Nava Atlas's Blog, page 75

Becoming Virginia Woolf: How Leonard Woolf Wooed Virginia Stephen

Virginia Stephen first met Leonard Woolf while visiting her brother Thoby at Trinity College at Cambridge in 1900. She wore a white dress and carried a parasol, looking like “the most Victorian of Victorian young ladies,” as Leonard described her. Leonard and Virginia Woolf, as she would later be known, were destined to be together, though it took considerable persistence and many proposals on his part before she agreed to marry him.

According to The American Reader, “Virginia and her elder sister, Vanessa, were described by Leonard Woolf as ‘young women of astonishing beauty …. It was almost impossible for a man not to fall in love with them.’” Brilliant as well as exquisitely beautiful, Virginia attracted many admirers, both male and female.

“You must marry Virginia”

In 1909, Lytton Strachey, a mutual friend of Virginia and Leonard’s proposed to her, and she turned him down. He immediately wrote to Leonard, who was working as a civil servant in Ceylon at the time:

“Your destiny is clearly marked out for you, but will you allow it to work? You must marry Virginia. She’s sitting waiting for you, is there any objection? She’s the only woman in the world with sufficient brains, it’s a miracle that she should exist; but if you’re not careful you’ll lose the opportunity … She’s young, wild, inquisitive, discontended, [sic] and longing to be in love.”

Leonard was intrigued and wrote back. “Do you think Virginia would have me? Wire to me if she accepts. I’ll take the next boat home.” It’s almost as if he expected his friend to make the proposal for him.

Virginia didn’t respond, thinking the offer to be a joke. Nothing more was said until Leonard returned to England at the end of 1911. After his first in-person proposal in January 1912, he resigned from the civil service, partly in the hope that Virginia would accept his proposal.

He moved into the house in Bloomsbury that Virginia shared with her brother and continued to court her, proposing several times. 

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The iconic image of the young Virginia Stephen 

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Reluctant to marry

Virginia’s reluctance to marry was fueled by fear of sex and the attendant emotional involvement. She wasn’t physically attracted to Leonard, and the fact that he was a Jew was, in her eyes, not in his favor.

According to Frank McLynn, author of Famous Letters: Messages & Thoughts that Shaped Our World (1993): “Virginia had mixed feelings about marriage and resented the role prescribed for women in British society.

She was also repelled by the idea of sex with a man, after the trauma of a childhood in which she was molested by her two older half-brothers.” More about this is detailed in Virginia Woolf: The Impact of Childhood Sexual Abuse on Her Life and Work by Louise DeSalvo.

A blunt letter

In a 1912 letter to Leonard, Virginia was blunt about her reservations, not holding back her true feelings:

May 1, 1912

Dearest Leonard,

To deal with the facts (my fingers are so cold I can hardly write) I shall be back about 7 tomorrow, so there will be time to discuss—but what does it mean? you can’t take the leave, I suppose if you are going to resign certainly at the end of it. Anyhow, it shows what a career you’re ruining!

Well then, as to all the rest. It seems to me that I am giving you a great deal of pain—some in the most casual way—and therefore I ought to be as plain with you as I can, because half the time I suspect, you’re in a fog which I don’t see at all. Of course I can’t explain what I feel—these are some of the things that strike me.

The obvious advantages of marriage stand in my way. I say to myself. Anyhow, you’ll be quite happy with him; and he will give you companionship, children, and a busy life—then I say By God, I will not look upon marriage as a profession. The only people who know of it, all think it suitable; and that makes me scrutinise my own motives all the more. 

Then, of course, I feel angry sometimes at the strength of your desire. Possibly, your being a Jew comes in also at this point. You seem so foreign. And then I am fearfully unstable. I pass from hot to cold in an instant, without any reason; except that I believe sheer physical effort and exhaustion influence me.

All I can say is that in spite of these feelings which go on chasing each other all day long when I am with you, there is some feeling which is permanent , and growing. You want to know of course whether it will ever make me marry you.

How can I say? I think it will, because there seems no reason why it shouldn’t—But I don’t know what the future will bring. I’m half afraid of myself. I sometimes feel that no one ever has or ever can share something — It’s the thing that makes you call me like a hill, or a rock. 

Again, I want everything — love, children, adventure, intimacy, work. (Can you make any sense out of this ramble? I am putting down one thing after another.) So I go from being half in love with you, and wanting you to be with me always, and known everything about me, to the extreme of wildness and aloofness.

I sometimes think that if I married you, I could have everything — and then — it is the sexual side of it that comes between us? As I told you brutally the other day, I feel no physical attraction in you. There are moments — when you kissed me the other day was one—when I feel no more than a rock. 

And yet your caring for me as you do almost overwhelms me. It is so real, and so strange. Why should you? What am I really except a pleasant attractive creature? But its [sic] just because you care so much that I feel I’ve got to care before I marry you. I feel I must give you everything and that if I can’t, well, marriage would only be second-best for you as well as for me. 

If you can still go on, as before, letting me find my own way, that is what would please me best; and then we must both take the risks. But you have made me very happy too. We both of us want a marriage that is a tremendous living thing, always alive, always hot, not dead and easy in parts as most marriages are. We ask a great deal of life, don’t we? Perhaps we shall get it; then, how splendid!

One doesn’t get much said in a letter does one? I haven’t touched upon the enormous variety of things that have been happening here—but they can wait…

Yrs.

VS

Virginia relents

Leonard must have worn her down. Virginia finally accepted his proposal later that same month. She wrote to her friend Violet Dickinson of the engagement:

“My Violet, I’ve got a confession to make. I’m going to marry Leonard Woolf. He’s a penniless Jew. I’m more happy than anyone ever said was possible – but I insist upon your liking him too. May we both come on Tuesday? Would you rather I come alone? He was a great friend of Thoby’s, went out to India – came back last summer when I saw him, and he has been living here since the winter.”

The two married on August 10, 1912. She was thirty, he was thirty-one.

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Just one year later, Virginia attempted to commit suicide with a large dose of verona, a sedative. Doctors discouraged her from having children due to her struggles with mental illness, which, despite her aversion to sex, she found heartbreaking.

Throughout their long marriage, Virginia continued to have other relationships, primarily with women (most famously, with Vita Sackville-West). Leonard seemed to tacitly approve of this arrangement.

 

A marriage of minds, a tragic end

The marriage of Leonard and Virginia Woolf was a partnership of minds, if not a romantic one, with a great deal of affection and mutual respect. Leonard could not have been a more nurturing husband. He saw Virginia through bouts of mania, depression, and suicide attempts. Most of all, he created a nurturing environment that made it possible for her to create the brilliant body of work that she ultimately produced.

When Virginia Woolf committed suicide in March of 1941, her note to Leonard said, “I don’t think two people could have been happier than we have been.”

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The post Becoming Virginia Woolf: How Leonard Woolf Wooed Virginia Stephen appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.

Eudora Welty

Eudora Welty (April 13, 1909 – July 23, 2001) was an American author whose work spanned several genres — novels, short stories, and memoir. Much of her writing focused on realistic human relationships — conflict, community,  interaction, and influence. As a Southern writer, a sense of place was an important theme running though her work.

Welty grew up in a close-knit, contented family in Jackson, Mississippi. Her parents instilled a love of education, curiosity, and reading to her and to her brothers, with whom she was close. She was always a  star student, from early grades through college. She earned her Bachelor’s degree from the University of Wisconsin.

She did her graduate work at Columbia University School of Business, heeding her father’s suggestion to study advertising. But since she finished her degree just as the depression was worsening, she struggled to find work. 

Photography and early writings

The various jobs Welty took during the 1930s  — for a radio station, as a society columnist, and publicity agent for the Works Progress Administration — helped make ends meet, but what gave her most satisfaction was taking photographs. She received marginal success in exhibiting them, but few were published, as she desired, until later in her life.

She had a breakthrough success with a short story, “Death of a Traveling Salesman.” It was published in a literary magazine whose editor called it “one of the best stories we have ever read.” After it was published in 1936; after that she found it easier to sell her stories to various publications. The story also caught the attention of Katherine Anne Porter, who became a mentor to her.

Her first collection of short stories, A Curtain of Green and Other Stories, was published in 1941, and featured elements of the so-called Southern grotesque.

She was a private person, and not much is known about her personal life. Though she traveled widely, she always returned to Jackson, Mississippi, and spent her later years living in the home that had belonged to her family.

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10 Inspiring Thoughts on Writing by Eudora Welty

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A writer in command of her craft

Welty spent much of her life in the Mississippi Delta and the community out of which her most iconic writings grew. Her early novel, Delta Wedding  (1946), looks at the world of adult interactions and love through the eyes of a child.

What stands out in Welty’s novels, stories, and memoirs is her ability to capture the texture of community and, to be a bit trite, a sense of place. Her work explores both separateness of the individual and the healing potential of love.

Welty’s writing style varied, simply because she was in command of it. Her stories and novels could be seen as quaint and understated or else wonderfully strange and funny. The Robber Bridegroom (1942), set in Mississippi of the late 1700s, made use of legend. As a whole, many of her works cross the boundaries of nostalgia for a culture that has had its day, and an examination of the inner lives of the characters.

Other works were daring: After Medgar Evers was murdered in Mississippi, she wrote a short  story in the voice of the assassin,  “Where Is the Voice Coming From?” It was published in The New Yorker.

Other well-know novels included The Ponder Heart (1954), which has comic elements, and Losing Battles (1970), a beautifully drawn portrait of a Southern family.

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Eudora Welty’s 7 Thoughtful Idea on the Art of Reading

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Master of the short story form

Among Welty’s most notable works are her short stories. Her skill in this form, which she returned to throughout her career, produced some of her finest pieces of fiction. The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty, a later volume that gathered all of her published short stories, introduced them as follows:

“Although their events and settings varied, and they range as far from Miss Welty’s native Mississippi as Cork and Naples, they spring from a distinctive Southern sensibility, from the author’s response to the place where she has always lived, from long familiarity with the thoughts and feelings of ordinary people around her.

