Nava Atlas's Blog, page 76

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

Given the circumstances of African-American life in the 19th century both before and after emancipation, women of color who took up the pen to write full books 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.

Not surprisingly, most of the books, essays, and poetry they produced by African-American women writers dealt with slavery. For a black woman to produce a novel or autobiography was a rare and radical act. 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 wasThe 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

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

The post 6 Fascinating African-American Women Writers of the 19th-Century appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.

A Selection of Poems by Alice Dunbar-Nelson

Alice Dunbar-Nelson (1875 – 1935; also known as Alice Moore Dunbar-Nelson) was a multitalented writer, poet, journalist, and teacher. She used her writings to advocate for the rights of women and African-Americans and was considered one of the premier poets of the Harlem Renaissance.

In addition to her highly regarded poetry, Alice was known for her short stories and searingly honest essays, in which she expressed the challenges of growing up mixed-race in Louisiana. Her heritage of African-American, Creole, European, and Native American gave her a broad perspective on race, which she explored along with the varied and complex issues faced by women of color.

Violets and Other Tales, her first book, was a compilation of poetry, essays, and short stories. She was twenty at the time of its publication in 1895. As her reputation as a writer grew, she wrote of sexism, racism, work, sexuality, and family in the various genres in which she wrote. Here is a selection of poems by Alice Dunbar-Nelson, from Violets and Other Tales as well as publications and anthologies of the early 1920s.

A Plaint

Dear God, ’tis hard, so awful hard to lose

The one we love, and see him go afar,

With scarce one thought of aching hearts behind,

Nor wistful eyes, nor outstretched yearning hands.

Chide not, dear God, if surging thoughts arise.

And bitter questionings of love and fate,

But rather give my weary heart thy rest,

And turn the sad, dark memories into sweet.

Dear God, I fain my loved one were anear,

But since thou will’st that happy thence he’ll be,

I send him forth, and back I’ll choke the grief

Rebellious rises in my lonely heart.

I pray thee, God, my loved one joy to bring;

I dare not hope that joy will be with me,

But ah, dear God, one boon I crave of thee,

That he shall ne’er forget his hours with me.

(from Violets and Other Tales, 1895)

See also: Women Poets of the Harlem Renaissance to Rediscover and Read

Amid the Roses

There is tropical warmth and languorous life

Where the roses lie

In a tempting drift

Of pink and red and golden light

Untouched as yet by the pruning knife.

And the still, warm life of the roses fair

That whisper “Come,”

With promises

Of sweet caresses, close and pure

Has a thorny whiff in the perfumed air.

There are thorns and love in the roses’ bed,

And Satan too

Must linger there;

So Satan’s wiles and the conscience stings,

Must now abide—the roses are dead.

(from Violets and Other Tales, 1895)

If I Had Known

If I had known

Two years ago how drear this life should be,

And crowd upon itself all strangely sad,

Mayhap another song would burst from out my lips,

Overflowing with the happiness of future hopes;

Mayhap another throb than that of joy.

Have stirred my soul into its inmost depths,

        If I had known.

If I had known,

Two years ago the impotence of love,

The vainness of a kiss, how barren a caress,

Mayhap my soul to higher things have soarn,

Nor clung to earthly loves and tender dreams,

But ever up aloft into the blue empyrean,

And there to master all the world of mind,

         If I had known.

(from Violets and Other Tales, 1895)

I Sit and Sew

I sit and sew—a useless task it seems,

The panoply of war, the martial tred of men,

Grim-faced, stern-eyed, gazing beyond the ken

My hands grown tired, my head weighed down with dreams—

Of lesser souls, whose eyes have not seen Death,

Nor learned to hold their lives but as a breath—

But—I must sit and sew.

I sit and sew—my heart aches with desire—

That pageant terrible, that fiercely pouring fire

On wasted fields, and writhing grotesque things

Once men. My soul in pity flings

Appealing cries, yearning only to go

There in that holocaust of hell, those fields of woe—

But—I must sit and sew.

The little useless seam, the idle patch;

Why dream I here beneath my homely thatch,

When there they lie in sodden mud and rain,

Pitifully calling me, the quick ones and the slain?

You need me, Christ! It is no roseate dream

That beckons me—this pretty futile seam,

It stifles me—God, must I sit and sew?

(first published in the AME Church Review in1918, “I Sit and Sew” is one of Alice Dunbar-Nelson’s most anthologized poems.

Here are several analyses of “I Sit and Sew”)

 

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Renaissance Women: 12 Women Writers of the Harlem Renaissance

To Madame Curie

Oft have I thrilled at deeds of high emprise,

And yearned to venture into realms unknown,

Thrice blessed she, I deemed, whom God had shown

How to achieve great deeds in woman’s guise.

Yet what discov’ry by expectant eyes

Of foreign shores, could vision half the throne

Full gained by her, whose power fully grown

Exceeds the conquerors of th’ uncharted skies?

So would I be this woman whom the world

Avows its benefactor; nobler far,

Than Sybil, Joan, Sappho, or Egypt’s queen.

In the alembic forged her shafts and hurled

At pain, diseases, waging a humane war;

Greater than this achievement, none, I ween.

(first published in The Philadelphia Public Ledger, August 21, 1921)

You! Inez!

Orange gleams athwart a crimson soul

Lambent flames; purple passion lurks

In your dusk eyes.

Red mouth; flower soft,

Your soul leaps up—and flashes

Star-like, white, flame-hot.

Curving arms, encircling a world of love,

You! Stirring the depths of passionate desire!

(from a Holograph manuscript, February 16, 1921)

Sonnet

I had not thought of violets late,

The wild, shy kind that spring beneath your feet

In wistful April days, when lovers mate

And wander through the fields in raptures sweet.

The thought of violets meant florists’ shops,

And bows and pins, and perfumed papers fine;

And garish lights, and mincing little fops

And cabarets and soaps, and deadening wines.

So far from sweet real things my thoughts had strayed,

I had forgot wide fields; and clear brown streams;

The perfect loveliness that God has made,—

Wild violets shy and Heaven-mounting dreams.

And now—unwittingly, you’ve made me dream

Of violets, and my soul’s forgotten gleam.

(from The Book of American Negro Poetry, 1922)

An excellent resource is Shadowed Dreams: Women’s Poetry of the Harlem Renaissance,

edited by Maureen Honey (Rutgers University Press, 1989)

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

The post A Selection of Poems by Alice Dunbar-Nelson appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.

4 Book Towns in North America

Whether you call it a Boekenstad, Village du Livres, Bokby or Bókabæirnir, from Canada to Korea and from Iceland to Australia a movement is growing. In hamlets, villages and towns around the world, like-minded booksellers, calligraphers, bookbinders, curators, publishers, and architects are coming together to ensure a future for the printed book, defying the e-book onslaught, and providing a new future for fading communities.

