.

I ask no monument, proud and high,

To arrest the gaze of the passers-by;

All that my yearning spirit craves,

Is bury me not in a land of slaves.

The Slave Auction 

The sale began—young girls were there,

   Defenseless in their wretchedness,

Whose stifled sobs of deep despair

   Revealed their anguish and distress.

And mothers stood, with streaming eyes,

   And saw their dearest children sold;

Unheeded rose their bitter cries,

   While tyrants bartered them for gold.

And woman, with her love and truth—

   For these in sable forms may dwell—

Gazed on the husband of her youth,

   With anguish none may paint or tell.

And men, whose sole crime was their hue,

   The impress of their Maker’s hand,

And frail and shrinking children too,

   Were gathered in that mournful band.

Ye who have laid your loved to rest,

   And wept above their lifeless clay,

Know not the anguish of that breast,

   Whose loved are rudely torn away.

Ye may not know how desolate

   Are bosoms rudely forced to part,

And how a dull and heavy weight

   Will press the life-drops from the heart.

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6 Fascinating African-American Women Writers of the 19th Century

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Going East

She came from the East a fair, young bride, 

With a light and a bounding heart, 

To find in the distant West a home 

With her husband to make a start. 

He builded his cabin far away, 

Where the prairie flower bloomed wild; 

Her love made lighter all his toil, 

And joy and hope around him smiled. 

She plied her hands to life’s homely tasks, 

And helped to build his fortunes up; 

While joy and grief, like bitter and sweet, 

Were mingled and mixed in her cup. 

He sowed in his fields of golden grain, 

All the strength of his manly prime; 

Nor music of birds, nor brooks, nor bees, 

Was as sweet as the dollar’s chime. 

She toiled and waited through weary years 

For the fortune that came at length; 

But toil and care and hope deferred, 

Had stolen and wasted her strength. 

The cabin changed to a stately home, 

Rich carpets were hushing her tread; 

But light was fading from her eye, 

And the bloom from her cheek had fled. 

Slower and heavier grew her step, 

While his gold and his gains increased; 

But his proud domain had not the charm 

Of her humble home in the East. 

Within her eye was a restless light, 

And a yearning that never ceased, 

A longing to see the dear old home 

She had left in the distant East. 

A longing to clasp her mother’s hand, 

And nestle close to her heart, 

And to feel the heavy cares of life 

Like the sun-kissed shadows depart. 

Her husband was adding field to field, 

And new wealth to his golden store; 

And little thought the shadow of death 

Was entering in at his door. 

He had no line to sound the depths 

Of her tears repressed and unshed; 

Nor dreamed ‘mid plenty a human heart 

Could be starving, but not for bread. 

The hungry heart was stilled at last; 

Its restless, baffled yearning ceased. 

A lonely man sat by the bier 

Of a corpse that was going East. 

Lines to a Friend

ON REMOVING FROM HER NATIVE VILLAGE.

The golden rays of sunset fall on a snow-clad hill,

As standing by my window I gaze there long and still.

I see a roof and a chimney, and some tall elms standing near,

While the winds that sway their branches bring voices to my ear.

They tell of a darkened hearth-stone, that once shone bright and gay,

And of old familiar faces that have sadly passed away;

How a stranger on the threshold with careless aspect stands,

And gazes on the acres that have passed into his hands.

I shudder, as these voices, so fraught with mournful woe,

Steal on my spirit’s hearing, in cadence sad and low,

And think I will not hear them–but, ah! who can control

The gloomy thoughts that enter and brood upon the soul?

So, turning from my window, while darkness deepens round,

And the wailing winds sweep onward with yet more piteous sound,

I feel within my bosom far wilder whirlwinds start,

And sweep the cloudy heaven that bends above my heart.

I have no power to quell them; so let them rage and roar,

The sooner will their raging and fury all be o’er;

I’ve seen Atlantic’s billows ‘neath tempests fiercely swell,

But O, the calm succeeding, I have no words to tell!

I think of you, and wonder if you are happy now;

Floats there no shade of sorrow at times across your brow?

When daily tasks are ended, and thought is free to roam,

Doth it not bear you swiftly back to that dear old home?

And then, with wizard fingers, doth Memory open fast

A thrilling panorama of all the changeful past!

Where blending light and shadow skip airy o’er the scene,

Painting in vivid contrast what is and what has been.