Yet the characters in her stories are anything but ordinary; in the commonplace she perceives what is unique. She is sensitively tuned to their voices and their minds, whether she is in the skin of a beautician, a salesman, or a jazz player.

Time is as important an element in Eudora Welty’s writing as place or character She has said that one cannot live in the South without being conscious of its history. “

RELATED POSTS

Contemplative Quotes by Eudora Welty

Eudora Welty: 7 Thoughtful Ideas on the Art of Reading

An Interview with Eudora Welty

An accomplished photographer

It’s not as widely known that Eudora Welty was an accomplished documentary photographer. She took thousands of photos from the 1930s through the 1950s. Most of her photos depicted Americans of different economic and social classes during the Great Depression and beyond.

The 1989 book Eudora Welty: Photographs collected 250 representative photographs from the few thousand that she took during those decades. Describing her photographic craft, the book notes:

“Although her camera’s view finder compresses much, like the frame in which she conceives her fiction, it finds elements that convey her deep compassion and her artist’s sensibilities.

From the confines of her native Mississippi, these photographs unfold the world of Eudora Welty’s art, reaching, extending, and exploring. In the Deep South of Depression times, when she began writing, she discovered the place into which she had been born and which would always be her subject  … 

These photographs reveal that both in her fiction and in the pictures she took it has always been in place, in the special qualities of what is local, that she found her impulse. “I was smitten by the identity of place wherever I was,” she said in 1989, “from Mississippi on — I still am.”

This serves as a definitive book of Welty’s photographs, compromising pictures from her personal collection, from the repository of Welty materials at the Mississippi Department of Archives and History, and from One Time, One Place, an album of her Depression-era photographs published in 1971.”

 
Legacy

Welty won numerous awards for her writing, among them, a Pulitzer Prize (for The Optimist’s Daughter, 1973 — which many critics considered her best novel), an American Book Award, National Medal for Literature, and The Presidential Medal of Freedom. She was a six-time winner of the O. Henry Award for Short Stories. 

She also received honorary degrees from Harvard, Yale, and Washington Universities, among others. 

Eudora Welty died in 2001 at the age of 92 in Jackson, Mississippi.

Eudora Welty page on Amazon

More about Eudora Welty on this site

An Interview with Eudora Welty (1946)
Eudora Welty: 7 Thoughtful Ideas on the Art of Reading
10 Inspiring Thoughts on Writing by Eudora Welty
Dear Literary Ladies: How can I tell if what I’m writing is any good?

Major works (novels and short story collections; highly selected)

A Curtain of Green and Other Stories  (1941)
The Robber Bridegroom (1942)


Delta Wedding   (1946)
The Ponder Heart  (1954)
Losing Battles   (1970)
The Shoe Bird   (1964)
The Golden Apples   (1949)
The Optimist’s Daughter  (1973)
The Collected Stories of Eudora Welt y  (1982)

Memoirs, biographies, and photo collections

On Writing (2002) by Eudora Welty
One Writer’s Beginnings (1998) by Eudora Welty
Eudora Welty: Stories, Essays & Memoir 
Eudora Welty: A Biography by Suzanne Marrs
A Daring Life: A Biography of Eudora Welty by Carolyn J. Brown
Eudora Welty: Photographs

More Information

Wikipedia
Reader discussion of Welty’s books on Goodreads

Visit 

Eudora Welty House and Gardens

*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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Zora and Me: How I Found Myself by Discovering Zora Neale Hurston

The following essay by Marita Golden is adapted from Well-Read Black Girl: Finding Our Stories, Discovering Ourselves, an anthology edited by Glory Edim:

I saw myself, found myself, and remade myself over and over learning and discovering Zora Neale Hurston. She became and has become a continuing source of possibility and pride for me.

When I think of Zora—and we call her Zora, using her first name only because we want to claim her as sister, mother, friend—I always remember that the Black people chronicled in her novels, folklore, journalism, anthropology, and plays offer to the world a people who are a symphony, not some trembling minor key.

Like Zora I lost my mother at a young age and warred with a father I loved, it seemed, more than life. Like Zora I stepped over the ashes and debris of loss and struck out on my own, carrying grief and anger on my shoulders. Like Zora I lived full to bursting with a universe of dreams and desires to prove to myself and the world. And like Zora everything I proved in the end was made possible by the people who loved me.

 

“Jump at the sun”

Zora’s mother told her to jump at the sun. My mother told me that one day I would write a book. My father told me stories of Sojourner Truth and Frederick Douglass years before I learned about them in school. Zora’s voracious appetite for life and experience rebuked, with every barrier she stormed, the idea that Black women are only or forever have to be “the mules of the world.”

In Zora’s blueprint and following her lead, we could be and are artists, anthropologists, philosophers, disturbers of the peace, not afraid to open our mouths or put a foot in that mouth, pull it out, and keep on steppin’.

In her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora allowed me to see the contradictions and complexity of Black life and Black female visions and virtues. Yes, Janie Crawford has “the look,” straight hair, light skin, but her status as sexual trophy offers her no stairway to heaven.

Zora fills her characters’ mouths with the most damning and scathingly satirical colorist comments one could imagine. It was the courageous lambasting of colorist orthodoxy that opened a space for me, a dark brown woman, in the novel.

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Well-Read Black Girl  edited by Glory Edim on Amazon

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A master class in the art of living

Zora did not teach me how to write. She taught me how to live, how to laugh, and how to love. Her canon is a master class in the art of living. And it is only through tackling and striding naked and unafraid into the territory, the geography of life and its awful realness and concreteness, that we build an imagination that can find life on a page and withstand the assault of indifference or misinterpretation. Dream a World. Imagine a Life. Be Here Now. That is what Zora mirrored for me to see in myself  …

In the 1930s and 1940s, against the backdrop of lynchings and segregation, Zora Neale Hurston proclaimed herself an artist, anthropologist, thinker, novelist, a kind of literary extreme adventurer. Her art was her life, and it made her life a decisive act of art. And unlike a child, her art never let her down, was always obedient, as long as she nurtured it and slammed the door in the face of despair.

I remember reading that in the last days of his life Richard Wright, under surveillance by the French government and the Americans because of his anti-colonial writing, unable to join his wife and daughters in England, wrote over four thousand haikus. Near the end of her life Zora worked as a domestic, struggled to “make ends meet,” yet was nourished by ideas and inspiration for new works.

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You might also enjoy these original 1937 reviews of

Their Eyes Were Watching God

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A writer resurrected

Zora Neale Hurston was one of a legion of Black writers resurrected and reintroduced as a result of the cultural power shifts and changes wrought by the civil rights, Black Power, and women’s movements. Zora was gone, out of print for a while, but you can’t keep a good woman down, and when her time had come, really come (because in her first debut she was ahead of her time), Zora was the drum majorette leading the parade of unleashed Black voices.

How did I discover Zora? How did she become such an integral part of my creative life? I read Alice Walker’s ground- breaking 1975 essay “In Search of Zora Neale Hurston,” in which she claimed Zora, a fellow Southerner, as her literary ancestor.

And as soon as Their Eyes Were Watching God was reprinted and available, I read it and discovered one of the most revolutionary, authentic, and lyrical voices I had ever encountered. I then read all the books she had written, then gushing into print, and read everything about her that I could find. Her life was as dramatic as the books she wrote, and in everything she wrote she paid homage to the town, the people, and the family that gave her the stories she would relentlessly explore …

Zora made me more than a novelist; she made me a woman of letters, writing fiction and nonfiction because I saw how she sprinted across the borders that supposedly sequestered these genres from each other. Zora wrote until she died, and her writing gave meaning and girth and depth to the life she lived. Not “tragically colored” but magnificently human and brazen and wise and foolish and made of some secret recipe the world had never known.

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See also: Zora Neale Hurston Quotes and Life Lessons

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She knew I wanted to fly

I see Zora in myself because she knew I wanted to fly so she showed me how to unfurl my wings, and I wanted people to listen, so she modeled being a woman with a mission, a woman on a mission.

Thank you, Zora, for surviving false accusations, poverty, patronage, being buked and scorned, lauded and lifted, speaking your mind, love found, love lost. Rest in peace, and keep rising, sending new missives forth like smoke signals, like the beat of those drums you heard in Jamaica. Like the still fiery drumbeat of your heart.

Excerpted from the book WELL-READ BLACK GIRL Finding Our Stories, Discovering Ourselves by Glory Edim . “Zora and Me” copyright © 2018 by Marita Golden. Published by arrangement with Ballantine Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All Rights Reserved.

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Marita Golden is the author of over a dozen works of fiction and nonfiction, Marita Golden’s works are favorites with book clubs, used in college courses from literature to sociology around the country, and are recognized as having added depth and complexity to the canon of contemporary African American writing. Find her online at MaritaGolden.com.

Glory Edim is the founder of Well-Read Black Girl, a Brooklyn-based book club and digital platform that celebrates the uniqueness of Black literature and sisterhood. In fall 2017 she organized the first-ever Well-Read Black Girl Festival. She has worked as a creative strategist for over ten years at startups and cultural institutions. Visit her online at Well-Read Black Girl.

*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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The Poetry of Anne Bradstreet: An Analysis

This concise analysis of the poetry of Anne Bradstreet is excerpted from Who Lived Here? A Baker’s Dozen of Historic New England Houses and Their Occupants by Marc Antony DeWolfe Howe, an eminent editor and writer of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Anne Bradstreet (1612 – 1672) was the first writer in the American colonies to be published.

She rejected the prevailing notions of women’s inferiority. That opened her to criticism, not for her work itself, but that she dared to write and make her work public. It was considered unacceptable for women of her time to have a voice. She not only used hers effectively but pushed back at her critics.

The Tenth Muse

In 1647, John Woodbridge, minister of North Andover, married to Anne Bradstreet’s sister, Mercy Dudley, went to England carrying with him a manuscript volume of his sister-in-law’s writings. There, without her knowledge, it was printed in 1650. 

The book’s full title page would demand more space that is available here, so this is how it began and ended:

The

Tenth Muse

Lately Sprung up in America,

OR

Severall Poems, compiled

with great variety of Wit

and Learning, full of delight.

