Nava Atlas's Blog, page 8

The World She Edited: Katharine S. White at The New Yorker

In the summer of 1925, Katharine Sergeant Angell walked into The New Yorker’s midtown office and left with a job as an editor. The magazine was only a few months old. Over the next thirty-six years, White would transform the publication into a literary powerhouse.

This towering but behind-the scenes figure in the history of 20th-century literature finally gets the first-rate biography she deserves in The World She Edited: Katharine S. White at The New Yorker by Amy Reading (Mariner Books, September 3, 2024; thanks to Mariner Books for supplying the content of this post).

In The World She Edited, Amy Reading brings to life the remarkable relationships White fostered with her writers and how these relationships nurtured an astonishing array of literary talent.

She edited a young John Updike, to whom she sent seventeen rejections before a single acceptance, as well as Vladimir Nabokov, with whom she fought incessantly, urging that he drop needlessly obscure, confusing words.

White’s biggest contribution, however, was her cultivation of women writers whose careers were made at The New Yorker—Janet Flanner, Mary McCarthy, Elizabeth Bishop, Jean Stafford, Nadine Gordimer, Elizabeth Taylor, Emily Hahn, Kay Boyle, and more.

She cleared their mental and financial obstacles, introduced them to each other, and helped them create now classic stories and essays. She propelled these women to great literary heights and, in the process, reinvented the role of the editor, transforming the relationship to be not just a way to improve a writer’s work but also their life.

Based on these years of scrupulous research, acclaimed author Amy Reading creates a rare and deeply intimate portrait of a prolific editor—through both her incredible tenure at The New Yorker, and her famous marriage to E.B. White—and reveals how she transformed our understanding of literary culture and community.

About Amy Reading: Amy Reading is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment of the Humanities and the New York Public Library. She is the author of The Mark Inside: A Perfect Swindle, a Cunning Revenge, and a Small History of the Big Con. She lives in upstate New York, where she has served on the executive board of Buffalo Street Books, an indie cooperative bookstore, since 2018.

 

 Fascinating facts about Katharine S. White

She hired E.B. White; then reader, she married him
Katharine hired E.B. White (who went by Andy all his life) as a staff writer at The New Yorker in 1926, a year after the magazine was founded and she joined as an editor. They began an affair in 1928, and in 1929, less than three months after Katharine divorced Ernest Angell, they eloped and would stay together until her death in 1977.

It was Katharine’s role as children’s book reviewer at The New Yorker and her encouragement and industry connections that led Andy to try his hand at children’s books, thus giving the world classics such as Charlotte’s Web.

Katharine was the only woman on the The New Yorker masthead for thirty years
Katharine was 32 and the magazine was a few months old when she walked in and asked for a job. She was hired as a very part-me manuscript reader but within weeks was promoted to full-time editor. She invented her job out of nothing, at a magazine which was struggling to survive.

From the summer of 1925, when she joined the magazine a few months after its founding, to the summer of 1956, a few years before her retirement when she hired Rachel Mackenzie to replace her, Katharine White was the only woman on the masthead at The New Yorker.

 

Katharine cultivated many women writers
Katherine brought many women authors into the New Yorker fold, including Janet Flanner, Louise Bogan, Kay Boyle, Sally Benson, Nancy Hale, and Emily Hahn.

She adored the stories of Mary McCarthy and exerted a major campaign to get and keep her for The New Yorker; their inmate relationship was crucial for McCarthy to develop the reminiscences that first published in the magazine and eventually collected as Memories of a Catholic Girlhood. Katharine acquired and edited the works of poets Elizabeth Bishop, Adrienne Rich, and Phyllis McGinley.

She brought to American readers the Indian-born writer Christine Weston and the South African writer Nadine Gordimer, and she persuaded British authors Rumer Godden, Sylvia Townsend Warner, and Elizabeth Taylor to write for the magazine. One of her closest friendships was with Jean Stafford; she published Stafford just as she was recovering from her violent marriage to Robert Lowell, thus saving her artistic life, and continued to support her emotionally for years.

Katharine impacted numerous male authors as well
Katharine edited many of the New Yorker’s most recognizable authors, including James Thurber, John O’Hara, Ogden Nash, and Alexander Woollcott in the early years. She discovered authors who would become New Yorker names, like John Cheever, Brendan Gill, and Morley Callaghan.

She published a range of poets including Theodore Roethke and W.H. Auden. She brought a just-graduated John Updike into the magazine and they began an intense, loving, playful relaonship over words and commas and semicolons.

She avidly sought out Vladimir Nabokov, using their mutual friend Edmund Wilson as go-between, and advanced him money before he’d even published a story with her. As with Updike, she exerted a strong hand over his prose for the first few years of their association, before giving him the reins, and two of his books, Pnin and Speak, Memory began as New Yorker serials.