And say, does not your mother remember yet with tears

The spot where calm and peaceful have lapsed so many years?

O, would some kindly spirit might give us all to know

How much a tender parent will for a child forego!

We prized your worth while with us; but now you’re gone from sight,

We feel ‘how blessings brighten while they are taking flight.’

O, don’t forget the homestead upon the pleasant hill;

Nor yet the love-lit home you have in all our memories still!

Come, often come to visit the haunts your childhood knew!

We pledge you earnest welcome, unbought, unfeigned and true.

And when before your vision new hopes and pleasure rise,

Turn sometimes with a sunny thought toward your native skies! 

My Mother’s Kiss

My mother’s kiss, my mother’s kiss,

I feel its impress now;

As in the bright and happy days

She pressed it on my brow.

You say it is a fancied thing

Within my memory fraught;

To me it has a sacred place —

The treasure house of thought.

Again, I feel her fingers glide

Amid my clustering hair;

I see the love-light in her eyes,

When all my life was fair.

Again, I hear her gentle voice

In warning or in love.

How precious was the faith that taught

My soul of things above.

The music of her voice is stilled,

Her lips are paled in death.

As precious pearls I’ll clasp her words

Until my latest breath.

The world has scattered round my path

Honor and wealth and fame;

But naught so precious as the thoughts

That gather round her name.

And friends have placed upon my brow

The laurels of renown;

But she first taught me how to wear

My manhood as a crown.

My hair is silvered o’er with age,

I’m longing to depart;

To clasp again my mother’s hand,

And be a child at heart.

To roam with her the glory-land

Where saints and angels greet;

To cast our crowns with songs of love

At our Redeemer’s feet. 

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Read books by Frances Watkins Harper online

Frances Watkins Harper page on Amazon

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The Reunion

Well, one morning real early

I was going down the street,

And I heard a stranger asking

For Missis Chloe Fleet.

There was something in his voice

That made me feel quite shaky.

And when I looked right in his face,

Who should it be but Jakey!

I grasped him tight, and took him home –

What gladness filled my cup!

And I laughed, and just rolled over,

And laughed, and just give up.

‘Where have you been? O Jakey, dear!

Why didn’t you come before?

Oh! when you children went away

My heart was awful sore.’

‘Why, mammy, I’ve been on your hunt

Since ever I’ve been free,

And I have heard from brother Ben, –

He’s down in Tennessee.

‘He wrote me that he had a wife,’

‘And children?’ ‘Yes, he’s three.’

‘You married, too?’ ‘Oh, no, indeed,

I thought I’d first get free.’

‘Then, Jakey, you will stay with me,

And comfort my poor heart;

Old Mistus got no power now

To tear us both apart.

‘I’m richer now than Mistus,

Because I have got my son;

And Mister Thomas he is dead,

And she’s nary one.

‘You must write to brother Benny

That he must come this fall,

And we’ll make the cabin bigger,

And that will hold us all.

‘Tell him I want to see ’em all

Before my life do cease:

And then, like good old Simeon,

I hope to die in peace.’ 

Dark-Browed Martha

When the frost-king clothed the forests

In a flood of gorgeous dyes,

Death called little dark-browed Martha

To her mansion in the skies.

‘Twas a calm October Sabbath

When the bell with solemn sound

Knelled her to her quiet slumbers

Low down in the darksome ground.

Far away, where sun and summer

Reign in glory all the year,

Was the land she left behind her,

To her simple heart so dear.

There a mother and a brother,

Meeting oft at close of day,

Spoke in tender, tearful whispers

Of the loved one far away.

‘I am thinking,’ said the mother,

‘How much Martha’ll get to know,

And how smart and bright ’twill make her,

Travellin’ round the country so.

‘Spect she’ll be a mighty lady,

Shinin’ jewels in her ears;

But I hope she won’t forget us,–

Dat is what dis poor heart fears.’

”Deed she won’t,’ then spoke the brother,

‘Martha’ll love us just as well

As before she parted from us, —

Trust me, mammy, I can tell.’

Then he passed a hand in silence

O’er his damp and swarthy brow,

Brushed a tear from off the eyelid,—

‘O that she were with us now!’

‘Pshaw! don’t cry, Lem,’ said the mother,

‘There’s no need of that at all;

Massa said he’d bring her to us

When the nuts began to fall.