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By a Gentlewoman in these parts

This title page contained one further line that must be cited: “With divers other pleasant and serious Poems.” In this category, which should be extended to include the prose Meditations she wrote for her son Simon, the best of Anne Bradstreet is to be found, whether in the London 1650 volume, or in “The Second Edition, Corrected by the Author and enlarged by an Addition of several other Poems found amongst her Peers after her Death.” Boston, 1678.

Woodbridge’s Introduction to The Tenth Muse suggested that “the Reader should pass his sentence that it is the gift of women not only to speak most but to speak best.”

Introductory verses by others, including John Rogers, president of Harvard in the second edition, hailed Anne Bradstreet as both woman and poet. She herself made early assertions of feminism.

      I am obnoxious to each carping tongue

      Who says my hand a needle better fits

      A Poet’s pen all scorn I should thus wrong,

      For such despite they cast on female wits;

      If what I do prove well, it won’t advance,

      They’ll say ’tis stole’n or else it was by chance.

This is in the Prologue to her “Four Elements” and in the poem honoring Queen Elizabeth:

      She hath wiped off th’ aspersion of her sex,

      That women wisdom lack to play the Rex.

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      Nay Masculines, you have thus tax’d us long

      But she, though dead, will vindicate our wrong.

Puritan as Anne Bradstreet may have been it would be quite a mistake to recall her as nothing more. Due allowance should be made for her brother in-law’s summary of “her gracious demeanour, her eminent parts, her pious conversation, her courteous disposition, her exact diligence in her place, her discreet managing of her family connections.”

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Clear and vigorous thinking

In her writings one may find at this late day direct evidence of clear and vigorous thinking, and of genuinely poetic expression.

Her prose Meditations written for her son Simon — seventy-seven in number, with four added in Latin — look back to Solomon and forward to Ben Franklin. Here is one of them:

“It is reported of the Peacock the priding himself and his gay colors, he ruffles them up; but spying his black feet, he’s soon lets fall his plumes, so that he glorys in his gifts and adornings, should look upon his Corruptions, and that will damn his high thoughts.” But it was in poetry rather than in proverbs that her real distinction lay.

Take, for example, “The Flesh and the Spirit,” ending with lines about the Celeste City in which the Spirit dwells — a rendering in telling verse of a familiar passage in the book of revelations.

Or look, still more attentively, at the long poem, “Contemplations,” which first saw the light in the second edition of her writings. Nature was here her theme — the woods, the river, all the outdoor objects to which she turned from her books. Chiefly of a high seriousness, it’s stanza’s held touches of light fancy — as here:

      I heard the merry grasshopper then sing,

      The black clad Cricket bear a second part,

      They kept one tune, and plaid on the same string,

      Seeming to glory in their little Art.

With Addison and Shelley still to come, she wrote this stanza”

      When I behold the heavens as in their prime,

      And then the earth (though old) still clad in green,

      The stones and trees, insensible of time

      Nor age nor wrinkle on their front are seen;

      Is winter come, and greenness then do fade,

      A spring returns, and they more youthful made

      But Man grows old, lies down, remains where once

            he’s laid.

And in conclusion this stanza, comparable with the best poetry of her own in later times, is found:

      O Time, the fatal wrack of mortal things,

      That draws oblivious curtains over Kings,

      Their sumptuous monuments, men know them not,

      Their names without a Record are forgot.

      Their parts, their ports, their pomp’s all laid in th’ dust

      Nor with nor gold, nor buildings scape time’s rust

      But he whose name is grav’d in the white stone

      Shall last and shine when all of these are gone.

An admirable husband

From such loftier strains as these, Anne Bradstreet could turned to domestic themes in the burning of her house, love for her children and, most of all, for her admirable husband.

Beginning in Massachusetts is one of the chosen Assistants in the government, Simon Bradstreet served the Colony in successive posts of responsibility … to the dignity of Deputy Governor and Governor.

What ever he may have been to the state he was all in all to that Tenth Muse, his wife. Her short poem beginning:

      If ever two were one, then surely we,

      If ever man were loved by wife, then thee;

and ending:

      Then while we live, in love let’s so persever,

      That when we live no more, we may live ever,

Speaks timelessly for conjugal happiness. There are, besides, three letters in verse to her husband, “absent upon Publick employment.” The third of these has a special 17th-century flavor … and, with these lines, as if of Jacobean conceit:

      Return my Dear, my joy, my only Love

      Unto thy Hind, thy mullet, and thy Dove,

      Who neither joyes in pasture, house, nor streams,

      The substance gone, O me, these are but dreams,

      Together at one Tree, oh let us brouze

      And like two Turtles, roost within one house,

      And like the Mullets in one River glide,

      Let’s still remain but one, till death divide.

            Thy loving love and dearest dear,

            At home, abroad, and everywhere.

A lofty place among American poets

Anne Bradstreet was not the first, or the last, of poets needing to be stripped of some excess poetical baggage. In fact she had a good deal of it, but there is a residue which, quite apart from the unique circumstances of its origin should hot be permitted to perish. It was long before any other woman took such a place as hers among the poets of America.

Excerpted from Who Lived Here? © 1952 by Marc Antony DeWolfe Howe (1860 – 1960), Bramhall House, New York.

Learn more about Anne Bradstreet

The post The Poetry of Anne Bradstreet: An Analysis appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.

Anne Bradstreet

Anne Bradstreet (March 20, 1612 – September 16, 1672) was one of the most prominent early American poets, and the first writer in the American colonies to be published. It was considered unacceptable for women of her time to write, but Anne rejected the prevailing notions of women’s inferiority. She was roundly criticized, not for the work itself, but that she dared to write and make her work public at all.

Young Anne Dudley didn’t attend school, though she received a solid education from her book-loving father, Thomas Dudley. During his year a steward at the estate of the Earl of Lincoln, she had access to the library, and read widely, especially from the classics: Plutarch, Pliny, Virgil, Suetonius, Homer, Ovid, Seneca, and others. She was also steeped in philosophy and Biblical studies.

Leaving England for New England

While still living in her native England, Anne married the highly educated Simon Bradstreet in 1628 when she was sixteen years old. That same year she contracted smallpox, and in her piety, she confessed to Pride and Vanity to the Lord that she worshipped. That, she believed, restored her to health. Two years later, she accompanied her husband and father to the new land. The three-month ocean voyage was a difficult one.

Along with her father, Anne Bradstreet and her husband Simon set off to New England in 1630. She was reluctant to give up the comfortable life of the manor for the wilderness of New England, but as a wife and daughter, she was obligated to follow. Their ship landed in Salem, Massachusetts, in July of 1630.

This imagined image of Anne Bradstreet appeared in 1898

See also: 5 Poems by Anne Bradstreet, Colonial American Poet

They lived for a few years in Newtowne, or what is now Cambridge, MA, and then in Ipswich, before settling in what is now North Andover, Massachusetts. The Bradstreets endured many privations, but it was her faith that helped her endure — even as she struggled with some of its harsher tenets, like salvation and redemption.

In his sketch of Anne Bradstreet in Who Lived Here? (1952), M.A. De Wolfe wrote of what might have inspired her to pursue writing:

“What set Anne Bradstreet apart from most of the emigrating women was her exposure to books, the works of both earlier writers and of her own exciting contemporaries — and not only her exposure, but her response to it.

One thing to be remembered is that in the ruling class of the Bay Colony to which Anne Bradstreet belonged, the clergy held a powerful place, and that month the immigrants to New England even before 1640 there were about one hundred fifteen graduates of English University’s — chiefly ministers — and that seventy-four of these were in the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

Difficult, then, as the mere mechanics of living must have been for anybody of Anne Bradstreet’s tastes and gifts, she could feel that her voice … would find some sympathetic listeners not too far away.”

Wife, mother, and poet

Anne was always, from girlhood, in delicate health. Once safely settled in Massachusetts, she anxiously awaited the arrival of children.

The Son of Prayers, of vowes, of teares,

The childe I stay’d for many years.

She did manage to have eight children, and her love for them inspired her best-known lines (from “In Reference to Her Children, 23 June 1659)

I had eight birds hatch in one nest,

Four Cocks there were, and Hens the rest,

I nurst them up with pain and care,

Nor cost nor Labour dis I spare,

Till at the last they felt their wing,

Mounted the Trees and learn’d to sing.

The poem continues on for many lines, celebrating each of her offspring. You can read it in its entirety in this post. 

Of her demanding life as a mother and her pull to express herself as a writer, The Poetry Foundation offers these insights:

“Although Bradstreet had eight children between the years 1633 and 1652, which meant that her domestic responsibilities were extremely demanding, she wrote poetry which expressed her commitment to the craft of writing. In addition, her work reflects the religious and emotional conflicts she experienced as a woman writer and as a Puritan.

Throughout her life, Bradstreet was concerned with the issues of sin and redemption, physical and emotional frailty, death and immortality. Much of her work indicates that she had a difficult time resolving the conflict she experienced between the pleasures of sensory and familial experience and the promises of heaven. As a Puritan she struggled to subdue her attachment to the world, but as a woman she sometimes felt more strongly connected to her husband, children, and community than to God.”

Anne Bradstreet page on Amazon

A deeply ambitious writer

Anne Bradstreet was a deeply ambitious writer, according to this piece, Humble Assertions, published in Common-Place, the journal of early American life. In it, Charlotte Gordon writes that her sophistication as a poet is often overlooked, as well as:

“…her skills as a disguise artist, and her youthful ambition. But if one reads Bradstreet’s poetry with close attention, one finds work that is replete with double meanings and ironies, self-deprecation and even self-condemnation—strategies she had learned in a culture that disparaged women for trespassing in realms that were considered male territory.”

The first edition of the poetry collection that won her fame was The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America (1650). How it came to be published was through the graces of her brother-in-law, John Woodbridge (a minister), husband of her sister Mercy Dudley. According to common legend, took Anne’s manuscript volume of poetry with him to England, and had it printed in London without her knowledge.