This post is excerpted and adapted from Book Towns: Forty-Five Paradises of the Printed Word by Alex Johnson (© 2018, Quarto Publishing, plc, by permission). It’s the first book to bring all of these towns together, offering a unique history of each one, and encouraging readers to seek them out. By visiting these towns you are not only helping to save the printed book; you are helping to keep communities alive. Above right, Mysteries and More in Hobart, NY, guarded by shop cat Big Red.

Book Towns by Alex Johnson on Amazon 

A book town is simply a small town, usually rural and scenic, full of bookshops and book-related industries. The movement started with Richard Booth in Hay-on-Wye in Wales in the 1960s, picked up speed in the 1980s and is continuing to thrive in the new millennium. From the start, the driving force has been to encourage sustainable tourism and help regenerate communities faced with economic collapse and soaring unemployment.

One important reason that almost all book towns are in bucolic locations is that they require cheap property to enable book businesses to open their doors. Many have been subsidized by local authorities to help them get off the ground. While many cities have numerous bookshops, book towns concentrate the outlets in a small area to create a critical mass.

The Gold Cities (Grass Valley and Nevada City)

Booktown books, a cooperative bookselling space housed in an old Salvation Army regional office

The Gold Cities in California actually cover two main locations, Grass Valley and (four miles to the north) Nevada City, with satellite sellers in nearby Penn Valley, North San Juan, and Lake of the Pines. In Nevada City, there’s Toad Hall Books (N Pine Street). Hardy Books, open by appointment only, specializes in Western Americana and ‘All Things Californian,’ much of which is not included in its online inventory.

Jenny’s Paper & Ink Books (Joerschke Drive) offers preowned delights in Grass Valley, which is also home to Booktown Books, a co-operative venture established by a group of book dealers in 1998. The project has gradually expanded, and since 2005 has operated from a two-story, 4,000 square foot building. Each bookseller has their own booth space and displays their chosen genres of books – military history, esoteric, graphic novels, or simply general  — as well as book ephemera, DVDs, CDs and vinyl records. Bud Plant and Hutchison Books, for example, specializes in fine illustrated and children’s books.

More information: Booktown Books

Hobart Book Village, Hobart, NY

One of the smallest bookshops to be found in any book town | Photo by Mark M. Rogers

Hobart Book Village owes a huge debt to one man. The small town of around 400 residents, in a picturesque rural location in the northern Catskills, now has six bookshops all very close to each other on Main Street, and was awarded the Delaware County Chamber of Commerce Tourism Award in 2016. This is all thanks to musician Don Dales, who in 1999 decided that the many empty shops at the time could provide the raw ingredients to make a thriving book town.

He bought up various premises and offered them to new businesses on tiny rents, sometimes even for free. He was soon joined by Diana and Bill Adams, who run WM. H. Adams Antiquarian Bookshop, specializing in pre-nineteenth-century and classical titles. It spreads over three floors and has an attractive deck overlooking the Delaware river. The bookshop is also the venue for the annual Winter Respite Lecture Series.

Don now runs the Mysteries & More Crime Café in a Greek Revival house dating back to the 1830s with a good stock of mystery, detective, and science fiction titles as well as homemade snacks.

The newest arrival is Kathy and George Duyer’s Creative Corner Books, which concentrates on cookery and craft books but also organizes cookery demonstrations, knitting clinics, and workshops on the premises, as well as stocking locally-produced farm products.

A good example of how things have changed is Liberty Rock Books, which was built in the early 1920s and was formerly an auto garage and propane distributor. Now the 5,000-square-foot space with exposed beams is full of books, including Native American works, plus jazz records and CDs, and vintage postcards. Other bookshops include Butternut Valley Books, which stocks a good range of local and global maps, fine art prints and bookends, as well as books in a variety of languages.

More information: Hobart Book Village

Sidney, Vancouver Island (Canada)

Munro’s Books in Victoria, established by acclaimed short story writer Alice Munro,

is just a short drive from Sidney

Sidney on Vancouver Island, British Columbia, is Canada’s only book town, established in 1996. Its pleasant seaside location makes it very popular with fishermen, and its population of 12,000 has a particularly high percentage of retirees.

Sidney’s half-dozen secondhand bookshops (numbers have halved over the last few years but those that remain are still going strong) are clustered along Beacon Avenue. The street is home to the eponymous Beacon Books which offers a wide general stock as well as modern first editions and antiquarian titles, while a whole room is devoted to ‘country living’ titles. Galleon Books and Antiques is a non-fiction specialist, especially good on regional Canadian history and First Nation titles, as well as selling antiques and other collectibles.

As you would guess, The Military & History Bookshop, just off of Beacon Avenue on Fourth Street, is a military specialist, strong on the two world wars and Churchilliana. The Children’s Bookshop caters for all youngsters from toddlers to young adults.

Tanner’s is where the book town really started, when Clive and Christine Tanner opened their first bookshop here, now selling only new books. It also sells an incredibly wide range of magazines and newspapers from Canada, the USA and the UK, as well as many maps and nautical charts.

The Haunted Bookshop is named after Christopher Morley’s 1919 novel of the same name (a bookshop-themed mystery tale rather than a supernatural whodunnit) and is Vancouver Island’s oldest antiquarian bookshop with appropriately classic bookshelves. Established originally in Victoria in 1947 and run by Odean Long, it has an excellent children’s classics section and also sells book ephemera, maps and prints.

More information: Sidney Book Town

You might also enjoy: Books for Book Lovers

*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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Books for Book Lovers: Bookshops, Libraries, Reading, & Bibliomania

For bibliophiles, it’s not enough to be so obsessed with books that we’re reading four or five works of fiction or nonfiction at any given time. We also love books about books, bookstores, libraries, bookish places, and even books about reading. This might seem eccentric at first glance, but for the devout book lover, it makes perfect sense.

Here’s a slew of books for book lovers that celebrate the passion for the page.At left, Bibliophile: An Illustrated History by Jane Mount, which kicks off this list. In this list you’ll find a book about so-called “book towns” around the world; a celebration of libraries; a musing on the art of reading itself; a collection on the thrill of finding rare books; a few books on bookshops, and a book on the joy of  bibliomania. What perfect gifts these make for the book nerds in your life — or for yourself, if you fit that description! 