 

She defined iconic genres for The New Yorker
Katharine invented the term “casual” for a quintessential New Yorker genre, a light or humorous personal essay which could be fiction or memoir. This became a pillar of the New Yorker appeal, and it grew into the serialized reminiscences that also came to define the magazine.

She was a pioneer of Work From Home
In 1938, Andy White decided to move the family to their summer home in Maine, for his mental health and for his ability to keep wring. Katharine had a choice to make about her work-life balance.

She solved a tremendously tense problem by moving with Andy to Maine and stepping down as head of the fiction department but reinventing her job as a consulting editor who worked via the twice-daily delivery of giant mailbags full of manuscripts and letters.

She was so crucial to The New Yorker that Harold Ross and the other editors flexed to accommodate her and keep her experience and critical eye trained on their work. It would have been easy to fire her, but instead she played an enormous role in editing this urban magazine from a saltwater farm in Maine, until the war brought both Whites back to the city.

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The World She Edited is available on Bookshop.org*, Amazon*, 
and wherever books are sold

 

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Praise for The World She Edited

“As elegant and judicious as its subject, The World She Edited draws a luminous portrait of Katharine White and her life’s work: making The New Yorker into the cultural powerhouse it would become. White’s creative brilliance as an editor, the care with which she nurtured challenging personal and professional relationships (including with her equally brilliant but sometimes unstable husband), and her central place in the history of American letters have been too little recognized—an injustice that Amy Reading’s essential book has finally corrected.” —Ruth Franklin, author of Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life

“Amy Reading has recreated a lost, gilded literary world in her smart and evocative biography of Katharine White, the longtime editor at The New Yorker who helped shape postwar American literature. As we read over White’s shoulder, we gain deeper insight into the lives and work of the women writers White cultivated—Elizabeth Bishop, Mary McCarthy, May Sarton, Djuna Barnes, Nadine Gordimer, Jean Stafford, Adrienne Rich, and many others—and that of her husband, E. B. White.

One finishes this book with enormous gratitude for Katharine White’s quiet but fierce commitment to reading, writing, and women, and for Amy Reading’s determination to recognize White’s achievement. Gratitude, too, for all the drama, humor, and literary gossip that make The World She Edited the next best thing to cocktails at the Algonquin.” —Heather Clark, Pulitzer Prize winning author of Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath

“Harold Ross, James Thurber, and E. B. White usually get all the credit for the creation and shaping of The New Yorker magazine. Amy Reading’s book, carefully researched and lucidly written, makes a powerful case that Katharine White was every bit as important. They gave the magazine a tone and a style. She gave it a brain.” —Chip McGrath, former deputy editor of The New Yorker

 

“This beautifully written book elegantly demonstrates the vital role hidden figures play in shaping cultural taste. New Yorker editor Katharine White encouraged a world of writers – women writers especially – to produce their finest work. This sensitive, compelling book does White justice, revealing the remarkable labor of pulling something better from those who believe they’ve already done their best. American literature as we know it owes Katharine White.” —Carla Kaplan, author of Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters and Miss Anne in Harlem

*These are Bookshop.org and Amazon.com affiliate links. If a product is purchased after linking through, Literary Ladies Guide will receive a modest commission, which helps us to keep growing.

 

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Fascinating Facts About Nadine Gordimer, South African Author & Activist

Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) was one of South Africa’s foremost authors and anti-apartheid activists. Gordimer’s writing is internationally known for providing a rare window into politics, the human condition, and how they intersect. Mentions of her work can still spark fiery discussions today.

Following are some fascinating facts about Nadine Gordimer, whose work was recognized with the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1991.

Gordimer published her first short story collection, Face to Face, in 1949; her debut semi-autobiographical novel, The Lying Days, was published in 1953. She continued writing prolifically until her death.

 

Gordimer’s mother founded a daycare in apartheid South Africa

Gordimer found her political and activist roots early in life, starting with her upbringing by parents who had immigrated to South Africa. Her mother, Hannah Gordimer, was a Jewish immigrant from London who had seen her fair share of discrimination.

Hannah Gordimer founded a daycare that accepted children of color, something that was highly unusual — and  illegal — for its time.

Growing up in an environment where discrimination and racism held less authority was pivotal in forming Gordimer’s worldview, and eventually inspired much of her work and political activism.

 

Gordimer started publishing as a teenager

By the time she was a teenager, Gordimer was writing children’s stories for several newspapers, finding her literary beginnings long before her debut stories and novels were published.

Her first short story, “The Quest for Seen Gold,” was published in the Children’s Sunday Express in 1937. Perhaps her upbringing in Springs, a small mining town, had an impact on writing about quests for gold.