Published under the pseudonym “A Gentlewoman from Those Parts,” this collection, like Anne Bradstreet’s subsequent work, reflected the duties of a Puritan woman to God, home, and family.

She did so with skill, yet occasionally allowed some cynical notes to creep in — exercizing the only form of rebellion available to her. She pushed back against the criticism heaped against her in her poems, as in this stanza from the poem “Prologue”:

I am obnoxious to each carping tongue

That says my hand a needle better fits.

A poet’s pen all scorn I should thus wrong.

For such despite they cast on female wits:

If what I do prove well, it won’t advance,

They’ll say it’s stol’n, or else it was by chance.

See also: 6 Early American Women Writers to Rediscover

A woman’s universal joys and struggles

Though Anne wrote sincerely and lovingly about her family, she also expressed her struggles as a woman and as a mother in her poetry.

Though she refused to accept the notion of women’s inferiority, she did seem to find contentment in her lot. Her husband was apparently supportive of her literary aspirations and was the beneficiary of her regard in “To My Dear and Loving Husband” which begins:

If ever two were one, then surely we.

If ever man were lov’d by wife, then thee;

If ever wife was happy in a man,

Compare with me ye women if you can.

Read the rest of this poem and others by Anne Bradstreet here. Several of her best-known poems can be read at Wikisource.

Legacy

Being from a wealthy family and having received a good, if informal education was to Anne’s advantage in an era when many Colonial women weren’t even taught to read, let alone write. She produced a copious body of poetry in the face of a great deal of criticism, but refused to accept the notion of women’s inferiority.

Summing up, M.A. DeWolfe Howe wrote: “Anne Bradstreet was not the first, or last, of poets needing to be stripped of excess poetical baggage. In fact. she had a good deal of it, but there is a residue which, quite apart from the unique circumstances of its origin, should not be permitted to perish. It was long before any other woman took such a place as her among the poets of America.”

Anne Bradstreet died at the age of 60 in 1672 in North Andover, Massachusetts.

More about Anne Bradstreet on this site

5 Poems by Anne Bradstreet, Colonial American Poet

More information

Anne Bradstreet: Celebrating 400 Years and Beyond
Wikipedia
Poetry Foundation
The Tenth Muse, Lately Sprung Up in America
Humble Assertions: The True Story of Anne Bradstreet’s Publication of The Tenth Muse
Anne Bradstreet Poems

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7 Biographies of Laura Ingalls Wilder, Author of the Little House Books

Laura Ingalls Wilder (1867 – 1957) has a permanent place in the American imagination for her beloved Little House series of books for young readers. With her own humble beginnings, having been born in a log cabin on the edge of an area called “Big Woods” in Pepin, Wisconsin, her life inspired her semi-autobiographical novels.

Because her fames series of books came out when she was already sixty-five, Laura’s body of work mainly consisted of the 9-volume little house set. The first installment, Little House in the Big Woods, was published in 1931; the best known of the series, Little House on the Prairie, was published soon after and the rest of the series followed apace.

Though the family depicted in the stories was idealized, the hardships and joys of pioneering the Great Plains in the mid-1800s was based on Laura’s actual experiences. Her tales immediately appealed to readers of all ages, immediately popular with readers and well-received by critics. Perhaps their being publication during the Great Depression resonated with a message of resilience during hard times.

The Little House books continues to be read from one generation to another, and her life continues to be a source of fascination. Here are several biographies of Laura Ingalls Wilder (including autobiographies) for those who can’t get enough of America’s favorite “pioneer girl.”

Laura Ingalls Wilder: A Biography (2007)

This substantive 2007 biography by William Anderson is aimed at middle grade readers. From her days on the prairie to her long and happy marriage to Almanzo Wilder, this well-researched account illuminates the real-life events behind the Little House books. Readers will also get a glimpse of what her life was like after the last Little House book left off.

Laura Ingalls Wilder: A Biography on Amazon

Laura Ingalls Wilder: A Writer’s Life (2007)

From Amazon: “In Laura Ingalls Wilder: A Writer’s Life, Pamela Smith Hill delves into the complex and often fascinating relationships Wilder formed throughout her life that led to the writing of her classic Little House series.

Using Wilder’s stories, personal correspondence, a previously unpublished autobiography, and experiences in South Dakota, Hill has produced a historical-literary biography of the famous and much-loved author. Following the course of Wilder’s life, and her real family’s journey west, Hill provides a context both familial and literary, for Wilder’s writing career.”

Laura Ingalls Wilder: A Writer’s Life on Amazon

On the Way Home (1962)

For ages 8 and up. A diary of the author of the beloved Little House books details her real-life journey with husband Almanzo and young daughter Rose from South Dakota to Missouri in 1894.

Discovered after Laura Ingalls Wilder’s death in 1957, this chronicle was published in 1962. From the publisher’s description: “She describes the towns passed, the rivers crossed, and the crops, birds, fruits, and flowers seen along the way as she moved south  … Readers who already know Wilder’s Little House books will welcome this further visit with Laura. Those reading her for the first time will appreciated the accurate glimpse of the prairie frontier which her journal affords.”

More about On the Way Home on Literary Ladies Guide

On the Way Home on Amazon

Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography (2014)

This beautifully illustrated book presenting the autobiography of Laura Ingalls Wilder was edited by Pamela Smith Hill, an eminent Wilder biographer.

From Amazon: “Hidden away since the 1930s, Laura Ingalls Wilder s never-before-published autobiography reveals the true stories of her pioneering life. Some of her experiences will be familiar; some will be a surprise. Pioneer Girl re-introduces readers to the woman who defined the pioneer experience for millions of people around the world.

Through her recollections, Wilder details the Ingalls family’s journey from Kansas, Missouri, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, back to Minnesota, and on to Dakota Territory sixteen years of travels, unforgettable stories, and the everyday people who became immortal through her fiction. Using additional manuscripts, diaries, and letters, Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography builds on Wilder’s work by adding valuable context and explores her growth as a writer.

Author of an award-winning Laura Ingalls Wilder biography, editor Pamela Smith Hill offers new insights into Wilder s life and times.”

Pioneer Girl on Amazon

Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder (2017)

Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder by Caroline Fraser is considered the first comprehensive historical biography of the beloved author of the Little House on the Prairie books. It has won the Pulitzer Prize, and the National Book Critics Circle Award.

From Amazon: “Millions of readers of Little House on the Prairie believe they know Laura Ingalls―the pioneer girl who survived blizzards and near-starvation on the Great Plains, and the woman who wrote the famous autobiographical books. But the true saga of her life has never been fully told.

Now, drawing on unpublished manuscripts, letters, diaries, and land and financial records, Caroline Fraser―the editor of the Library of America edition of the Little House series―masterfully fills in the gaps in Wilder’s biography. Revealing the grown-up story behind the most influential childhood epic of pioneer life, she also chronicles Wilder’s tumultuous relationship with her journalist daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, setting the record straight regarding charges of ghostwriting that have swirled around the books.”

Prairie Fires on Amazon

West from Home: Letters of Laura Ingalls Wilder

For ages 8 and up. Published in 1976, this collection of letters giving firsthand accounts of a solo trip west by the beloved author of the Little House books includes 24 pages of photographs.

From Amazon: “‘It is like a fairyland.’ So Laura Ingalls Wilder … described her 1915 voyage to San Francisco to visit her daughter, Rose Wilder Lane. Laura’s husband, Almanzo, was unable to leave their Missouri farm; her faithful letters home, vividly describing every detail of her journey, have been gathered here.

West from Home on Amazon

The World of Laura Ingalls Wilder:

The Frontier Landscapes that Inspired the Little House Books 

Marta McDowell gave a glimpse into The World of Laura Ingalls Wilder (2017) in her post, Laura Ingalls Wilder: Late-Blooming Author with a Passion for Nature. Publishers Weekly said of this charming book: “For gardeners, botanists, and fans of Laura Ingalls Wilder, this book looks at the beloved Little House on the Prairie author’s relationship to nature.” —Publishers Weekly

From Amazon: “The universal appeal of Laura Ingalls Wilder springs from a life lived in partnership with the land, on farms she and her family settled across the Northeast and Midwest. In this revealing exploration of Wilder’s deep connection with the natural world, Marta McDowell follows the wagon trail of the beloved Little House series.

You’ll learn details about Wilder’s life and inspirations, pinpoint the Ingalls and Wilder homestead claims on authentic archival maps, and learn to grow the plants and vegetables featured in the series. Excerpts from Wilder’s books, letters, and diaries bring to light her profound appreciation for the landscapes at the heart of her world.

The World of Laura Ingalls Wilder on Amazon

And the books that started it all …

Little House (9-Volume Set)

From Amazon: “This nine-book paperback box set of the classic series (the 8-volume Little House books plus Farmer Boy, about Almanzo) features the classic black-and-white artwork from Garth Williams.

The nine books in the timeless Little House series tell the story of Laura’s real childhood as an American pioneer, and are cherished by readers of all generations. They offer a unique glimpse into life on the American frontier, and tell the heartwarming, unforgettable story of a loving family.”

Little House 9-volume set on Amazon

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Laura Ingalls Wilder

Laura Ingalls Wilder (February 7, 1867 – February 10, 1957) gained renown for her autobiographical writings about growing up as an American pioneer. Particularly beloved are her Little House series of books for young readers. Born in a log cabin on the edge of an area called “Big Woods” in Pepin, Wisconsin, her life was the inspiration for her novels and richly informed her memoirs.

The Ingalls family traveled by covered wagon through Kansas and Minnesota with all that they owned, until finally settling in De Smet, Dakota Territory. The family loved the open spaces of the prairie, where they farmed and raised animals.

The Ingalls moved around quite a bit, and though it wasn’t an easy life, it gave Laura a rich trove of memories and experiences to draw upon when she began writing. It may be comforting to aspiring writers of all ages that her first book wasn’t published until she was sixty-five! 