Bibiliophile: An Illustrated History by Jane Mount

Bibliophile by Jane Mount on Amazon

A love letter to all things bookish, book people and places are curated by Jane Mount, who illuminates them with the vibrant illustrations she’s known for. You’ll find literary trivia, see the world’s beautiful bookstores, workplaces of famous authors, and even get a taste of famous fictional meals. Best of all, it’s a wonderful resource for discoverong some of the greatest reads ever.

“In this love letter to all things bookish, Jane Mount brings literary people, places, and things to life through her signature and vibrant illustrations … A source of endless inspiration, literary facts and recommendations, Bibliophile is pure bookish joy.”

Book Towns: Forty Five Paradises

of the Printed Word by Alex Johnson

Book Towns by Alex Johnson on Amazon 

“Book Towns” of the world are hamlets, villages, and towns center on literature and bookshops — in other words, paradises for book lovers. Book Towns will take you on a tour of the recognized literary towns around the world, with stories of how they grew and offering information on how to get there. But even if you never get to any of them, the beautiful photos and charming stories are perfect for the book-loving armchair traveler.

“Amid the beauty of the Norwegian fjords, among the verdant green valleys of Wales, in the shadow of the Catskill mountains and beyond, publishers and printmakers have banded together to form unique havens of literature.”

Footnotes from the World’s Greatest Bookstores: True Tales and Lost Moments

from Book Buyers, Booksellers, and Book Lovers by Bob Eckstein

Footnotes from the World’s Greatest Bookstores by Bob Eckstein on Amazon

Read an excerpt here on Literary Ladies Guide

From New Yorker cartoonist Bob Eckstein, here’s a collection of 75 gorgeous detailed paintings of some of the world’s most iconic bookstores, served up with the inside scoop about what goes on inside them. Quirky and charming, the anecdotes and stories feature many of today’s most renowned authors and thinkers.Some of these bookstores have gone by the wayside, many, thankfully, are still open for business.

“Page by page, Eckstein perfectly captures our lifelong love affair with books, bookstores, and book-sellers that is at once heartfelt, bittersweet, and cheerfully confessional.”

I’d Rather Be Reading: The Delights and Dilemmas

of the Reading Life by Anne Bogel

I’d Rather Be Reading by Anne Bogel on Amazon

I’d Rather Be Reading is a collection of witty reflection that any voracious reader will relate to. Blogger and author Anne Bogel (known for her popular podcast What Should I Read Next?) invites book lovers into a virtual community that’s as cozy as it is fascinating.

“With fascinating new things about books and publishing, and reflect on the role reading plays in their lives.  The perfect gift for the bibliophile in everyone’s life, I’d Rather Be Reading will command an honored place on the overstuffed bookshelves of any book lover.”

Rare Books Uncovered: True Stories of Fantastic Finds

in Unlikely Places by Rebecca Rego Barry

Rare Books Uncovered by Rebecca Rego Barry on Amazon

The thrill of the chase is rarely so thrilling as it is for book collectors in pursuit of rare and unique books. In Rare Books Uncovered, Rebecca Rego Barry, an expert on book collecting, tells the stories of incredible finds, from the first Superman comic — discovered in an attic — to a first edition of To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, bought at a flea market for a few bucks. Richly detailed, it’s an engrossing read for the die-hard book lover and inveterate collector.

“These tales and many others will entertain and inspire casual collectors and hardcore bibliomaniacs alike.”

The Bookshop Book by Jen Campbell

The Bookshop Book by Jen Campbell on Amazon

Here’s a book in which the bookshop, even more than the book itself, is the center of curiosity and fascination. Here you’ll  find more than 300 weird and wonderful bookstores around the world, in every form imaginable: shops on buses, in converted churches, abandoned factories, on barges, and even odder places. You’ll encounter stories of bookshops that moveable, mutable, and that are even folded into vending machines.

“From the oldest bookshop in the world, to the smallest you could imagine … The Bookshop Book is a love letter to bookshops all around the world.”

The Diary of a Bookseller by Shaun Bythell

The Diary of a Bookseller by Shaun Bythell on Amazon

You wouldn’t think that the journals of a bookseller would be so comedic, but The Diary of a Bookseller by Shaun Bythell is laugh-out-loud-funny. The owner of a used bookstore, appropriately called The Book Shop, Shaun’s story takes place in Wigtown, Scotland. This rural town was the first of the forty-some odd “Book Towns” compiled into the book of the same name, above. Bythell dishes on how he buys books, how he makes his old-fashioned business thrive in the modern world, and more. The heart of the book is his the hilarious interactions with staff and customers, adding up to an entertaining romp for book nerds.

The Library: A Catalogue of Wonders by Stuart Kells

The Library by Stuart Kells on Amazon

“Ancient libraries, grand baroque libraries, scientific libraries, memorial libraries, personal libraries, clandestine libraries: Stuart Kells tells the stories of their creators, their prizes, their secrets, and their fate. To research this book, Kells traveled around the world with his young family like modern-day ‘Library Tourists.’” So states the description of this book that will surely thrill devoted library lovers.

The Library is a celebration of libraries as places of wonder, and of the physical book as a thing of beauty. And it explores the human element, the very thing that has made libraries enduring institutions in a rapidly changing world.

*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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Poems by Gwendolyn B. Bennett, Harlem Renaissance Poet

Gwendolyn B. Bennett (1902 – 1981) was a multitalented American poet, artist, columnist, educator, and arts administrator associated with the Harlem Renaissance movement of the 1920s. 

Equally dedicated to visual and literary arts, her first published poem, “Heritage,” was published in the NAACP’s journal, The Crisis, in 1923. Her most productive period as a poet was from 1926 and 1927, producing poems that explored themes of racial pride and reflected African motifs. “Fantasy” spoke to the aspirations of African-American women. “Dark Girl” encouraged black women to love themselves and aspire to the nobility of African queens. 

Though Gwendolyn Bennett’s body of poetry wasn’t large, with around thirty of them published in The Crisis, Opportunity, and a few anthologies, they were impactful and earned her great respect from her peers. Here’s a selection for you to enjoy, from the pen of a creative woman who lived her life well and shouldn’t be forgotten.

Nocturne

This cool night is strange

Among midsummer days…

Far frosts are caught

In the moon’s pale light,

And sounds are distant laughter

Chilled to crystal tears.

(1923)

Heritage

I want to see the slim palm-trees,

Pulling at the clouds

With little pointed fingers …

I want to see lithe Negro girls,

Etched dark against the sky

While sunset lingers.

I want to hear the silent sands,

Singing to the moon

Before the Sphinx-still face …

I want to hear the chanting

Around a heathen fire

Of a strange black race.

I want to breathe the Lotus flow’r,

Sighing to the stars

With tendrils drinking at the Nile …

I want to feel the surging

Of my sad people’s soul

Hidden by a minstrel-smile.