She reportedly also drew from her own life for her debut novel The Lying Days (1953), which is considered autobiographical. Like the story’s protagonist, Gordimer moved outside her small hometown to “the big city” later in her life.

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Learn more about Nadine Gordimer
(photo from the Nobel Prize Archive)
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Several of Gordimer’s novels were banned or censored in the apartheid era

Gordimer was one of the authors subjected to apartheid book banning, which made reading or owning any of the listed books a criminal offense.

The Late Bourgeois World was the first book to be banned in 1976, the same year in which the violent Soweto Uprising took place. The apartheid government also banned Burger’s Daughter (1979) and July’s People (1981) soon after their publication.

Gordimer protested the book bans together with other authors, leading to their unbanning just months after the books had been placed on the list. According to the then-government, Gordimer’s books were too ’one-sided’ to continue being controversial. See more in The Banning of Nadine Gordimer’s Anti-Apartheid Novels.

 

Gordimer maintained a close friendships with Nelson Mandela

Gordimer moved in anti-apartheid and political circles, which formed the foundation for some of her stories. Allies and friendships were especially important to her, as she mentioned the arrest of friends as pivotal to her more serious political activism. That includes one of the reasons she joined the African National Congress (ANC) when it was still a banned organization.

Her friendships with Nelson Mandela’s attorneys, Bram Fischer and George Bizos, would also form a direct inspiration for her later novels.

Gordimer remained connected with Nelson Mandela during the time of his 1962 trial, and advised him on his 1964 trial defense speech. Upon Nelson Mandela’s release from prison, Gordimer was one of the first people he requested to see.

 

Gordimer’s personal life was the subject of an unauthorized biography

Nadine Gordimer was married twice in her life, first to Gerald Gavron (1949 to 1950), and then to Reinhold Cassirer (1951 to 2001). Her marriages generated plenty of controversy later in her life, becoming the subject of an unauthorized biography.

The biography claimed an affair by Gordimer in the 1950s as well as further claims regarding her second husband’s death: Gordimer immediately pulled her approval for the manuscript, though it was still published as an account of her life in 2006.

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Gordimer wrote about post-apartheid South Africa in her “transitional period”

Nadine Gordimer went from writing about apartheid to exploring the possibilities within a free and unoppressed South Africa. With a career spanning several decades, Gordimer saw enormous changes in the country.

Her later writing went beyond apartheid themes, including how legal changes affected the average household. In The House Gun, she explored what would happen if a household firearm killed someone — and the novel greatly used the mindset of gun ownership in a political environment as a storytelling tool.

Her further transitional writing explored themes like romance and immigration, branching into the politically-loaded international love story The Pickup (2001).

 

July’s People was briefly censored again in 2001

Gordimer’s writing wasn’t just banned during apartheid years, but also became a source of controversy in later years: July’s People was removed from school reading lists by the Department of Education in 2001.

According to the department, the book was too controversial for the provincial school curriculum. However, Gordimer was quick to protest the ban, like she had done previously.

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8 Essential Novels by Nadine Gordimer
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Nadine Gordimer lectured in Canada

Nadine Gordimer spent time as lecturer outside the boundaries of Southern Africa, though she never left the country permanently. She didn’t wish to be cut off from her country of origin.

In the early 2000s, she briefly left Southern Africa and lectured at Massey College at the University of Toronto. However, she eventually returned to South Africa, and continued to live in her Parktown, Johannesburg home until her passing.

 

No Cold Kitchen is an unauthorized biography of Gordimer’s life

No Cold Kitchen (2006) by Ronald Suresh Roberts is considered an unauthorized biography of Nadine Gordimer’s life. However, it was originally supposed to be a biography written alongside the author, and with her final approval.

Gordimer withdrew her approval for the manuscript’s draft, citing disputes about a 1950s affair and further disagreements about her husband (Kassimer’s) illness and death. In her accounts, Gordimer claimed the book’s author had breached their trust agreement, and refused to grant her approval. However, Roberts went ahead and published the unauthorized biography.

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Contributed by Alex J. Coyne, a journalist, author, and proofreader. He has written for a variety of publications and websites, with a radar calibrated for gothic, gonzo and the weird. His features, posts, articles and interviews have been published in People Magazine, ATKV Taalgenoot, LitNet, The Citizen, Funds for Writers, and The South African, among other publications.

Further Reading & Sources Britannica Nobel Prize: Nadine Gordimer Facts University of Johannesburg Special Collections Nadine Gordimer obituary in The Guardian Nadine Gordimer: 5 Essential Reads from the Award-Winning Author Encyclopedia.com

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Stevie Smith, English Poet and Author of Novel on Yellow Paper

Stevie Smith (September 20, 1902 – March 7, 1971) was known for satirical poetry as well as novels (including her best known, Novel on Yellow Paper) suffused with black humor, acid wit, and unorthodox contemplations of death. 