Another long journey

Though Laura wasn’t conventionally educated, she managed to get her teaching certificate at the age of fifteen. Three years later, she married Almonzo Wilder, and helped her husband work the farm that they lived on. In 1894, The couple and their seven-year-old daughter, Rose, made the journey from their drought-stricken farm in De Smet to a new farm in Mansfield, Missouri, where they settled permanently. She told of this journey in diary entries that were later published in On the Way Home.

A brief glimpse of Laura

Prairie Fires:The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder, the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography by Caroline Fraser, opens with a compelling portrait of Laura in adulthood. Here she is, portrayed at age fifty-seven, shortly after her mother’s death:

“At fifty seven, Wilder was still far from becoming the emblematic figure of pioneer history. The woman whose life would become synonymous with the settlement of the West had spent most of her adult life living in the American South. She was not yet famous, had not yet written a book; the only writing she had published was her farm paper column. Anxious, she suffered from nerves and had a recurrent nightmare of walking down a “long, dark road” into obscure woods, the path of poverty.

… She had a sharp temper and a dry humor … Judgmental of others, she could be humble, even self-excoriating. She was parsimonious to a fault, but when she went into town she dressed elegantly in full skirts, lace collars, and hats garlanded with feathers or flowers. She favored long, dangling earrings, fastening her blouses with a cameo brooch. She loved velvet.

She was not an intellectual, but she had an intellect. She had never graduated from high school, but had studied with passion and vigor the Independent Fifth Reader. She knew a song for every occasion and passages of Shakespeare, Longfellow, Tennyson, Scott, Swinburne, and the Brownings. Books took pride of place in her living room, on custom-built shelves beside a stone hearth. 

As her fifties drew to a close, she stood at a turning point. The first act of her life was long over. Her childhood had been packed with incident: Indian encounters, prairie fires, blizzards, a virtual compendium of American frontier life … She married at eighteen and was a mother a year later.

By age of twenty-one, she know that everything she had ever had, no matter how hard-won, held the capacity to be lost. After a series of disasters, she and her husband left the Dakotas to rebuild seven hundred miles south, a long climb out of poverty constituting her life’s second act.”

Laura and Almonzo at about the time they married

The Little House books

Drought, crop failure, and Almonzo’s illness put the Wilders in a precarious position. Finally, in the 1920s, Laura got encouragement from her daughter Rose as well as the time that she needed to start writing. The first of the autobiographical Little House books, Little House in the Big Woods, was published in 1931; Laura was well into her sixties at the time. The best known volume of the series, Little House on the Prairie, was published soon after.

The family depicted in the stories was an idealized version of the one she grew up in. The Little House books tell of a family, not unlike her own, pioneering the Great Plains in the mid-1800s. Life was simple but good, yet of course, had its challenges. Little House in the Big Woods begins when the eponymous Laura is five years old; the family is headed by Ma and Pa, and rounded out by two sisters, Mary and Carrie.

Laura Ingalls Wilder page on Amazon

The series continues with By the Shores of Silver Lake and The Long Winter. In Little House on the Prairie, perhaps the best known in the series, Laura comes of age and becomes a teacher. Next comes These Happy Golden Years, in which Laura marries Almonzo and they move to their own home.

Laura Ingalls Wilder’s tales immediately appealed to readers of all ages — nine in the Little House series in all. The books were an immediate critical and popular success, winning numerous awards and making their way into the hearts of generations of readers with their message of endurance, simple living, and love of family. Though presented as fiction, the author insisted, “I lived everything I wrote.”

You might also like: Comforting Quotes by Laura Ingalls Wilder

Husband Almonzo and daughter Rose

She enjoyed a 64-year marriage with her husband Almonzo. Rose, their only daughter, was said to have played a fairly substantial role in making Laura’s books the eminently readable works of children’s literature that they became. Some have been less kind about Rose’s role in her mother’s writing career, and there have been numerous controversies around this issue.

The Wilder family, who had lost nearly everything in the early years of the Depression, became very wealthy indeed upon the publication of the Little House books. But in the end what matters is how beloved these books have been for generations of readers.

Laura’s beloved husband Almonzo died in 1949 at the age of 92. She lived for several more years and died in 1957 on her farm in Mansfield, Missouri at the age of 90.

More about Laura Ingalls Wilder on this site

Comforting Quotes by Laura Ingalls Wilder
Laura Ingalls Wilder: Late Blooming Author with a Passion for Nature
Caroline: Little House, Revisited (a novel)

Major Works

Little House on the Prairie Series

Autobiographies and Biographies about Laura Ingalls Wilder

Laura Ingalls Wilder: A Biography by William Anderson
Laura Ingalls Wilder: A Writer’s Life by Pamela Smith Hill
Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography 
Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder by Caroline Fraser
On the Way Home: The Diary of a Trip from South Dakota by Laura Ingalls Wilder

West from Home: Letters of Laura Ingalls Wilder, San Francisco, 1915

More Information

Wikipedia
Reader discussion of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s books on Goodreads
10 Things You Probably Didn’t Know About Laura Ingalls Wilder
In Search of Laura: Some Historical Facts

Selected film adaptations of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s books

Little House on the Prairie Complete Series (1974 – 82)
Little House on the Prairie (2005)
Little House on the Prairie – Movie Boxed Set (1983)

Visit Laura Ingalls Wilder’s homes and museums

Laura Ingalls Wilder Historic Home and Museum  – Mansfield, MO
Wilder Homestead  – Malone, NY

*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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“The Two Offers” by Frances Watkins Harper – full text

“The Two Offers” by Frances Watkins Harper (1825 – 1922; also known as Frances E.W. Harper) is believed to be the first published short story by an African-American writer. It first appeared in the June and July 1859 issues of the Anglo-African Magazine, a publication based in New York that featured the writings of black authors.

Written in the sentimental, somewhat stilted style of the era, the story is an example of “reform literature,” steeped in the values of Christianity, morality, and domesticity. It’s set in an era in which women of any class or race were basically the property of their fathers and husbands, were they not owned in the bonds of slavery

The story centers on two cousins, Laura Lagrange and Janette Alston. Laura and ponders two offers of marriage. This was about as much choice as many women could exercise at a time when it was considered more important to be “the angel of the house” than the mistress of one’s own life.

Making the choice of who, and less commonly whether, to marry was the biggest decision a woman of that era could make. As fate would have it, Laura marries a man who proves worthless and Janette remains, in the parlance of the day, a spinster. How much of their choice was based on what  they really wanted, rather than what society dictated for women? What part of their decision was based on fear, both of the known and unknown?

Harper, though a believer in traditional values, seems to have presented this story as a cautionary tale, warning women not to rely entirely on romantic love and marriage as their goal in life.

Frances Watkins Harper, in addition to a being prolific writer of poetry and prose, was a social reformer, suffragist, lecturer, and abolitionist. Freeborn in Baltimore, Maryland, her first collection of poetry was published in 1845, when she was twenty. Much later, the novel Iola Leroy, or Shadows Uplifted (1892) was another critical and commercial success.

“The Two Offers” is reprinted below in full. Some of the very long paragraphs of the original text have been broken up for easier readability. Originally published in the Anglo-African Magazine (June and July, 1859), it is in the public domain. The source of this text is HistoryTool.org.

“The Two Offers” by Frances Elizabeth Watkins Harper

“What is the matter with you, Laura, this morning? I have been watching you this hour, and in that time you have commenced a half dozen letters and torn them all up. What matter of such grave moment is puzzling your dear little head, that you do not know how to decide?”

“Well, it is an important matter: I have two offers for marriage, and I do not know which to choose.”

“I should accept neither, or to say the least, not at present.”

“Why not?”

“Because I think a woman who is undecided between two offers, has not love enough for either to make a choice; and in that very hesitation, indecision, she has a reason to pause and seriously reflect, lest her marriage, instead of being an affinity of souls or a union of hearts, should only be a mere matter of bargain and sale, or an affair of convenience and selfish interest.”

“But I consider them both very good offers, just such as many a girl would gladly receive. But to tell you the truth, I do not think that I regard either as a woman should the man she chooses for her husband. But then if I refuse, there is the risk of being an old maid, and that is not to be thought of.”

“Well, suppose there is, is that the most dreadful fate that can befall a woman? Is there not more intense wretchedness in an ill-assorted marriage—more utter loneliness in a loveless home, than in the lot of the old maid who accepts her earthly mission as a gift from God, and strives to walk the path of life with earnest and unfaltering steps?”

“Oh! what a little preacher you are. I really believe that you were cut out for an old maid; that when nature formed you, she put in a double portion of intellect to make up for a deficiency of love; and yet you are kind and affectionate. But I do not think that you know anything of the grand, over-mastering passion, or the deep necessity of woman’s heart for loving.”

You might also enjoy:

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

“Do you think so?” resumed the first speaker; and bending over her work she quietly applied herself to the knitting that had lain neglected by her side, during this brief conversation; but as she did so, a shadow flitted over her pale and intellectual brow, a mist gathered in her eyes, and a slight quivering of the lips, revealed a depth of feeling to which her companion was a stranger.

But before I proceed with my story, let me give you a slight history of the speakers. They were cousins, who had met life under different auspices. Laura Lagrange, was the only daughter of rich and indulgent parents, who had spared no pains to make her an accomplished lady. Her cousin, Janette Alston, was the child of parents, rich only in goodness and affection. Her father had been unfortunate in business, and dying before he could retrieve his fortunes, left his business in an embarrassed state. His widow was unacquainted with his business affairs, and when the estate was settled, hungry creditors had brought their claims and the lawyers had received their fees, she found herself homeless and almost penniless, and she who had been sheltered in the warm clasp of loving arms, found them too powerless to shield her from the pitiless pelting storms of adversity.

Year after year she struggled with poverty and wrestled with want, till her toil-worn hands became too feeble to hold the shattered chords of existence, and her tear-dimmed eyes grew heavy with the slumber of death. Her daughter had watched over her with untiring devotion, had closed her eyes in death, and gone out into the busy, restless world, missing a precious tone from the voices of earth, a beloved step from the paths of life.