The pecans will soon be rattling

From the tall plantation trees,

She’ll be here to help us pick them,

Brisk and merry as you please.’

Thus they talked, while she they waited

From the earth had passed away;

Walked no more in pleasant places,

Saw no more the light of day;

Knew no more of toilsome labor,

Spiteful threats or angry blows;

For the Heavenly One had called her

Early from a life of woes.

Folded we the tiny fingers

On the cold, unmoving breast;

Robed her in a decent garment,

For her long and dreamless rest;

And when o’er the tranquil Sabbath

Evening’s rays began to fall,

Followed her with heavy footsteps

To the home that waits us all.

As we paused beside the churchyard,

Where the tall green maples rise,

Strangers came and viewed the sleeper,

With sad wonder in their eyes;

While my thoughts flew to that mother,

And that brother far away:

How they’d weep and wail, if conscious

This was Martha’s burial day!

When the coffin had been lowered

Carefully into the ground,

And the heavy sods fell on it

With a cold and hollow sound,

Thought I, as we hastened homewards,

By the day’s expiring light,

Martha never slept so sweetly

As she’ll sleep this Sabbath night. 

The Night of Death

Twas a night of dreadful horror, — 

Death was sweeping through the land; 

And the wings of dark destruction 

Were outstretched from strand to strand 

Strong men’s hearts grew faint with terror, 

As the tempest and the waves 

Wrecked their homes and swept them downward, 

Suddenly to yawning graves. 

‘Mid the wastes of ruined households, 

And the tempest’s wild alarms, 

Stood a terror-stricken mother 

With a child within her arms. 

Other children huddled ’round her, 

Each one nestling in her heart; 

Swift in thought and swift in action, 

She at least from one must part. 

Then she said unto her daughter, 

“Strive to save one child from death.” 

“Which one?” said the anxious daughter, 

As she stood with bated breath. 

Oh! the anguish of that mother; 

What despair was in her eye! 

All her little ones were precious; 

Which one should she leave to die? 

Then outspake the brother Bennie: 

“I will take the little one.” 

“No,” exclaimed the anxious mother; 

“No, my child, it can’t be done.” 

“See! my boy, the waves are rising, 

Save yourself and leave the child!” 

“I will trust in Christ,” he answered; 

Grasped the little one and smiled. 

Through the roar of wind and waters 

Ever and anon she cried; 

But throughout the night of terror 

Never Bennie’s voice replied. 

But above the waves’ wild surging 

He had found a safe retreat, 

As if God had sent an angel, 

Just to guide his wandering feet. 

When the storm had spent its fury, 

And the sea gave up its dead 

She was mourning for her loved ones, 

Lost amid that night of dread. 

While her head was bowed in anguish, 

On her ear there fell a voice, 

Bringing surcease to her sorrow, 

Bidding all her heart rejoice. 

“Didn’t I tell you true?” said Bennie, 

And his eyes were full of light, 

“When I told you God would help me 

Through the dark and dreadful night?” 

And he placed the little darling 

Safe within his mother’s arms, 

Feeling Christ had been his guardian, 

‘Mid the dangers and alarms. 

Oh! for faith so firm and precious, 

In the darkest, saddest night, 

Till life’s gloom-encircled shadows 

Fade in everlasting light. 

And upon the mount of vision 

We our loved and lost shall greet, 

With earth’s wildest storms behind us, 

And its cares beneath our feet. 

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Somber and Beautiful Quotes from Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton

Ethan Frome (1911) by Edith Wharton is a somber tale indeed, but so beautifully told that many readers return to it again and again. An original review in the San Francisco Call from the year the book was published sketches the outline of the novella:

“Twenty years before the tale opens we learn that Ethan Frome has been crippled in a terrible accident … Ethan had his old parents to take care of and after their death he married the young woman who had helped him to nurse them … In a few years she needed assistance, so a young poor relation, Mattie Silver, came to live with them. Slowly she and Ethan fell in love. What happens next isn’t ‘happily ever after.’”

Read the rest of the review as well as Edith Wharton’s own introduction to the story. To get a sense of the gorgeous yet spare language, here’s a selection of quotes from Ethan Frome, one of Edith Wharton’s most enduring works.

. . . . . . . . . 

“That man touch a hundred? He looks as if he was dead and in hell now!”

. . . . . . . . . 