(1923)

See a

To Usward

Let us be still

As ginger jars are still

Upon a Chinese shelf.

And let us be contained

By entities of Self …

Not still with lethargy and sloth,

But quiet with the pushing of our growth.

Not self-contained with smug identity

But conscious of the strength in entity.

If any have a song to sing

That’s different from the rest,

Oh let them sing

Before the urgency of Youth’s behest!

For some of us have songs to sing

Of jungle heat and fires,

And some of us are solemn grown

With pitiful desires,

And there are those who feel the pull

Of seas beneath the skies,

And some there be who want to croon

Of Negro lullabies.

We claim no part with racial dearth;

We want to sing the songs of birth!

And so we stand like ginger jars

Like ginger jars bound round

With dust and age;

Like jars of ginger we are sealed

By nature’s heritage.

But let us break the seal of years

With pungent thrusts of song,

For there is joy in long-dried tears

For whetted passions of a throng!

(1924)

See a commentary on “To Usward”

See also: Women Poets of the Harlem Renaissance to Rediscover and Read

Epitaph

When I am dead, carve this upon my stone:

Here lies a woman, fit root for flower and tree,

Whose living flesh, now mouldering round the bone,

Wants nothing more than this for immortality,

That in her heart, where love so long unfruited lay

A seed for grass or weed shall grow,

And push to light and air its heedless way;

That she who lies here dead may know

Through all the putrid marrow of her bones

The searing pangs of birth,

While none may know the pains nor hear the groans

Of she who lived with barrenness upon the earth.

(1924)

Hatred

I shall hate you

Like a dart of singing steel

Shot through still air

At even-tide,

Or solemnly

As pines are sober

When they stand etched

Against the sky.

Hating you shall be a game

Played with cool hands

And slim fingers.

Your heart will yearn

For the lonely splendor

Of the pine tree

While rekindled fires

In my eyes

Shall wound you like swift arrows.

Memory will lay its hands

Upon your breast

And you will understand

My hatred.

(1926)

Lines Written at the Grave of Alexandre Dumas

Cemeteries are places for departed souls

And bones interred,

Or hearts with shattered loves.

A woman with lips made warm for laughter

Would find grey stones and roving spirits

Too chill for living, moving pulses . . .

And thou, great spirit, wouldst shiver in thy granite shroud

Should idle mirth or empty talk

Disturb thy tranquil sleeping.

A cemetery is a place for shattered loves

And broken hearts …

Bowed before the crystal chalice of thy soul,

I find the multi-colored fragrance of thy mind

Has lost itself in Death’s transparency.

Oh, stir the lucid waters of thy sleep

And coin for me a tale

Of happy loves and gems and joyous limbs

And hearts where love is sweet!

A cemetery is a place for broken hearts

And silent thought …

And silence never moves,

Nor speaks nor sings.

(1926)

See a commentary on Lines Written at the Grave of Alexander Dumas

Song

I am weaving a song of waters,

Shaken from firm, brown limbs,

Or heads thrown back in irreverent mirth.

My song has the lush sweetness

Of moist, dark lips

Where hymns keep company

With old forgotten banjo songs.

Abandon tells you

That I sing the heart of race

While sadness whispers

That I am the cry of a soul …

A-shoutin’ in de ole camp-meeting-place,

A-strummin’ o’ de ole banjo.

Singin’ in de moonlight,

Sobbin’ in de dark.

Singin’, sobbin’, strummin’ slow …

Singin’ slow, sobbin’ low.

Strummin’, strummin’, strummin’ slow …

Words are bright bugles

That make the shining for my song,

And mothers hold down babies

To dark, warm breasts

To make my singing sad.

A dancing girl with swaying hips

Sets mad the queen in the harlot’s eye.

Praying slave

Jazz-band after

Breaking heart

To the time of laughter …

Clinking chains and minstrelsy

Are wedged fast with melody.

A praying slave

With a jazz-band after …

Singin’ slow, sobbin’ low.

Sun-baked lips will kiss the earth.

Throats of bronze will burst with mirth.

Sing a little faster,

Sing a little faster,

Sing!

(1926)

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Street Lamps in Early Spring

Night wears a garment

All velvet soft, all violet blue …

And over her face she draws a veil

As shimmering fine as floating dew …

And here and there

In the black of her hair

The subtle hands of Night

Move slowly with their gem-starred light.

(1926)

To a Dark Girl

I love you for your brownness,

And the rounded darkness of your breast,

I love you for the breaking sadness in your voice

And shadows where your wayward eyelids rest.

Something of old forgotten queens

Lurks in the lithe abandon of your walk

And something of the shackled slave

Sobs in the rhythm of your talk.

Oh, little brown girl, born for sorrow’s mate,

Keep all you have of queenliness,

Forgetting that you once were slave,

And let your full lips laugh at Fate!

(1927)

See a commentary on “To a Dark Girl”

Quatrains

1

Brushes and paints are all I have

To speak the music in my soul—

While silently there laughs at me

A copper jar beside a pale green bowl.

2

How strange that grass should sing—

Grass is so still a thing …

And strange the swift surprise of snow

So soft it falls and slow.

(1927)

Fantasy

I sailed in my dreams to the Land of Night

Where you were the dusk-eyed Queen,

And there in the pallor of moon-veiled light

The loveliest things were seen …

A slim-necked peacock sauntered there

In a garden of lavender hues,

And you were strange with your purple hair

As you sat in your amethyst chair

With your feet in your hyacinth shoes.

Oh, the moon gave a bluish light

Through the trees in the land of dreams and night.

I stood behind a bush of yellow-green

And whistled a song to the dark-haired Queen …

(1927)

See a commentary on “Fantasy”

Secret

I shall make a song like you hair …

Gold-woven with shadows green-tinged,

And I shall play with my song

As my fingers might play with your hair.

Deep in my heart

I shall play with my song of you,

Gently …

I shall laugh

At its sensitive lustre …

I shall wrap my song in a blanket,

Blue like your eyes are blue

With tiny shots of silver.

I shall wrap it caressingly,

Tenderly …

I shall sing a lullaby

To the song I have made

Of your hair and eyes …

And you will never know

That deep in my heart

I shelter a song for you

Secretly …

(1927)

Sonnets

1.

He came in silvern armour, trimmed with black—

A lover come from legends long ago—

With silver spurs and silken plumes a-blow,

And flashing sword caught fast and buckled back

In a carven sheath of Tamarack.

He came with footsteps beautifully slow,

And spoke in voice meticulously low.

He came and Romance followed in his track …

I did not ask his name—I thought him Love;

I did not care to see his hidden face.