Too self reliant to depend on the charity of relations, she endeavored to support herself by her own exertions, and she had succeeded. Her path for a while was marked with struggle and trial, but instead of uselessly repining, she met them bravely, and her life became not a thing of ease and indulgence, but of conquest, victory, and accomplishments.

At the time when this conversation took place, the deep trials of her life had passed away. The achievements of her genius had won her a position in the literary world, where she shone as one of its bright particular stars. And with her fame came a competence of worldly means, which gave her leisure for improvement, and the riper development of her rare talents.

And she, that pale intellectual woman, whose genius gave life and vivacity to the social circle, and whose presence threw a halo of beauty and grace around the charmed atmosphere in which she moved, had at one period of her life, known the mystic and solemn strength of an all-absorbing love. Years faded into the misty past, had seen the kindling of her eye, the quick flushing of her cheek, and the wild throbbing of her heart, at tones of a voice long since hushed to the stillness of death.

Deeply, wildly, passionately, she had loved. Her whole life seemed like the pouring out of rich, warm and gushing affections. This love quickened her talents, inspired her genius, and threw over her life a tender and spiritual earnestness. And then came a fearful shock, a mournful waking from that “dream of beauty and delight.”

A shadow fell around her path; it came between her and the object of her heart’s worship; first a few cold words, estrangement, and then a painful separation; the old story of woman’s pride—digging the sepulchre of her happiness, and then a new-made grave, and her path over it to the spirit world; and thus faded out from that young heart her bright, brief and saddened dream of life.

Faint and spirit-broken, she turned from the scenes associated with the memory of the loved and lost. She tried to break the chain of sad associations that bound her to the mournful past; and so, pressing back the bitter sobs from her almost breaking heart, like the dying dolphin, whose beauty is born of its death anguish, her genius gathered strength from suffering and wondrous power and brilliancy from the agony she hid within the desolate chambers of her soul.

Men hailed her as one of earth’s strangely gifted children, and wreathed the garlands of fame for her brow, when it was throbbing with a wild and fearful unrest. They breathed her name with applause, when through the lonely halls of her stricken spirit, was an earnest cry for peace, a deep yearning for sympathy and heart-support.

But life, with its stern realities, met her; its solemn responsibilities confronted her, and turning, with an earnest and shattered spirit, to life’s duties and trials, she found a calmness and strength that she had only imagined in her dreams of poetry and song.

We will now pass over a period of ten years, and the cousins have met again. In that calm and lovely woman, in whose eyes is a depth of tenderness, tempering the flashes of her genius, whose looks and tones are full of sympathy and love, we recognize the once smitten and stricken Janette Alston. The bloom of her girlhood had given way to a higher type of spiritual beauty, as if some unseen hand had been polishing and refining the temple in which her lovely spirit found its habitation; and this had been the fact. Her inner life had grown beautiful, and it was this that was constantly developing the outer.

Never, in the early flush of womanhood, when an absorbing love had lit up her eyes and glowed in her life, had she appeared so interesting as when, with a countenance which seemed overshadowed with a spiritual light, she bent over the death-bed of a young woman, just lingering at the shadowy gates of the unseen land.

“Has he come?” faintly but eagerly exclaimed the dying woman. “Oh! how I have longed for his coming, and even in death he forgets me.”

“Oh, do not say so, dear Laura, some accident may have detained him,” said Janette to her cousin; for on that bed, from whence she will never rise, lies the once-beautiful and lighthearted Laura Lagrange, the brightness of whose eyes has long since been dimmed with tears, and whose voice had become like a harp whose every chord is turned to sadness—whose faintest thrill and loudest vibrations are but the variations of agony.

A heavy hand was laid upon her once warm and bounding heart, and a voice came whispering through her soul, that she must die. But, to her, the tidings was a message of deliverance—a voice, hushing her wild sorrows to the calmness of resignation and hope. Life had grown so weary upon her head— the future looked so hopeless—she had no wish to tread again the track where thorns had pierced her feet, and clouds overcast her sky; and she hailed the coming of death’s angel as the footsteps of a welcome friend.

And yet, earth had one object so very dear to her weary heart. It was her absent and 4 recreant husband; for, since that conversation, she had accepted one of her offers, and become a wife. But, before she married, she learned that great lesson of human experience and woman’s life, to love the man who bowed at her shrine, a willing worshipper. He had a pleasing address, raven hair, flashing eyes, a voice of thrilling sweetness, and lips of persuasive eloquence; and being well versed in the ways of the world, he won his way to her heart, and she became his bride, and he was proud of his prize.

Vain and superficial in his character, he looked upon marriage not as a divine sacrament for the soul’s development and human progression, but as the title-deed that gave him possession of the woman he thought he loved. But alas for her, the laxity of his principles had rendered him unworthy of the deep and undying devotion of a pure-hearted woman; but, for awhile, he hid from her his true character, and she blindly loved him, and for a short period was happy in the consciousness of being beloved; though sometimes a vague unrest would fill her soul, when, overflowing with a sense of the good, the beautiful, and the true, she would turn to him, but find no response to the deep yearnings of her soul—no appreciation of life’s highest realities—its solemn grandeur and significant importance.

Their souls never met, and soon she found a void in her bosom, that his earth-born love could not fill. He did not satisfy the wants of her mental and moral nature—between him and her there was no affinity of minds, no intercommunion of souls.

Talk as you will of woman’s deep capacity for loving, of the strength of her affectional nature. I do not deny it; but will the mere possession of any human love, fully satisfy all the demands of her whole being? You may paint her in poetry or fiction, as a frail vine, clinging to her brother man for support, and dying when deprived of it; and all this may sound well enough to please the imaginations of school-girls, or love-lorn maidens.

But woman—the true woman—if you would render her happy, it needs more than the mere development of her affectional nature. Her conscience should be enlightened, her faith in the true and right established, scope given to her Heaven-endowed and God-given faculties. The true aim of female education should be not a development of one or two, but all the faculties of the human soul, because no perfect womanhood is developed by imperfect culture. Intense love is often akin to intense suffering, and to trust the whole wealth of a woman’s nature on the frail bark of human love, may often be like trusting a cargo of gold and precious gems, to a bark that has never battled with the storm, or buffeted the waves.

Is it any wonder, then, that so many life-barks go down, paving the ocean of time with precious hearts and wasted hopes? that so many float around us, shattered and dismasted wrecks? that so many are stranded on the shoals of existence, mournful beacons and solemn warnings for the thoughtless, to whom marriage is a careless and hasty rushing together of the affections? Alas that an institution so fraught with good for humanity should be so perverted, and that state of life, which should be filled with happiness, become so replete with misery.

And this was the fate of Laura Lagrange. For a brief period after her marriage her life seemed like a bright and beautiful dream, full of hope and radiant with joy. And then there came a change—he found other attractions that lay beyond the pale of home influences. The gambling saloon had power to win him from her side, he had lived in an element of unhealthy and unhallowed excitements, and the society of a loving wife, the pleasures of a well-regulated home, were enjoyments too tame for one who had vitiated his tastes by the pleasures of sin. There were charmed houses of vice, built upon dead men’s loves, where, amid the flow of song, laughter, wine, and careless mirth, he would spend hour after hour, forgetting the cheek that was paling through his neglect, heedless of the tear-dimmed eyes, peering anxiously into the darkness, waiting, or watching his return.

The influence of old associations was upon him. In early life, home had been to him a place of ceilings and walls, not a true home, built upon goodness, love and truth. It was a place where velvet carpets hushed its tread, where images of loveliness and beauty invoked into being by painter’s art and sculptor’s skill, pleased the eye and gratified the taste, where magnificence surrounded his way and costly clothing adorned his person; but it was not the place for the true culture and right development of his soul.

His father had been too much engrossed in making money, and his mother in spending it, in striving to maintain a fashionable position in society, and shining in the eyes of the world, to give the proper direction to the character of their wayward and impulsive son. His mother put beautiful robes upon his body, but left ugly scars upon his soul; she pampered his appetite, but starved his spirit. Every mother should be a true artist, who knows how to weave into her child’s life images of grace and beauty, the true poet capable of writing on the soul of childhood the harmony of love and truth, and teaching it how to produce the grandest of all poems—the poetry of a true and noble life.

But in his home, a love for the good, the true and right, had been sacrificed at the shrine of frivolity and fashion. That parental authority which should have been preserved as a string of precious pearls, unbroken and unscattered, was simply the administration of chance. At one time obedience was enforced by authority, at another time by flattery and promises, and just as often it was not enforced at all. His early associations were formed as chance directed, and from his want of home-training, his character received a bias, his life a shade, which ran through every avenue of his existence, and darkened all his future hours.

Oh, if we would trace the history of all the crimes that have o’ershadowed this sin-shrouded and sorrow-darkened world of ours, how many might be seen arising from the wrong home influences, or the weakening of the home ties. Home should always be the best school for the affections, the birthplace of high resolves, and the altar upon which lofty aspirations are kindled, from whence the soul may go forth strengthened, to act its part aright in the great drama of life with conscience enlightened, affections cultivated, and reason and judgment dominant.

But alas for the young wife. Her husband had not been blessed with such a home. When he entered the arena of life, the voices from home did not linger around his path as angels of guidance about his steps; they were not like so many messages to invite him to deeds of high and holy worth. The memory of no sainted mother arose between him and deeds of darkness; the earnest prayers of no father arrested him in his downward course: and before a year of his married life had waned, his young wife had learned to wait and mourn his frequent and uncalled-for absence.

More than once had she seen him come home from his midnight haunts, the bright intelligence of his eye displaced by the drunkard’s stare, and his manly gait changed to the inebriate’s stagger; and she was beginning to know the bitter agony that is compressed in the mournful words, a drunkard’s wife.

And then there came a bright but brief episode in her experience; the angel of life gave to her existence a deeper meaning and loftier significance; she sheltered in the warm clasp of her loving arms, a dear babe, a precious child, whose love filled every chamber of her heart, and felt the fount of maternal love gushing so new within her soul. That child was hers. How overshadowing was the love with which she bent over its helplessness, how much it helped to fill the void and chasms in her soul. How many lonely hours were beguiled by its winsome ways, its answering smiles and fond caresses. How exquisite and solemn was the feeling that thrilled her heart when she clasped the tiny hands together and taught her dear child to call God “Our Father.”