“He seemed a part of the mute melancholy landscape, an incarnation of its frozen woe, with all that was warm and sentient in him fast bound below the surface; but there was nothing nothing unfriendly in his silence.”

. . . . . . . . . 

“There was in him a slumbering spark of sociability which the long Starkfield winters had not yet extinguished. By nature grave and inarticulate, he admired recklessness and gaiety in others and was warmed to the marrow by friendly human intercourse.”

. . . . . . . . . 

“He was a poor man, the husband of a sickly woman, whom his desertion would leave alone and destitute; and even if he had had the heart to desert her he could have done so only by deceiving two kindly people who had pitied him.” 

. . . . . . . . . 

“After the funeral, when he saw her preparing to go away, he was seized with an unreasoning dread of being left alone on the farm; and before he knew what he was doing he had asked her to stay there with him. He had often thought since that it would not have happened if his mother had died in spring instead of winter…” (Ethan musing on how he got caught up with Zeena, a woman he didn’t love)

. . . . . . . . . 

“She had an eye to see and an ear to hear: he could show her things and tell her things, and taste the bliss of feeling.”

. . . . . . . . . 

“They seemed to come suddenly upon happiness as if they had surprised a butterfly in the winter woods.”

. . . . . . . . . 

“Ethan’s love of nature did not take the form of a taste for agriculture.”

. . . . . . . . . 

“It pleased Ethan to have surprised a pair of lovers on the spot where he and Mattie had stood with such a thirst for each other in their hearts; but he felt a pang at the thought that these two need not hide their happiness.”

. . . . . . . . . 

“I want to put my hand out and touch you. I want to do for you and care for you. I want to be there when you’re sick and when you’re lonesome.”

. . . . . . . . . 

“If she’d ha’ died, Ethan might ha’ lived; and the way they are now, I don’t see’s there’s much difference between the Fromes up at the farm and the Fromes down in the graveyard; ‘cept that down there they’re all quiet, and the women have got to hold their tongues.” 

. . . . . . . . . .

Ethan Frome  by Edith Wharton on Amazon

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“Against the dark background of the kitchen she [Zeena] stood up tall and angular, one hand drawing a quilted counterpane to her flat breast, while the other held a lamp. The light, on a level with her chin, drew out of the darkness her puckered throat and the projecting wrist of the hand that clutched the quilt, and deepened fantastically the hollows and prominences of her high-boned face under its rings of crimping-pins.

To Ethan, still in the rosy haze of his hour with Mattie, the sight came with the intense precision of the last dream before waking. He felt as if he had never before known what his wife looked like.”

. . . . . . . . . 

“The sudden heat of his tone made her color mount again, not with a rush, but gradually, delicately, like the reflection of a thought stealing slowly across her heart.”

. . . . . . . . . 

“It was a long time since any one had spoken to him as kindly as Mrs Hale. Most people were either indifferent to his troubles, or disposed to think it natural that a young fellow of his age should have carried without repining the burden of three crippled lives. But Mrs Hale had said ‘You’ve had an awful mean time, Ethan Frome,’ and he felt less alone with his misery.”

. . . . . . . . . 

“Ethan looked at her with loathing. She was no longer the listless creature who had lived at his side in a state of sullen self-absorption, but a mysterious alien presence, an evil energy secreted from the long years of silent brooding.”

. . . . . . . . . 

“They had never before avowed their inclination so openly, and Ethan, for a moment, had the illusion that he was a free man, wooing the girl he meant to marry. He looked at her hair and longed to touch it again, and to tell her that is smelt of the woods; but he had never learned to say such things.” 

. . . . . . . . . 

“The inexorable facts closed in on him like prison-warders handcuffing a convict. There was no way out – none. He was a prisoner for life, and now his one ray of light was to be extinguished.”

. . . . . . . . . 

See also: Perceptive Quotes by Edith Wharton

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“They stood together in the gloom of the spruces, an empty world glimmering about them wide and gray under the stars.” 

. . . . . . . . . 

“The return to reality was as painful as the return to consciousness after taking an anesthetic.”

. . . . . . . . . 

“She had taken everything else from him, and now she meant to take the one thing that made up for it all.” 