Vastly different cultural epochs bookended her life. She was born the year after the end of the conservative Victorian Era and died the year after the turbulent “Me Decade”of  the 1970s, as author Tom Wolfe dubbed it. (Photo above courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

As The British Empire lost its colonies and women gained independence, Smith’s poetry tapped into the era’s emotional and societal upheaval.

Early life

Florence Margaret Smith was born in Kingston upon Hull, Yorkshire, England in 1902. Her father was a shipping agent, and her maternal grandfather was a maritime engineer. Her parents’ marriage was disastrous, and the year Stevie turned three, her father abandoned the family to pursue a career at sea.

Stevie’s father occasionally appeared on 24-hour leaves or sent the briefest of postcards. She and her older sister Molly refused to meet him in later life or attend his funeral. Stevie later described the rupture with characteristic levity that couldn’t disguise her inner pain:

I sat upright in my baby carriage
And wished mama hadn’t made such a foolish marriage,
I tried to hide it, but it showed in my eyes unfortunately
And a fortnight later papa ran away to sea.
( “Papa Love Baby”)

Another major event in Stevie’s childhood was a diagnosis of tubercular peritonitis at age five, and she was sent to a nursing home for tubercular children, per the custom of the time. When she recovered and returned home three years later, she was thankfully enveloped once again in what she described as a secure “house of female habitation.”

For the rest of her life, Stevie vividly described the terrors of childhood without a whiff of sentimentality. In her persona as a poet, she combined the forlorn air of a “little girl lost” with the cool-headed cynicism necessary to survive as a woman writer. 

Stevie, Molly, and their mother moved to a house in the suburb Palmer’s Green in North London, along with their maternal aunt Madge Spear, who was soon dubbed “Lion Aunt.” As their mother declined from the heart disease that killed her the year Stevie turned sixteen, Madge raised her nieces with fierce pride and devotion, even if she did not always understand her niece’s literary bent.

There wasn’t much money, but Lion Aunt insisted on her nieces attending excellent schools, and Smith and her sister enjoyed theatricals, the hymns at church, and trips to the country. The nickname “Stevie” was acquired in her late teens when she was riding with a friend and was compared to legendary horse jockey Steve Donoghue. She kept the moniker for the rest of her life.

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Stevie Smith in 1966 (fair use image)
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Young adulthood and the start of a career

Stevie described herself as “nervy, bold, and grim.” Her friend and literary executor James MacGibbon described her singular appearance:

“She … dressed with some care in a style of her own which had, at first sight, and specially when she aged, a ‘little girl’ look; but one soon saw that it was perfectly appropriate and never without dignity … her fine-boned features were of a striking beauty that was never more apparent than when death approached.”

Stevie memorably described her appearance in her poem “The Actress”:

I have a poet’s mind, but a poor exterior,
What goes on inside me is superior.

Instead of attending university, Stevie worked as a secretary in a magazine publishing company, where she remained for the next thirty years. She later supplemented her salary by writing book reviews for The Observer, among other prestigious publications. The undemanding job ensured she had time to entertain visiting friends in her office with tea, buttered toast, and strawberry jam, as well as write acerbic poems on the sly.

Stevie remained in the same house for the rest of her life and devotedly cared for her aunt until her death at age ninety-six.

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Novel on Yellow Paper (1936)
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Stevie Smith’s novels

Stevie didn’t gain notice with her first printed poems, and an editor told her to try to write a novel instead. In six weeks, she finished her first, Novel on Yellow Paper, published in 1936. Her first poetry collection, A Good Time Was Had By All, arrived a year later.

When Novel on Yellow Paper was published, it caused a minor furor in the London literary scene. She had come out of nowhere and written a heroine—Pompey Casmilus—who, like Stevie, was a secretary with very determined opinions about seemingly everything that affected an independent young woman in interwar England. Pompey even has opinions about her countrymen and their views:

“One of the greatest qualities which have made the English a great people is their eminently sane, reasonable, fair-minded inability to conceive that any viewpoint save their own can possibly have the slightest merit.”

 The London Times Literary Supplement described the debut novel as “a curious, amusing, provocative and very serious piece of work.” Stevie’s subsequent novels, Over the Frontier (1938) and The Holiday (1949), never achieved her original notoriety or varied readership, and Smith appeared happy to return to poetry.