What a blessing was that child. The father paused in his headlong career, awed by the strange beauty and precocious intellect of his child; and the mother’s life had a better expression through her ministrations of love. And then there came hours of bitter anguish, shading the sunlight of her home and hushing the music of her heart. The angel of death bent over the couch of her child and beaconed it away. Closer and closer the mother strained her child to her wildly heaving breast, and struggled with the heavy hand that lay upon its heart. Love and agony contended with death, and the language of the mother’s heart was,

“Oh, Death, away! that innocent is mine;

     I cannot spare him from my arms

To lay him, Death, in thine.

     I am a mother, Death; I gave that darling birth

I could not bear his lifeless limbs

     Should moulder in the earth.”

But death was stronger than love and mightier than agony and won the child for the land of crystal founts and deathless flowers, and the poor, stricken mother sat down beneath the shadow of her mighty grief, feeling as if a great light had gone out from her soul, and that the sunshine had suddenly faded around her path. She turned in her deep anguish to the father of her child, the loved and cherished dead.

For awhile his words were kind and tender, his heart seemed subdued, and his tenderness fell upon her worn and weary heart like rain on perishing flowers, or cooling waters to lips all parched with thirst and scorched with fever; but the change was evanescent, the influence of unhallowed associations and evil habits had vitiated and poisoned the springs of his existence. They had bound him in their meshes, and he lacked the moral strength to break his fetters, and stand erect in all the strength and dignity of a true manhood, making life’s highest excellence his ideal, and striving to gain it.

And yet moments of deep contrition would sweep over him, when he would resolve to abandon the wine-cup forever, when he was ready to forswear the handling of another card, and he would try to break away from the associations that he felt were working his ruin; but when the hour of temptation came his strength was weakness, his earnest purposes were cobwebs, his well meant resolutions ropes of sand, and thus passed year after year of the married life of Laura Lagrange.

She tried to hide her agony from the public gaze, to smile when her heart was almost breaking. But year after year her voice grew fainter and sadder, her once light and bounding step grew slower and faltering. Year after year she wrestled with agony, and strove with despair, till the quick eyes of her brother read, in the paling of her cheek and the dimming eye, the secret anguish of her worn and weary spirit. On that wan, sad face, he saw the death-tokens, and he knew the dark wing of the mystic angel swept coldly around her path.

“Laura,” said her brother to her one day, “you are not well, and I think you need our mother’s tender care and nursing. You are daily losing strength, and if you will go I will accompany you.” At first, she hesitated, she shrank almost instinctively from presenting that pale sad face to the loved ones at home. That face was such a telltale; it told of heart-sickness, of hope deferred, and the mournful story of unrequited love.

But then a deep yearning for home sympathy woke within her a passionate longing for love’s kind words, for tenderness and heart support, and she resolved to seek the home of her childhood and lay her weary head upon her mother’s bosom, to be folded again in her loving arms, to lay that poor, bruised and aching heart where it might beat and throb closely to the loved ones at home.

A kind welcome awaited her. All that love and tenderness could devise was done to bring the bloom to her cheek and the light to her eye; but it was all in vain; her’s was a disease that no medicine could cure, no earthly balm would heal. It was a slow wasting of the vital forces, the sickness of the soul. The unkindness and neglect of her husband, lay like a leaden weight upon her heart, and slowly oozed way its life-drops. And where was he that had won her love, and then cast it aside as a useless thing, who rifled her heart of its wealth and spread bitter ashes upon its broken altars? He was lingering away from her when the death-damps were gathering on her brow, when his name was trembling on her lips! lingering away! when she was watching his coming, though the death films were gathering before her eyes, and earthly things were fading from her vision.

“I think I hear him now,” said the dying woman, “surely that is his step;” but the sound died away in the distance. Again she started from an uneasy slumber, “that is his voice! I am so glad he has come.”

Tears gathered in the eyes of the sad watchers by that dying bed, for they knew that she was deceived. He had not returned. For her sake they wished his coming. Slowly the hours waned away, and then came the sad, soul-sickening thought that she was forgotten, forgotten in the last hour of human need, forgotten when the spirit, about to be dissolved, paused for the last time on the threshold of existence, a weary watcher at the gates of death.

“He has forgotten me,” again she faintly murmured, and the last tears she would ever shed on earth sprung to her mournful eyes, and clasping her hands together in silent anguish, a few broken sentences issued from her pale and quivering lips. They were prayers for strength and earnest pleading for him who had desolated her young life, by turning its sunshine to shadows, its smiles to tears.

“He has forgotten me,” she murmured again, “but I can bear it, the bitterness of death is passed, and soon I hope to exchange the shadows of death for the brightness of eternity, the rugged paths of life for the golden streets of glory, and the care and turmoils of earth for the peace and rest of heaven.” Her voice grew fainter and fainter, they saw the shadows that never deceive flit over her pale and faded face, and knew that the death angel waited to soothe their weary one to rest, to calm the throbbing of her bosom and cool the fever of her brain.

And amid the silent hush of their grief the freed spirit, refined through suffering, and brought into divine harmony through the spirit of the living Christ, passed over the dark waters of death as on a bridge of light, over whose radiant arches hovering angels bent. They parted the dark locks from her marble brow, closed the waxen lids over the once bright and laughing eye, and left her to the dreamless slumber of the grave.

Her cousin turned from that death-bed a sadder and wiser woman. She resolved more earnestly than ever to make the world better by her example, gladder by her presence, and to kindle the fires of her genius on the altars of universal love and truth. She had a higher and better object in all her writings than the mere acquisition of gold, or acquirement of fame. She felt that she had a high and holy mission on the battle-field of existence, that life was not given her to be frittered away in nonsense, or wasted away in trifling pursuits. She would willingly espouse an unpopular cause but not an unrighteous one. In her the down-trodden slave found an earnest advocate; the flying fugitive remembered her kindness as he stepped cautiously through our Republic, to gain his freedom in a monarchial land, having broken the chains on which the rust of centuries had gathered.

Little children learned to name her with affection, the poor called her blessed, as she broke her bread to the pale lips of hunger. Her life was like a beautiful story, only it was clothed with the dignity of reality and invested with the sublimity of truth. True, she was an old maid. No husband brightened her life with his love, or shaded it with his neglect. No children nestling lovingly in her arms called her mother. No one appended Mrs. to her name; she was indeed an old maid, not vainly striving to keep up an appearance of girlishness, when departed was written on her youth.

Not vainly pining at her loneliness and isolation: the world was full of warm, loving hearts, and her own beat in unison with them. Neither was she always sentimentally sighing for something to love, objects of affection were all around her, and the world was not so wealthy in love that it had no use for her’s; in blessing others she made a life and benediction, and as old age descended peacefully and gently upon her, she had learned one of life’s most precious lessons, that true happiness consists not so much in the fruition of our wishes as in the regulation of desires and the full development and right culture of our whole statures.

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Liana by Martha Gellhorn (1944)

Martha Gellhorn was married to Ernest Hemingway when Liana, her fifth novel, was published in 1944. She had already made quite a name for herself as a war correspondent by that point and it rankled her to be described as “Mrs. Ernest Hemingway” in reviews of her books. Though her fiction varied in its quality and critical acclaim, her set of linked stories, The Trouble I’ve Seen (1936), based on her actual observations as a journalist during the Depression, earned her a great deal of respect.

Her brief marriage to Hemingway was already in jeopardy the year that Liana appeared. In her capacity as a war correspondent, Gellhorn wanted to cover the action, wherever it happened to be. In June of 1944 she sought to cover the landing of the Allied troops at Normandy, and was sabotaged from getting official press credentials by Hemingway, who resented her long absences. Undaunted, she forged ahead, employing her characteristic daring and subterfuge. She was the only female journalist at Normandy on D-Day.

When the novel was released early in 1944, World War II was coming to a peak and its author was otherwise preoccupied. It may not have received the kind of notice it might have, had it been published after the war.

An inauspicious marriage

The New York Times review of Liana from January 16, 1944 begins:

“With this new novel, Martha Gellhorn (Mrs. Ernest Hemingway) establishes herself as an honest and intelligent writer who has something to say and knows how to say it well. Liana has certain agreeable qualities of maturity and emotional understanding which are not always to be found in even the best modern art, still a predominantly male affair.

The story centers on Liana, who is described as a mulatto, or what we now call mixed-race. She marries Marc Royer, a wealthy white man on a fictional French Caribbean island called Saint Boniface. For his part, he marries her mainly to spite another woman, and so, Liana is marked by a kind of tragedy in this sense, becoming a prisoner in his home, and a partner to a man who doesn’t fully love her.

You might also enjoy: The Trouble I’ve Seen by Martha Gellhorn

An odd love triangle

As a way to mold her into a “white wife,” Marc engages a French intellectual named Pierre to tutor her. Predictably, Liana and Pierre fall in love, but Gellhorn is too skilled a writer to let the story devolve into love triangle cliché.

Marc, in fact, seems more sympathetic to Pierre than to his wife, but seen through Liana’s perspective, neither are to be completely trusted. She sees two white men conspiring against her. Things take a complicated turn when Pierre wants to join the war effort, comforted by the notion that in his absence Marc will care for her. Marc’s wealth makes him impervious to reproach, but in tying her fortunes to his, Liana has alienated herself from the black race that’s part of her heritage.

To quote again from the New York Times review:

“Pierre, the intellectual, is an old friend; you will find him, better drawn perhaps but recognizable, in a dozen modern novels. He is The Moral Man of E.M. Forester, The Natural Man of D.H. Lawrence … he is even, in some ways, Hemingway’s Man of Courage. If you are as tired of seeing this character defended, extolled, and exalted in all his aggressively masculine virtue, you will appreciate Miss Gellhorn’s attempt to show what he looks like to a woman.”

The quibble that this review has with the book is that Gellhorn writes too much from the mind and too little from the heart, and that as an artist, she should have done a more thorough job of capturing “the mysteries of personality.”