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More about Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton

Wikipedia
Reader discussion of Ethan Frome on Goodreads
Listen to Ethan Frome on Librivox
Film adaptation of Ethan Frome

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In Search of Nellie Bly: Uncovering America’s Pioneering Investigative Journalist

Excerpted from Nellie Bly: Daredevil, Reporter, Feminist by Brooke Kroeger, the most comprehensive biography to date on the pioneering investigative journalist, born Elizabeth Jane Cochran (she later spelled her name Cochrane) on May 5, 1864, in Cochran’s Mills, Pennsylvania:

Nellie Bly was one of the most rousing characters in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the 1880s she pioneered the development of “detective” or “stunt” journalism the acknowledged forerunner of full-scale investigative reporting.

While she was still in her early twenties, the example of her fearless success helped open the profession to coming generations of women journalists clamoring to write hard news.

Accomplished the extraordinary as a matter of course

Bly performed feats for the record books. She feigned insanity and engineered her own commitment to a mental asylum, then exposed its horrid conditions. She circle the globe faster than any living or fictional soul. She designed, manufactured, and marketed the first successful steel barrel produced in the United States. She owned and operated factories as a model of social welfare for her 1,500 employees.

She journeyed to Paris to argue the case of a defeated nation. She wrote a widely read advice column while devoting herself to the plight of the unfortunate, most notably unwed and indigent mothers and their offspring.

Bly’s life — 1864 to 1922 — spanned Reconstruction, the Victorian and Progressive eras, the Great War and its aftermath. She grew up without privilege for higher education, knowing that her greatest asset was the force of her own will. Bly executed the extraordinary as a matter of routine …

. . . . . . . . . .

Nellie Bly: Daredevil, Reporter, Feminist by Brooke Kroeger

. . . . . . . . . .

An indomitable will, an incredible life story

To admirers, she was Will Indomitable, The Best Reporter in America, the Personification of Pluck. Amazing was the adjective that always came to mind. As the most famous woman journalist of her day, as an early woman industrialist, as a humanitarian, even as a beleaguered litigant, Bly kept the same formula for success: Determine Right. Decide Fast. Apply Energy. Act with Conviction. Fight to the Finish. Accept the Consequences. Move on.

It is baffling that a life of such purpose and accomplishment — still daunting, even by the contemporary standard —did not incite the passions of any number of serious authors over the years.

Even if none of the more commercially successful biographers sensed the essential universality of Bly’s dramatic story, at least it should have snared the narrative the imagination of a feminist scholar or two, a doctoral candidate perhaps.

 

An affecting and inspiring nonfiction heroine

And yet, the Library of Congress catalog is without one documented biography of Nellie Bly … more disturbing is the puny place she occupies insured was in histories, which dismissed her with this sentence, maybe a paragraph.

Biographical sketches still appear in academic works and in the literary and women’s biographical dictionaries however. And Bly’s exemplary story has inspired over the past half-century at least a score of juvenile books. As a girl of ten, I happen to read one of them. Bly’s story had a greater impact on my life than that of any other nonfiction heroine.

I hadn’t thought about Bly in years, but when my daughter, Brett, turned ten in 1986, I wanted to introduce her to the real-life character who had affected me so deeply. We had moved to New York two years before, and I thought a book length encounter with Mother’s patron saint would help her make sense of the hopscotch childhood she had been subjected to between the ages of three weeks and eight years.

In that time, Brett had lived in Brussels, London, Tel Aviv (with weekends in the Gaza Strip), and London again. It’s suddenly became very important to locate that book and share with her.

. . . . . . . . . .

Bly gained worldwide fame for her 1889 “Around the World in 72 Days” journey; 

she outdid the fictional version in Around the World in Eighty Days by Jules Verne

. . . . . . . . . .

Relegated to virtual obscurity

That is when I first became conscious of Bly’s near invisibility. Judging from what was available in the bookstores, nothing has come along to replace those early biographies. From the reference librarians at the Library of Congress, I learned of the two Bly biographies that had been published in the 1950s in addition to the one I had read as a child, and that numerous others had come out sense.

Through a search firm, I obtained a 1971 reprint of Mignon Rittenhouse’s The Amazing Nellie Bly and Jason Marks’s The Story of Nellie Bly. In the main branch of the public library in Kansas City, I found the other two from the 1950s, Iris Noble’s incorrectly titled Nellie Bly: First Woman Reporter and Nina Brown Baker’s Nellie Bly. I also found two fairly extensive juvenile biographies written as recently as 1989: Making Headlines: A Biography of Nellie Bly by Kathy Lynn Emerson and Nellie Bly by Elizabeth Ehrlich.