All life seemed born in my intaken breath;

All thought seemed flown like some forgotten dove.

He bent to kiss and raised his visor’s lace …

All eager-lipped I kissed the mouth of Death.

2.

Some things are very dear to me—

Such things as flowers bathed by rain

Or patterns traced upon the sea

Or crocuses where snow has lain …

The iridescence of a gem,

The moon’s cool opalescent light,

Azaleas and the scent of them,

And honeysuckles in the night.

And many sounds are also dear —

Like winds that sing among the trees

Or crickets calling from the weir

Or Negroes humming melodies.

But dearer far than all surmise

Are sudden tear-drops in your eyes.

(1927)

Learn more about Gwendolyn B. Bennett

Anthologies

Gwendolyn B. Bennett’s poetry was never collected into a single volume, though it appeared in many anthologies, especially during the 1920s. These included:

Caroling Dusk  (1924), edited by Countee Cullen
The New Negro: Voices of the Harlem Renaissance  (1925), edited by Alain Locke
Yearbook of American Poetry  (1927), edited by William Braithwaite
The Book of American Negro Poetry  (1931), edited by James Weldon Johnson

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Gwendolyn B. Bennett

Gwendolyn B. Bennett (July 8, 1902 – May 30, 1981) was an American poet, writer, artist, columnist, and arts administrator associated with the Harlem Renaissance. Born in Giddings, Texas, she spent her early childhood on a Paiute Indian Reservation in Nevada, where her parents were teachers.

When she was four, her parents moved to Washington, D.C. so that her father could study law at Howard University, while her mother trained as a beautician. But all wasn’t well with this upwardly mobile couple; when Gwendolyn was seven, her parents divorced. After her mother gained custody, she was kidnapped by her father, who, along with his new wife, moved her around the northeast for several years.

A budding artist

When Gwendolyn finally achieved stability as a teen, her talents emerged and began to flourish. Attending an all-girls’ high school in Brooklyn, NY, she won a school-wide art contest and became the first African-American student to be part of the drama and literary clubs. She excelled at theater arts, starring in a play that she wrote.

In 1921, Gwendolyn took art courses at Pratt Institute and Columbia University. At the same time, she began writing poetry. Her first published poem, “Heritage,” was published in the NAACP’s journal, The Crisis, in 1923. What became one of her best-known poems, “To Usward” was released the following year as an homage to Jessie Redmon Fauset’s 1924 novel, There is Confusion.

After graduating college in 1924, Gwendolyn moved to Washington, D.C., where she taught various art courses at Howard University. A slew of scholarships and awards allowed her to further pursue art studies. She took courses at several prestigious institutions in Paris, including the Sorbonne, and explored oil and watercolor painting, woodcut, and drawing in pen and ink. Alas, most of the artwork she did during this period was later destroyed in a fire.

 

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A productive poet 

Whether in the nation’s capital or in Europe, Gwendolyn corresponded with Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, and other Harlem Renaissance luminaries, maintaining her ties to the creative community. Upon her return to New York City in 1926, she easily slid right back into the swing of things.

Some of her most memorable poetry was produced during this period. Her poems explored themes of racial pride and reflected African motifs. “Fantasy” spoke to the aspirations of African-American women. “Dark Girl” encouraged black women to love themselves and aspire to the nobility of African queens. Some poems were splendidly romantic, others a celebration of self. “Heritage” is also among her highly regarded poems as is the brief, evocative “Nocturn”:

This cool night is strange

Among midsummer days…

Far frosts are caught

In the moon’s pale light,

And sounds are distant laughter

Chilled to crystal tears.

While working an assistant editor at the influential African-American journal, Opportunity, Gwendolyn received another major award. The Barnes Foundation Fellowship recognized her achievement in fine art and graphic design. She embraced her visual and literary sides in richly expressive ways.

Gwendolyn was respected and beloved by the Harlem arts community. She bolstered emerging artists and writers and became adept at building community. The 1920s, while still in her own twenties, were among her most productive periods. Established figures praised her talent, describing her as “a dynamic figure, noted for her depth and understanding.”

Gwendolyn B. Bennett in the 1920s

See also: Women Poets of the Harlem Renaissance to Rediscover and Read

Marriages

In 1927, Gwendolyn married Dr. Albert Joseph Jackson, a fellow instructor at Howard University. The couple moved to Florida, but found the racism unbearable. In addition, Gwendolyn didn’t like being so far from the a cultural center. She and her husband returned to New York, this time to Long Island.

When Dr. Jackson died in 1936, Gwendolyn moved back to New York City, though the condition in which she found her beloved Harlem shocked and saddened her. The Depression had taken an immense toll in many ways, and with few outlets were available for the creative arts, so Gwendolyn put her energy into working for the Federal Writers Project and the Federal Art Project.

In 1940, Gwendolyn married fellow writer and educator Richard Crosscup, who was white. For unknown reasons, Gwendolyn was suspected of being a Communist by the FBI, then led by the nefarious J. Edgar Hoover. Along with others who were part of the arts community, she was investigated from 1941 through 1959 despite lack of evidence. Still, she remained active in community arts organizations, including serving on the board of the Negro Playwright’s Guild and leading the Harlem Community Arts Center.

Later life

As a multi-talented artist, writer, educator, journalist, and arts administrator, her versatility was an asset to the Harlem Renaissance and beyond. She dedicated herself to advancing the careers of young black artists. Gwendolyn B. Bennett’s achievements certainly deserve more attention, and if not for the intrusion of the FBI into her life, she would surely have accomplished even more.

The FBI investigation dampened Gwendolyn’s appetite for working in the arts. Her later years were spent as a secretary at the Consumers Union and after retiring, she and her husband settled in Kutztown, Pennsylvania. Together, they opened an antique shop, living a fairly anonymous life. She died of cardiovascular disease on May 30, 1981, in Reading, Pennsylvania.

More Information

Wikipedia
Modern American Poetry
Gwendolyn B. Bennett on My Black History
Gwendolyn B. Bennett – Pennsylvania Center for the Book

Publications

Gwendolyn B. Bennett’s poetry was never collected into a single volume, though it appeared in many anthologies, especially during the 1920s. These included:

Caroling Dusk (1924), edited by Countee Cullen
The New Negro: Voices of the Harlem Renaissance  (1925), edited by Alain Locke
Yearbook of American Poetry (1927), edited by William Braithwaite
The Book of American Negro Poetry (1931), edited by James Weldon Johnson

Two published short stories include “Wedding Day” (1926) and “Tokens” (1927). In additions to these works, she wrote a number of essays in addition to the popular “Ebony and Flute” columns for Opportunity magazine from 1926 to 1928. These were intended to celebrate the achievements of her fellow creative artists and writers in Harlem.