In 1962, Stevie received a letter from another poet, another young woman chafing at society’s expectations, who was looking forward to finally getting to read the novel nearly thirty years after it was first published:

“I better say straight out that I am an addict of your poetry, a desperate Smith-addict. I have wanted for ages to get hold of A Novel on Yellow Paper (I am jealous of that title, it is beautiful, I’ve just finished my first, on pink, but that’s no help to the title I fear) … I am hoping by a work of magic, to get myself and the babies to a flat in London by the New Year and would be very grateful in advance to hear if you might be able to come to tea or coffee when I manage my move—to cheer me up a bit. I’ve wanted to meet you for a long time.”

The letter was from Sylvia Plath, the now-iconic poet and author of The Bell Jar. Sadly, Plath never got to have tea with Stevie —  she took her own life less than three months later.

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Stevie Smith’s poetry, style, and themes

With a typical dry understatement, Stevie detailed her unique views on the craft of poetry in her essay “My Muse”:

“All poetry has to do is to make a strong communication. All the poet has to do is to listen. The poet is not an important fellow. There will always be another poet.”

Stevie trusted her instincts, and early on, she knew which poetry subjects interested her the most and which her style best suited. She rarely wrote of pressing political subjects (although her poem The Leader is a powerful and frighteningly relevant portrait of a Fascist dictator).

She also rarely wrote about romance or happy relationships, finding the travails of modern courtships and marriages — both in the isolated suburbs and crowded cities — more intriguing. In a letter, she bluntly confided, “I don’t much like the ding dong theme of love, love, love.”

Many of her poems are flavored with spiky, biting, black humor. Smith was not interested in sugar-coating anything, and she knew that a laugh or a punchline could get an unpleasant point across. In her (typically cheeky) poem “To an American Publisher,” she retorts:

You say I must write another book? But
I’ve just written this one.
You like it so much that’s the reason?
Read it again then.

Peruse a handful of Stevie Smith’s poems, and you’ll see that, like Emily Dickinson, she flagrantly used hymn meter to structure many of her poems. This stylistic choice enabled many of her poems to have a deceptive simplicity and sense of urgency and make them easier to remember.

I am not God’s little lamb
I am God’s sick tiger.
And I prowl about at night
And what most I love I bite.
from “Little Boy Sick”

Though she appeared very secure in her choice of themes and writing style, Smith still needed reassurance from friends and fellow writers. She once wrote to author Rosamond Lehmann: “I wish there was some litmus paper test you could have for your poems, blue for bad and pink for good.”

Two of the most recurring themes in her poetry are God and death, which are often intertwined in the poems. “You are quite potty about death,” says one of her characters to another in her novel The Holiday. Despite her nearly lifelong agnosticism, she didn’t appear to be afraid of death. Musing on it was a good copy of her poems and the siren call to return to the faith.

“I’m a backslider as a non-believer,” she once described herself. In her poem “God the Eater,” she described the pull of faith:

There is a god in whom I do not believe
Yet to this god my love stretches.

Reverend Gerard Irvine, an unlikely longtime friend, described Smith’s religious beliefs thus:

“In religion, Stevie was ambivalent: neither a believer, an unbeliever nor agnostic, but oddly all three at once…She was scornful of what she considered watered-down reformulations of the faith, and disgusted by their liturgical expression. One could say she did not like the God of Christian orthodoxy, but she could not disregard Him nor ever quite bring herself to disbelieve in him.”

The year before her death, Smith wrote a scathing review of the publication of the New English Bible, describing its translators as “smudgers and meddlers.” She often expressed to friends her love of the King James Version. Again and again, she appears to approach Christianity, only to recoil once again due to the condemnatory doctrine of hell and the hypocritical behavior of many of its followers.

In her poem “Thought About the Christian Doctrine of Eternal Hell,” which is part of her extended essay “Some Impediments to Christian Commitment,” she described her overwhelmingly adverse reaction to organized religion—including its history of using violence to quell dissent and the moral hypocrisy of many of its followers—as such:

The religion of Christianity
Is mixed of sweetness and cruelty…
This God the Christians show
Out with him, out with him, let him go.

Repeatedly, Stevie attested to her love of the figure of Jesus Christ and the stately church ceremonies, but she always withdrew, writing of her conflict with the brutal honesty and reluctant awe of Gerard Manley Hopkins. After the publication of Harold’s Leap (1950), Michael Tatham described her as “one of the few religious poets of our time.”

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Illustrations by Stevie Smith

Stevie loved decorating her poems with her simple line illustrations. They look deceptively like juvenile stick-figure doodles, but she can ably and disconcertingly depict confusion, malice, and despair in just a few pen strokes.

In his preface to her Collected Poems, James MacGibbon described her poetry as “embroidered” by her illustrations. He said, “If Stevie had taken them more seriously, no doubt these drawings would have made her a renowned cartoonist.”

Stevie was in good company when it came to her unconventional illustrations: William Blake and Ogden Nash often illustrated their poems, and Flannery O’Connor (also eccentric, mordant-witted, and intensely critical of religious hypocrites) seriously considered a career as a cartoonist before turning to fiction.