Brent and I read the books. She grew interested enough to turn Bly into a research project for school a few years later. We found that though all these books covered much the same ground, none of them agreed on any of the most basic facts of Bly’s life, right down to the dates, ages, and spellings of important names, including hers.

None seem to have been based on much primary material. I began to think that there wasn’t much primary material. Brett thought I should find out …

. . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . .

Poor planning for posterity

Bly’s error seems to have been leaving behind a substantial written record to which there would be ready access. Given the circumstances at the end of her life this was probably not by design. But the fact is, no diaries or journals of hers has surfaced. When I begin this project, there were only seven letters of hers — six at the Carnegie Library in Pittsburgh and one in the Sofia Smith collection at Smith College. The only family memorabilia, assembled by her grandnephew James Agey, disappeared after his death in 1981.

The results of this situation has been that when ever the noon details of Bly’s life have been summoned for those passing references in journalism histories or for sketchy biographical profiles, they have always derived from the same anorexic body of sources …

The problem with Bly’s legacy, then, was poor planning for posterity. Guaranteeing a place in history, it seems, takes more than living a phenomenal life. In most cases, it takes careful attention to creating a documented record of that life that isn’t too hard to retrieve.

Retrieving a life

It began to make sense why the life of Nellie Bly had been relegated to the fascination of little girls — and fear and fewer of them as time passed, with limited circulation of those juvenile books. Bly’s was an amazing story, but as a subject of serious inquiry, simply not cost-effective. Scholarship, then was not going to be the impetus for her historical rescue.

Alternative motivation was required: a quirky, even maniacal devotion to her memory, perhaps; and an intuitive believe that, in the end, she would have turned out to have been worth the bother.

By tracing Bly’s Life trail backward through the layers of accepted lore and faulty secondary information, drilling for the closest primary source, I attempted to eliminate all the confusing factoids about her. Most of these have emerged from incorrect information in books, and newspaper and magazine articles over the years, which had gained credence through repetition.

Some came from sections the early biographers supplied to fill in gaps. Census records helped clarify dates and family circumstances, as did old county and family histories, however flawed. I found enlightening paragraphs about Bly in the memoirs of some of her colleagues and in biographies of them.

Combing through all of those old newspapers on microfilm, page by page by page, I have compiled as complete a record as possible of Nellie Bly, Working Reporter, and have copies of all of those stories.

. . . . . . . .

A board game inspired by Bly’s around-the-world journey came out in 1890

. . . . . . . . .

Clearing up myths

Several hunches paid off: For example, I located Bly’s baptismal record, which put the confusion Bly herself caused on the question of her birth date to permanent rest. Thankfully, she was highly litigious. There was court testimony of hers on record from the time she was fourteen years old and records of lawsuits filed into her final years.

National, county, and municipal archives in all the places she lived, including Vienna, yielded information I only dreamed I would find, as did libraries, special collections, and historical societies all over the United States.

Although the numerous books on journalism in newspaper history tend to slight her, many have provided or confirmed important background information or inspired new ways of looking at Bly’s life, as her biographies of editors and publishers such as Joseph Pulitzer, William Randolph Hearst, John Cockerill, and Arthur Brisbane …

 

A woman’s life that deserves a lasting legacy

Now that the work is done, I remain convinced that Nellie Bly was worth the effort. She is an example of possibility, even still. Bly viewed every situation as an opportunity to make a significant difference in other people’s lives as well as her own. Not wealth or connections or position or beauty or outstanding intellect eased her way to greatness. She never dwelled I’m in adequacy or defeat. Bly just harnessed her pluck, her power to decide, and then did as she saw fit, to both impressive and disaster ends.

My immersion in Bly’s life has triggered a dozen reactions — from delight to just taste. Her story is fascinating. She deserves a full and lasting legacy.

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Nellie Bly: Daredevil, Reporter, Feminist by Brooke Kroeger 

on Amazon

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Brooke Kroeger directs NYU Journalism’s graduate Global and Joint Program Studies and has been a faculty member since 1998. She was department chair from 2005-2011 and the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute’s inaugural director.

Her latest book, The Suffragents, chronicles the prominent, influential men whose support helped women get the vote. She is also the author of Passing: When People Can’t Be Who They Are, Fannie: The Talent for Success of Writer Fannie Hurst (1999), and others.

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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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