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Quotes from O Pioneers! by Willa Cather

The 1913 novel O Pioneers! by Willa Cather is written in the spare yet lyrical prose that came to define her style. One of her earliest novel, and one of the most successful on many levels, it explores themes of fate, love, perseverance, family ties, and community. The novel’s central character, Alexandra Bergson, is the daughter of Swedish immigrants who pioneer the harsh, unforgiving land of the Nebraska prairie.

In an unusual move, Alexandra’s father tasks her, in his dying wish, with taking the lead on managing the family farm. He tells his sons to honor the decisions of their sister. Of course, a novel doesn’t move along without conflict, but Cather delivers it without the sentimentality and overwrought prose characteristic of novels of that era.

More than one hundred years after its publication, O Pioneers! still resonates, speaking to the virtues of dignity, hard work, sacrifice, and loyalty. It’s only right and fitting that Alexandra Bergson, a feminist heroine for the ages, finds a route to happiness and contentment. Here are quotes from O Pioneers! that demonstrate the gentle wisdom of this novel.

“Freedom so often means that one isn’t needed anywhere.” 

“I like trees because they seem more resigned to the way they have to live than other things do. I feel as if this tree knows everything I ever think of when I sit here. When I come back to it, I never have to remind it of anything; I begin just where I left off.” 

Learn more about O Pioneers! by Willa Cather

“I’ve seen it before. There are women who spread ruin through no fault of theirs, just by being too beautiful, too ful of life and love. They can’t help it. People come to them as people go to a warm fire in winter.” 

“People have to snatch at happiness when they can, in this world. It is always easier to lose than to find.”

“There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before; like the larks in this country, that have been singing the same five notes over for thousands of years.” 

“It’s awfully easy to rush into a profession you don’t really like, and awfully hard to get out of it.”

O Pioneers! on Amazon

“I might as well try to will the sunset over there to my brother’s children. We come and go, but the land is always here. And the people who love it and understand it are the people who own it — for a little while.”

“There is often a good deal of the child left in people who have had to grow up too soon.” 

“It’s queer what things one remembers and what things one forgets.”

“Everywhere the grain stood ripe and the hot afternoon was full of the smell of the ripe wheat, like the smell of bread baking in an oven. The breath of the wheat and the sweet clover passed him like pleasant things in a dream.”

“He had got into the habit of seeing himself always in desperate straits. His unhappy temperament was like a cage; he could never get out of it; and he felt that other people, his wife in particular, must have put him there. It had never more than dimly occurred to Frank that he made his own unhappiness.”

“I’ve found it sometimes pays to mend other people’s fences”

“… he felt that men were too weak to make any mark here, that the land wanted to be let alone, to preserve its own fierce strength, its peculiar, savage kind of beauty, its uninterrupted mournfulness.”

“The years seemed to stretch before her like the land; spring, summer, autumn, winter, spring; always the same patient fields, the patient little trees, the patient lives; always the same yearning, the same pulling at the chain—until the instinct to live had torn itself and bled and weakened for the last time, until the chain secured a dead woman, who might cautiously be released.” 

“It was to him a very strange and perplexing place, where people wore fine clothes and had hard hearts.”

“Above Marie and Emil, two white butterflies from Frank’s alfalfa field were fluttering in and out among the interlacing shadows; diving and soaring, now close together, now far apart; and in the long grass by the fence the last wild roses of the year opened their pink hearts to die.”

You might enjoy knowing more about Willa Cather

“There is something frank and joyous and young in the open face of the country. It gives itself ungrudgingly to the moods of the season, holding nothing back. Like the plains of Lombardy, it seems to rise a little to meet the sun. The air and the earth are curiously mated and intermingled, as if the one were the breath of the other. You feel in the atmosphere the same tonic, puissant quality that is in the tilth, the same strength and resoluteness.” 

“Yes, there would be a dirty way out of life, if one chose to take it. But she did not want to die. She wanted to live and dream — a hundred years, forever! As long as this sweetness welled up in her heart, as long as her breast could hold this treasure of pain!”

“How many times we have walked this path together, Carl. How many times we will walk it again! Does it seem to you like coming back to your own place? Do you feel at peace with the world here?”

“I think we shall be very happy. I haven’t any fears. I think when friends marry, they are safe. We don’t suffer like — those young ones.”

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O Pioneers! by Willa Cather (1913)

O Pioneers! by Willa Cather is one of this esteemed American author’s most iconic novels. One of her earliest full-length works, it was published in 1913. Written in the kind of  spare, lyric prose that would become her trademark, the story explores themes of destiny, chance, love, and perseverance. It honors the ideas of community, family ties, and the dignity of work. Never sentimental or verbose, Cather delivers her plots with gentle forward motion. Her characters may be flawed, but they’re rarely weak. 

The novel’s central character, Alexandra Bergson, is her parents’ only daughter and oldest child. The Bergsons are Swedish immigrants working the Nebraska prairie land. The Bergsons encounter hardship, naturally. The unforgiving land is difficult to farm, the climate is harsh, and their neighbors, an amalgam of European immigrants, don’t always live harmoniously. 

Putting the daughter in charge

When Alexandra’s father John dies, he conveys his desire clearly to his offspring —Alexandra is to run the farm, and her brothers are to follow her lead. They are all to take care of their mother. His final instructions are conveyed from the deathbed:

“Boys,” said the father wearily, “I want you to keep the land together and to be guided by your sister. I have talked to her since I have been sick, and she knows all my wishes. I want no quarrels among my children, and so long as there is one hose there must be one head. Alexandra is the oldest, and she knows my wishes … If she makes mistakes, she will not make so many as I have made. When you marry, and want a house of your own, the land will be divided fairly, according to the courts. But for the next few years you will have it hard, and you must all keep together. Alexandra will manage the best she can.”

It’s difficult to know whether this action of John Bergson reflected anything of real life in those times — remember, this was published in 1913. It seems that a father putting his daughter in charge of the land he did battle with yet loved, when there are a number of sons as well, is quite a feminist statement.

You might also enjoy: Quotes from O Pioneers! by Willa Cather

Success comes with sacrifice

Alexandra did more than just manage. She proved her mettle at managing the business of farming and household management to become one of the most prosperous landowners in the region. This success came with the sacrifice; Alexandra had to forgo the joys of youth and young adulthood. And human nature being what it is, the enterprise wasn’t without conflict with her brothers.

It is the youngest brother, Emil who gets to set foot in the wider world and pursue a college education. Though this is due to the fruits of his family’s hard work, his brothers resent him for it and grow to hate Alexandra for creating such a seismic shift in the family dynamic. Emil’s story, told alongside Alexandra’s, is central to the plot and involves his love interest, Marie, a married woman from the town’s French community.