As it happens often with lifelong unmarried women authors, there are speculations about Stevie’s personal life, and if her writing fulfilled her as much as marriage and children would have done. Regarding children, she once wrote: “I’m very fond of children. Why I admire children so much is that I think all the time, ‘Thank heaven they aren’t mine.’”

There are also lingering questions about whether she had a relationship with George Orwell when they briefly worked together during World War II. (And her book of illustrations—Some Are More Human Than Others—obviously references Orwell’s Animal Farm.) However, Smith had this to say of speculating about the dead who cannot explain or defend themselves:

“Read the stories and the poems the sinners write, but leave their private lives (as we should like our own sinning lives to be left—remembering that equation which cannot truly be cast by any human being) to heaven. So one feels. One may be wrong.”

 

“Unique and cheerfully gruesome” — success as a poet

In 1953, Stevie attempted to take her own life, and doctors encouraged intensive physical rest. She retired from her publishing job with a good pension and settled into book reviewing and writing poetry full time, with her aunt guarding the door from unwelcome distractions.

A second attempt never occurred, and increasing stature as a poet brought more color and friendships into her life at Palmers Green.

Stevie’s flagrant depiction of friends and acquaintances in her poetry and novels often lost those people as a result, but many more remained. Although devoted to her aunt, Smith enjoyed her jaunts into sophisticated London literary circles and invitations to some of England’s most splendid country houses.

When asked about her motivation for writing, she told her friend John Hayward: “It’s not the fame, dear, it’s the company.”

Her near brush with death gave her plenty of material to draw from, and in 1957, the title poem of her collection Not Waving but Drowning became her most famous and anthologized.

Nobody heard him, the dead man,
But still he lay moaning:
I was much further out than you thought
And not waving but drowning.

Read the rest of this poem here.

In her analysis for the Poetry Foundation, Caitlin Kimball writes that the poem is a “twelve-line punch to the gut” and “one of her most sober and plainly nihilistic pieces…It’s a grim premise: Life is a series of opportunities to be misunderstood.”

For the rest of her career, Stevie wrote about death, viewing it dispassionately as an inevitable conclusion to her life rather than with existentialist trepidation.

Augmented with jabs of humor and unassuming illustrations, Stevie knew that her poems, simple at first glance, could pack a punch. This often resulted in mixed reviews from her contemporaries, but most were cautiously admiring.

“One turns to Stevie Smith and enjoys her unique and cheerfully gruesome voice,” wrote the American poet Robert Lowell.

Critic Linda Rahm Hallett wrote that “the apparent geniality of many of her poems is in fact more frightening than the solemn keening and sentimental despair of other poets, for it is based on a clear-sighted acceptance, by a mind neither obtuse nor unimaginative, but sharp and serious, innocent but far from naive.”

In 1966, Stevie Smith was awarded the Cholmondeley Award for Poets. Along with her poetry collections, she enjoyed having a radio play produced by the BBC and increasing notoriety as a poetic voice for disgruntled nonconformists.

 

Final years

A doctor once told Stevie that her life “was a failure,” presumably due to her being unmarried and childless. She wrote of loneliness, often the inevitable companion of a writer who willfully rows against the cultural grain. She frequently pointed out the loneliness in mismatched marriages and unhappy families.

Anthony Thwaite, a fellow poet and critic, wrote of her “vast succession of friends, male and female, single and married, literary and non-literary…She was also a copious letter and postcard writer, a keeper-in-touch.”

Her letters reveal the pleasure she took in encouraging and promoting fellow writers’ work, as she wrote to one of them: “I hope you are flourishing and writing like stink.”

In her later years, Stevie gave unusual readings at literary societies and in schools, often chanting her poems in a sing-song voice. She attended a “Psychedelic Feast” poetry event in 1967 alongside much younger Beat poets and was a hit with those in attendance.

In 1968, Stevie lost her “Lion Aunt.” She had left her job to nurse her Aunt Madge and was happy to return the devotion her aunt had showered on her for so long. In Novel on Yellow Paper, Stevie paid tribute to the most steadfast love in her life. “Darling Auntie Lion … You are yourself like shining gold.” Sadly, soon after their aunt’s passing, Stevie’s older sister Molly suffered a stroke.

A year later, Stevie was awarded the Gold Medal for Poetry by Queen Elizabeth II; her friends were amused by varying preposterous descriptions of the royal encounter.

She saw the publication of her ninth poetry collection, The Best Beast, but was soon after diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor. The battle was mercifully brief, and she passed away on March 7, 1971, at the age of sixty-eight.

 

The legacy of Stevie Smith

Ogden Nash, a fellow poet born the same year as Stevie, wrote of her when her Selected Poems (1962) was published in the United States:

Who and what is Stevie Smith?
Is she woman? Is she myth?