Learn more about Martha Gellhorn

Another 1944 review

Here’s another contemporaneous review of Liana:

From the original review by Pearl Allred of Liana by Martha Gellhorn in The Ogden Standard-Examiner, February 27, 1944: Martha Gellhorn has managed to avoid stereotype in this tale concerning the two men and a woman on the little French island of Saint Boniface in the Caribbean.

The fact that the woman — Liana — is a Mulatto complicates the situation, but does not, certainly, give it any special degree of freshness. Writers long before the period of Madame Butterfly and beyond the time of Wingless Victory have been preoccupied with the plight of the beautiful woman of color who, through no fault of her own, becomes the victim of a society to which she feels she doesn’t belong.

She is obligated to learn painfully not merely the fact that this is a man’s world, but that it is a white man’s world.

Liana, as the wife of Marc, the richest man on the island, is not happy, even though she has escaped from the existence she would have known among her own people. It is only when Pierre, the young French intellectual who has been engaged by Marc to tutor his wife, comes into her life that she knows what happiness can mean.

Pierre and Liana, as might be expected, fall in love, but the climax is not the usual and predicable  one in a triangle which involves lovers and jealous husbands. The author has brought to her story an understanding of character and an emotional maturity which keeps the reader from feeling he has read the same thing not merely once, but many times before.

Liana, like Gellhorn’s first novel What Mad Pursuit (1934), is hard to come by. It would be fascinating to analyze whether a contemporary reading would feel racist or sexist. Though knowing Gellhorn and her strong feelings about humanity and women’s equality, it would be hard to imagine that she’d knowingly or disingenuously write a book with a biased slant. Copies of Liana are hard to come by. Check your library system, or the library of a college or university.

Martha Gellhorn page on Amazon

More about Liana by Martha Gellhorn

Full New York Times book review (1944)
Reader discussion on Goodreads

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

Given the circumstances of the 19th century, both before and after emancipation, African-American women writers who took up the pen to write full books or other substantial bodies of work were rare indeed. It’s worth noting that before the Civil War, it was illegal to teach African-Americans to read in many states, not just in the South. So to write a novel or autobiography was a radical act for a black woman of that era, whether she had been enslaved or free born.

Not surprisingly, many of the books, essays, and poetry produced by African-American women writers dealt with slavery. Most of the autobiographies and thinly veiled novels discussed here were in the genre of slave narrative.

Lest you think we’ve forgotten Phillis Wheatley — the first African-American female poet to be published, and one of the first women of any background to be published in the colonies — we haven’t. She’s not included in this list because she lived and wrote exclusively in the 18th century. Here are six fascinating 19th-century African-American women writers whose talent and daring are ripe for rediscovery.

Hannah Bond (aka Hannah Crafts)

Hannah Bond (pen name Hannah Crafts, born 1830s – date of death unknown) escaped slavery around 1857 and settled in New Jersey. Her only known book was The Bondswoman’s Narrative by Hannah Crafts, Fugitive Slave from North Carolina. This autobiographical novel, likely written in the 1850s or 1860s is one of the first novels written by an African-American woman, and uniquely by a fugitive slave.

Not much is known about Hannah’s life, though it has been inferred from details in her novel that she was of mixed race and enslaved in Virginia. The manuscript of The Bondswoman’s Narrative was discovered some one hundred fifty years later by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., authenticated, and published for the first time in 2002. It has been extensively studied and analyzed by professor Gregg Hecimovich of Winthrop University. According to this September 18, 2013 story in the New York Times that uncovered the author’s true identity:

“Beyond simply identifying the author, the professor’s research offers insight into one of the central mysteries of the novel, believed to be semi-autobiographical: how a house slave with limited access to education and books was heavily influenced by the great literature of her time, like Bleak House (Charles Dickens) and Jane Eyre ( Charlotte Brontë ), and how she managed to pull off a daring escape from servitude, disguised as a man.”

Learn more about Hannah Bond / Hannah Crafts and The Bondswoman’s Narrative.

The Bondswoman’s Narrative on Amazon

Julia C. Collins

Julia C. Collins (1842 – 1865), believed to have been freeborn, worked as a schoolteacher in Pennsylvania once she reached young adulthood. In 1864, she began to write essays of racial uplift for The Christian Recorder, produced by the African Methodist Episcopal Church. The Curse of Caste, or The Slave Bride was serialized in The Christian Recorder beginning in early 1865. It’s the story of a mixed-race mother and her daughter who encounter barriers to love and opportunity due to slavery and racial bias. Not much is known about Julia Collins’ short life, though apparently, she was well educated.

Unfortunately, she didn’t live to finish her novel, dying of tuberculosis (then called consumption) in late November of 1965. The Curse of Caste, along with Julia’s other writings, were collected and published with analysis and commentary in 2006 by Oxford University Press.

The serialized novel was just reaching its climax as the author lay dying, and was never completed in its own time. The editors of the 2006 volume supplied two alternative endings. Some critics found that to be presumptuous, along with the claim that this was the first published novel by an African-American woman (as it erroneously states on the modern cover, above). Most scholars, including Henry Louis Gates, Jr., agree that Harriet E. Wilson’s Our Nig (1859) and Harriet Ann Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) hold that distinction.

Still, The Curse of Caste is considered a great discovery, a story that in real time explored race and gender issues, interracial love, and oppression in American life. Here’s a review of the 2006 edition in the New York Times.

Read The Curse of Caste online

The Curse of Caste on Amazon

Frances Watkins Harper

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. Freeborn in Baltimore, Maryland, she was also known as Frances E. W. Harper and by her full name of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper.

Erlene Stetson, in her 1981 book Black Sister: Poetry by Black American Women, 1746 – 1980, described Frances Harper’s poetry as “stylistically diverse and reverberated with a creative tension between her polite Victorian style and a sociopolitical content concerned with slavery, temperance, and suffrage.”

Frances became active in anti-slavery societies in the early 1850s and was a conductor on the Underground Railroad. She also began lecturing and was widely praised as a compelling public speaker. Her 1854 collection Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects was one her most successful publications. Much later, the novel Iola Leroy, or Shadows Uplifted (1892) was another critical and commercial success.

Her heartbreaking poem “The Slave Mother” is arguably her best known. Here’s a portion:

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.

Frances Harper published some eighty poems in her lifetime, which, in consideration with her fiction and nonfiction works, should have earned her a prominent place in American literature. Of all the writers listed in this post, she was the one with the most complete literary career. Learn more about her remarkable life.

Read books by Frances Watkins Harper online

Frances Watkins Harper page on Amazon

Harriet Ann Jacobs

Harriet Ann Jacobs in 1894

Harriet Ann Jacobs (1813 – 1897) was known for Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself  (1861). After repeated rejection, Harriet decided to self-publish the book, an impressive feat for any woman of that era, let alone one that had spent years as a fugitive slave. 

Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl is an autobiography, though it reads like a novel. According to the 1987 Harvard University Press edition: “Harriet A. Jacobs was born a slave in North Carolina in 1813 and became a fugitive in the 1830s. She recorded her triumphant struggle for freedom in an autobiography that was published pseudonymously in 1861 … Incidents is the major antebellum autobiography of a black woman. Along with Frederick Douglass’s account of his life, it is one of the two archetypes in the genre of the slave narrative.”

Writing pseudonymously as “Linda Brent,” the book’s narrator, Jacobs recounts the history of her family: a remarkable grandmother who hid her for seven years; a brother who escaped and spoke out for abolition; her two children, who she rescued and sent north. Incidents is also notable for its brutal honesty about the sexual abuse of female slaves. Learn more about Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and about the remarkable life of Harriet Ann Jacobs.

Read Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl online

Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl on Amazon

Elizabeth Hobbs Keckley

Elizabeth Hobbs Keckley (1818 – 1907), who was born into slavery and later emancipated, became a successful seamstress and social reformer before writing Behind the Scenes: Or, Thirty Years a Slave and Four Years in the White House (1868). This autobiography traces her journey from slavery in Virginia and North Carolina to become the seamstress of Mary Todd Lincoln, wife of Abraham Lincoln, during her years as First Lady.

Shortly after she bought her own freedom and that of her son in 1860, she moved to Washington, D.C. and built an impressive dressmaking business, serving the wives of the capital’s elite. Not only did she sew Mrs. Lincoln’s clothing, she also became her close confidante.

Behind the Scenes is an amalgam of first-person slave narrative and tell-all. Elizabeth’s portrait of the First Family sparked a bit of controversy since it broke some rules of privacy. Still, her warm and intimate friendship with Mrs. Lincoln endured. Interestingly, George Saunders’ 2016 novel Lincoln in the Bardo quotes passages from Behind the Scenes.

Elizabeth Keckley may not have been a literary figure per se, but the importance of Behind the Scenes, coupled with her successful dressmaking business as a newly minted member of the black middle class, made her a notable figure worth reconsidering.

Read Behind the Scenes online

Behind the Scenes on Amazon

Harriet E. Wilson

Photo: The Root

Harriet E. Wilson (1825 – 1900) is another figure in the small group of pioneering female African-American female novelists. Born free as Harriet E. Adams in Milford, New Hampshire, she was the mixed-race daughter of an Irish washerwoman and an African-American barrel-hooper. She was orphaned early and worked for several years as an indentured servant. Released from servitude at age eighteen, she struggled to make a living. She married twice, was widowed, and endured many hardships.

Her novel Our Nig, or Sketches from the Life of a Free Black was published anonymously in 1859 by a Boston publisher. Her motivation for writing the novel was to raise money to care for her young son, who was ill. This battle was lost, as little George died in the poorhouse in which she had boarded him, at age seven.

Our Nig didn’t make a splash when first published, and remained obscure until it was rediscovered by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. in 1982. It’s considered one of the first novels published by an African-American author. It remained Harriet Wilson’s only novel. After her child’s death, she went on the public lecture circuit to speak about her life. Gates called Our Nig “a complex response to Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”

Read Our Nig on Project Gutenberg

Our Nig by Harriet E. Wilson on Amazon

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