As in all of Cather’s prairie novels and stories, the land itself becomes a character of sorts, a symbol of a way of life that tested the endurance of the pioneers who lived it. More than one hundred years after its publication, O Pioneers! still resonates, speaking to the virtues of dignity, hard work, sacrifice, and loyalty. It’s only right and fitting that Alexandra Bergson, a feminist heroine for the ages, finds a way to happiness and contentment in the end.

A 1913 Review of O Pioneers!

A Novel Without A Hero: O Pioneers! by Willa Cather from the original review in the New York Times, September, 1913:  The hero of the American novel very often starts on the farm, but he seldom stays there; instead he uses it as a spring-board form which to plunge into the mysteries of politics or finance.

Probably the novel reflects a national tendency. To be sure, after we have carefully separated ourselves from the soil, we are apt to talk a lot about the advantages of a return to it, but in most cases it ends there. The average American does not have any deep instinct for the land, or vital consciousness of the dignity and value of the life that may be lived upon it.

The struggle with the untamed land

O Pioneers! is filled with this instinct and this consciousness. It is a tale of the old wood-and-field worshipping races, Swedes and Bohemians, transplanted to Nebraskan uplands, of their struggle with the untamed soil, and their final conquest of it. Miss Cather has written a good story, we hasten to assure the reader who cares for good stories, but she has achieved something finer.

Through a direct, human tale of love and struggle and attainment, a tale that is American in the best sense of the word, there runs a thread of symbolism. It is practically a novel without a hero. There are men in it, but the interest centers in two women — not rivals, but friends, and more especially in the splendid farm-woman, Alexandra.

O Pioneers! by Willa Cather on Amazon

The great feminine

In this new mythology, which is the old, the goddess of fertility once more subdues the barren and stubborn earth. Possibly some might call it a feminist novel, for the who heroines are stronger, cleverer, and better balanced than their husbands and brothers — but we are sure Miss Cather had nothing so inartistic in mind. It is a natural growth, feminine because it is only an expansion of the very essence of femininity.

Instead of calling O Pioneers! a novel without a hero it might be more accurate to call it a novel with three heroines — Alexandra, the harvest-goddess, Marie, poor little spirit of love and youth snatched untimely former poppy-fields, and the Earth itself, patient and bountiful source of all things.

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All My Pretty Ones by Anne Sexton (1962)

Anne Sexton (1928 – 1974) was an American poet considered one of the pioneers of modern confessional poetry, though her artistry reached far beyond that genre. Her first collection, To Bedlam and Part Way Back, was published in 1960 to critical and public praise. It was followed by All My Pretty Ones in 1962.

During this period, Anne was receiving not only critical praise but prestigious awards as well. These included the Frost Fellowship, the Shelley Memorial Prize, a Ford Foundation grant, and many others. Sexton struggled mightily with mental illness during this fertile time in her creative life.

By the time she won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1966, she had been hospitalized and attempted suicide several times. Her poetry resonated as much with readers as it did with critics. Following is a review of All My Pretty Ones from its time of publication:

From the original review of All My Pretty Ones by Anne Sexton in the El Paso Herald-Post, October 20, 1962: “A work of art may be a revelation. The higher consciousness of the great artist is evidenced not only by his capacity of ordering his experience but also of having the experience,” Robert Shaw once remarked. And All My Pretty Ones by Anne Sexton brings a poignant assurance that these human capacities are as vital as they ever have been.

Her poetic genius has enabled her to take this language of ours, this same language that so much of our contemporary life uses to make our being — the chatter at a cocktail party, the TV commercial — and create poems that reawaken our wonder at the human capacity for awareness and insight into “the infrared and ultra-violet” of man’s life.

See also: 10 Poems by Anne Sexton, Confessional Poet

All My Pretty Ones follow Sexton’s first volume, To Bedlam and Part Way Back. The thirty-three poem speak with directness and concreteness of a woman’s life that she accepts the pain, the conflict that are a part of life as a “sign and seal of a deep bond with being.” And with her art, Sexton puts some order to doubt, terror and death, and out of the agony glimpses the reality of love.

This world we live in, a world of hydrogen bombs, cold wars, and revolutions, is a world so mobile we can forget our roots are in the soil. It brings pain and darkness to each of us. The poets of our age have reminded us of this over and over, but none has been more immediate, intense, and personal in the full meaning than Anne Sexton

These poems in this rich art of hers give us hope, for as Eric Bently once said, “… no poet lives through anything isolated. What he lives through all his countrymen live through with him.” This world of the same stars Van Gogh once saw will not let you off easy. But the dimensions of your life will be deepened and enriched by them. — Elizabeth D. Campbell

The Complete Poems of Anne Sexton on Amazon

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Jane Austen, the Secret Radical: How She Would Have Liked to Be Read

In Jane Austen, the Secret Radical, author Helena Kelly looks past the grand houses, drawing room dramas, and witty dialogue that have long been the hallmarks of Jane Austen‘s work to bring to light the serious, ambitious, subversive concerns of this beloved writer. Kelly illuminates the radical views — on such subjects as slavery, poverty, feminism, marriage, and the church — that Austen deftly and carefully explored in her six novels, at a time when open criticism was considered treason.

Kelly shows us that Austen was fully aware of what was going on in the world during the turbulent times she lived in, and sure of what she thought of it. Above all, Austen understood that the novel — until then dismissed as mindless and frivolous — could be a meaningful art form, one that in her hands reached unprecedented heights of greatness.

The following is excerpted from Jane Austen, the Secret Radical © 2016 by Helena Kelly. Reprinted by permission with Vintage Books, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC.

Reading Jane Austen as she would have preferred

Jane talks in one letter about wanting readers who have “a great deal of ingenuity,” who will read her carefully. In wartime, in a totalitarian regime, and in a culture that took the written word far more seriously than we do, she could have expected to find them. Jane expected to be read slowly — perhaps aloud, in the evenings, or over a period of weeks as each volume was borrowed in turn from the circulating library. She expected that her readers would think about what she wrote, would even discuss it with each other.

She never expected to be read the way we read her, gulped down as escapist historical fiction, fodder for romantic fantasies. Yes, she wanted to be enjoyed; she wanted people to feel as strongly about her characters as she did herself. But for Jane a story about love and marriage wasn’t ever a light and frothy confection.