To say that Stevie marched to the beat of her own drum—both in her poetry and personal life—is an understatement. Her determined commitment to her poetic style and unconventional voice led to a surge of renewed interest in her writing in the 1970s and ‘80s.

Six years after Stevie’s passing, depicted her life with her “Lion Aunt” in his play Stevie, starring the revered actresses Glenda Jackson and .

Whitemore adapted his play for the screen adaptation in 1978, with Jackson and Washbourne reprising their roles. American film critic Roger Ebert was intrigued by Smith’s deceptively uneventful life as rendered by Jackson and gave the film his highest rating of four stars.

Author and critic Rosemary Dinnage long resisted the pull of Stevie Smith’s poetry, believing her to be “affected,” but eventually became an admirer, writing: “the free-floating imagination, the sure instinct for style, above all the deep note of death, death, death sounding through the wispy poems eventually wins one over.”

The revered theologian, social activist, and Trappist monk Thomas Merton was an unlikely admirer of Stevie Smith. “I love her, I am crazy about her,” he wrote, “she is innocent and smashing like a Blake only new, and a lot of pathos under the deadpan sad funny stuff, a lot of true religion.”

Biographer Sanford Sternlicht wrote admiringly of her “profound ability both to verbalize and symbolize the melancholy, the frustration, the rage, and the vengefulness of the intelligent women of her generation.”

Stevie Smith’s writing deserves another revival of interest, as it enjoyed in the 1970s and 1980s. There’s still an audience for those who wish to read about themes such as nonconformity, isolation, and death with a heaping dose of black humor; there are still people who are, as she wrote in her most famous poem, “Too Far Out.”

“The times will just have to enlarge themselves to make room for me, won’t they?” She wrote. Her writing has the potential to inspire hopeful authors (as she once did Plath). On the subject of writing, here is Stevie Smith with her signature self-deprecating humor in “My Muse”:

Why does my Muse speak only when she is unhappy?
She does not, I only listen when I am unhappy
When I am happy, I live and despise writing.
For my Muse this cannot be but disquieting.

. . . . . . . . . . .

Contributed by Katharine Armbrester, who graduated from the MFA creative writing program at the Mississippi University for Women in 2022. She is a devotee of Flannery O’Connor and Margaret Atwood, and loves periodicals, history, and writing.

 

Further Reading and SourcesIntroduction to Me Again by Jack Barbera and William McBrien“Black Sequins and Seaweed: Stevie Smith” chapter in Alone! Alone! Lives of Some Outsider Women by Rosemary DinnagePreface to Collected Poems by James MacGibbonStevie Smith’s Resistant Antics by Laura SeverinStevie Smith: A Critical Biography by Frances SpaldingStevie Smith by Sanford SternlightBiographical page on the Poetry Foundation website: Analysis of “ Not Waving but Drowning ” by Caitlin Kimball:
Stevie Smith, steel soul of the suburbs article in The Guardian 

Poetry Collections

A Good Time Was Had by All (1937)Tender Only to One (1938)Mother, What Is Man? (1942)Harold’s Leap (1950)Not Waving but Drowning (1957)Selected Poems (1962)The Best Beast (1969)Scorpion and Other Poems (1972)Collected Poems (1975)Me Again: Uncollected Writings of Stevie Smith (1981)

Novels

Novel on Yellow Paper (1936)Over the Frontier (1938)The Holiday (1949)

Other writings

Some Are More Human than Others: A Sketch-Book (Orwellian phrase!) (1958)A Turn Outside (Radio Play, 1959)Cats in Colour (1959)

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A Sketch of Belle de Zuylen, Age of Enlightenment Writer

What Belle de Zuylen did in 1763 was inexcusable for a young woman. She wrote a novel.

I discovered Belle de Zuylen (1740 – 1805), Dutch-Swiss writer in the age of Enlightenment (also known as Isabelle de Charriére, Belle van Zuylen, Isabella Elisabeth van Tuyll van Seeroskerken, and Zélide) via James Boswell, the 18th-century biographer (The Life of Samuel Johnson) and diarist.

The second book of Boswell’s papers, Boswell in Holland, included his correspondence with de Zuylen. Boswell, a Scot, was studying law in Holland (Scottish and Dutch law apparently being related) and had made her acquaintance.

Boswell was always on the lookout for a rich heiress to marry, and de Zuylen came from a wealthy, aristocratic family. Among other properties they owned a moated castle, now a museum, in which she spent her summers.

Their correspondence began as he was leaving Holland and went on for four years. Frederick Pottle, editor of the Boswell papers, writes that they “may be safely be called one of the oddest series of love letters ever written.”