Marriage wasn’t all that romantic

Generally speaking, we view sex as an enjoyable recreational activity; we have access to reliable contraception; we have very low rates of maternal and infant mortality. None of these things were true for the society in which Jane lived. The four of her brothers who became fathers produced, between them, thirty-three children. Three of those brothers lost a wife to complications of pregnancy and childbirth. Another of Jane’s sisters-in-law collapsed and died suddenly at the age of thirty-six; it sounds very much as if the cause might have been the rupturing of an ectopic pregnancy, which was, then, impossible to treat.

Marriage as Jane knew it involved a woman giving up everything to her husband — her money, her body, her very existence as a legal adult. Husbands could beat their wives, rape them, imprison them, take their children away, all within the bounds of the law. Avowedly feminist writers such as Mary Wollstonecraft and the novelist Charlotte Smith were beginning to explore these injustices during Jane’s lifetime. Understand what a serious subject marriage was then, how important it was, and all of a sudden courtship plots start to seem like a more suitable vehicle for discussing other serious things.

No more than a handful of the marriages Jane depicts in her novels are happy ones. And with the possible exception of Pride and Prejudice, even the relationships between Jane’s central characters are less than ideal — certainly not love’s young dream. Marriage mattered because it was the defining action of a woman’s life; to accept or refuse a proposal was almost the only decision that a woman could make for herself, the only sort of control she could exert in a world that must very often have seemed as if it were spiraling into turmoil. Jane’s novels aren’t romantic. But it’s become increasingly difficult for readers to see this.

Jane Austen, the Secret Radical by Helena Kelly on Amazon

A skewed view of Jane Austen’s novels

For readers today opening one of Jane’s novels, there’s an enormous amount standing between them and the text. There’s the passage of two hundred years, for a start, and then there’s everything else — biographies and biopics, the lies and half-truths of the family memoirs, the adaptations and sequels, rewritings and reimaginings.

When it comes to Jane, so many images have been danced before us, so rich, so vivid, so prettily presented. They’ve been seared onto our retinas in the sweaty darkness of a cinema, and the aftereffect remains, a shadow on top of everything we look at subsequently.

It’s hard; it requires an effort for most readers to blink those images away, to be able to see Edward Ferrars cutting up a scissor case (a scene that arguably carries a strong suggestion of sexual violence) rather than the 1990s heartthrob Hugh Grant nervously rearranging the china ornaments on the mantelpiece. By the time you’ve seen Colin-Firth-as-Mr.-Darcy poised to dive into a lake fifty times, it’s made a synaptic pathway in your brain. Indeed, I’d question whether we can get away from that, certainly how we do.

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What we’ve gotten wrong

And this ought to concern us, because a lot of the images—like the images on the banknote—are simplistic, and some of them are plain wrong. Pemberley isn’t on the scale of the great ducal mansion at Chatsworth; Captain Wentworth doesn’t buy Kellynch Hall for Anne as a wedding present at the end of Persuasion; the environs of Highbury, the setting for Emma, aren’t a golden pastoral idyll. We have, really, very little reason to believe that Jane was in love with Tom Lefroy. But each image colors our understanding in some way or another, from Henry Austen’s careful portrait of his sister as an accidental author to Curtis Sittenfeld’s updated Pride and Prejudice, set in suburban Cincinnati.

The effect of all of them together is to make us read novels that aren’t actually there … I would suggest that when dealing with someone like Jane Austen, we could add another, and more dangerous, class of knowledge; what might be termed the unknown knowns—things we don’t actually know but think we do.

How to take Jane seriously

If we want to be the best readers of Jane’s novels that we can be, the readers that she hoped for, then we have to take her seriously. We can’t make the mistake that the publisher Crosby made and let our eyes slide over what doesn’t seem to be important. We can’t shrug off apparent contradictions or look only for confirmation of what we think we already know. We have to read, and we have to read carefully, because Jane had to write carefully, because she was a woman and because she was living through a time when ideas both scared and excited people.

And once we read like this, we start to see her novels in an entirely new light. Not an undifferentiated procession of witty, ironical stories about romance and drawing rooms, but books in which an authoress reflects back to her readers their world as it really is — complicated, messy, filled with error and injustice.

This is a world in which parents and guardians can be stupid and selfish; in which the Church ignores the needs of the faithful; in which landowners and magistrates — the people with local power — are eager to enrich themselves even when that means driving the poorest into criminality. Jane’s novels, in truth, are as revolutionary, at their heart, as anything that Wollstonecraft or Tom Paine wrote. But by and large, they’re so cleverly crafted that unless readers are looking in the right places — reading them in the right way — they simply won’t understand.

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An artist, if not a genius

Jane wasn’t a genius — inspired, unthinking; she was an artist. She compared herself to a miniature painter; in her work every stroke of the brush, every word, every character name and every line of poetry quoted, every location, matters.

It’s here, in the novels, that we find Jane — what there is of her to find, after all these years, after all her family’s efforts at concealment. It’s here we find a clever woman, clear-sighted, a woman “of information,” who knew what was going on in the world and what she thought about it. An authoress who knew that the novel, until then widely seen as mindless “trash,” could be a great art form and who did a lot — perhaps more than any other writer — to make it into one.

We’ve grown too accustomed to the other Janes—to Henry’s perfect sister and James-Edward’s maiden aunt; to the romantic, reckless girl in Becoming Jane and the woman on the banknote. I’ll try hard to shake these Janes off. In Jane Austen, Secret Radical, I offer flashes of an imaginary Jane Austen, sometimes in ordinary life, sometimes in the places she revisited in her books, but always primarily as a writer.

They’re intended as glimpses of what the authoress might have been thinking, of how real events and locations, and people, might have made their way into her novels. I don’t claim these as biography; even though they stay close to Jane’s manuscript correspondence, and to her own writing, they’re fiction.

Fiction offers deeper truths

Jane wouldn’t, I think, have disapproved of this approach. Northanger Abbey contains a lengthy passage about history, about its blend of fact and fiction. The naïve heroine, Catherine Morland, states an undoubted truth, that “a great deal” of history is made up: “The speeches that are put into the heroes’ mouths, their thoughts and designs—the chief of all this must be invention.” The older and more intelligent Eleanor Tilney, who reads history chiefly for pleasure, expresses herself “very well contented to take the false with the true.”

For Jane herself, though, fiction isn’t simply an enjoyable embellishment. It can offer deeper truths than fact. It’s in fiction, Jane says, that we should look for “the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties.”

The “truthful fictions” in Jane Austen, the Secret Radical, the glimpses of an unfamiliar woman, should help to prepare readers for novels that will also become suddenly unfamiliar. Each chapter is devoted to one book and suggests how, by forgetting what we think we know, and focusing instead on the historical background, and on the texts themselves, we can make an attempt at reading as Jane intended us to. 

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