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Drawing of Belle de Zuylen by Isabella Bannerman
. . . . . . . . . .

Eventually Boswell proposed to her, in terms he well knew she would never accept. For one, he demanded she take an oath in front of her father, brothers, and Boswell that “without their approbation she would neither publish nor cause to be acted any of her literary compositions.”

It is impossible to imagine her married to Boswell. As she explained to him, “I lack the subaltern talents.” She later continues:

“I have fortune enough that I do not need a husband’s; I have a sufficiently happy cast of mind and enough mental resources to be able to dispense with a husband, with a family, and what is called an establishment. I therefore make no vows, I take no resolutions; I let the days come and go, deciding always for the better among the things which Fate presents to me with some power of choice. I should be glad if time in its flow might carry away my thousand little faults of humor and character which I recognize and deplore. Often my progress does not come up to my good intentions.” (translation from Pottle’s Boswell in Holland)

It is interesting to me to speculate that, had she been miserably married Boswell, she may at least have had the literary support of Samuel Johnson, a champion of many women writers of the time, including Elizabeth Carter, Charlotte Lennox, Elizabeth Montagu, Hester Thrale, Hannah More and Fanny Burney.

There may have been more opportunities for women writers in England than Holland (or Switzerland). To learn more about Johnson’s friendships with women writers, see Norma Clarke’s Dr. Johnson’s Women. Another excellent book on the subject is Wits & Wives: Dr. Johnson in the Company of Women by Kate Chisholm.

Prior to meeting Boswell, de Zuylen had begun a secret sixteen-year correspondence with Constant d’Hermenches, a military officer, actor, musician, and it was said, womanizer. He was 18 years her senior and married. Their correspondence has been gathered and translated by Janet Whatley and Malcolm Whatley in There Are No Letters Like Yours, who describe it as “one of the richest in a whole age of great letter writing.” They are perhaps less love letters than, in time, the writings of two oddly matched, supportive pen pals.

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In 1762 de Zuylen anonymously published The Nobleman, which was scandalous for two reasons: One, the aristocratic heroine Julie jumps out of the window of her ancient home onto a cushion of ancestral portraits, which she has thrown there herself, the better to elope with her not-aristocratic-enough-for-her-family suitor, Valaincourt.

Sensitive readers should know that they engage in much gratuitous hand-kissing. Two, women weren’t supposed to write novels. It was considered unseemly. And taken as more evidence that de Zuylen, who saw no reason to rein in her opinions, would never be the demure wife sought after in her circles, despite her family name and fortune.

The Nobleman, which in my edition (translated by Caroline Warman) is under twenty pages long, was withdrawn from sale when her parents discovered who had written it—that is to say, they bought up any and all existing copies. Perhaps they are at the bottom of the moat.

She also wrote what Whatley and Whatley call “a provocative literary self-portrait: Portrait de Zélide.” This would become the title of a book published in 1925 by Geoffrey Scott, one that helped revive her fame, at least to some extent. Scott’s book is something to read, a classic and artful and maybe even weird biography. My editions include brilliant introductions by Shirley Hazzard, George Dangerfield, and Richard Holmes, quite the heavyweight trio.

In many ways Scott’s book presents her life as a tragedy, as in his opinion she grew more detached from friends and life (she sure wrote a lot, though). To me, at least, he makes leaps from some of her writing to her state of mind. Good for a biography, perhaps, but maybe it doesn’t tell the full story. 

She eventually married her brothers’ tutor, Charles-Emmanuel de Charrière, and they moved to Colombier, Switzerland. This was surprising to many, as he was not of her social class, but she appears to have fallen in love with him, at least for a while, and he was supportive of her writing.

As far as we know, she didn’t have to jump out the castle window onto a pile of family portraits to marry him. She published a novella, Lettres neuchâteloises, Lettres de Mistriss Henley, Lettres écrites de Lausanne, and Caliste, which would become a success (and was written in Paris, a city she did not like). 

It was in Paris she met Benjamin Constant, who was twenty-seven years her junior, and the nephew of Constant de Hermenches. They too would have a famous correspondence. He often visited her and her husband in Switzerland, and she responded to his intelligence and wit. He eventually left her for Madame de Stäel, who she despised, dare I opine, rightfully so. Geoffrey Scott makes a great deal of the ending of their correspondence, their break putting her into a self-imposed “icy cage.” 

If so it was a cage filled with companions and correspondents, including Henriette L’Hardy, with whom she wrote over 240 letters, and other women friends including Isabel Morel, who became a writer herself. De Zuylan also created many musical works, including an opera-bouffe based on Le Noble, which has been lost. 

Belle de Zuylan’s has fascinated critics and readers for decades after her rediscovery in the early part of the 20th century. She is unique in every way, and did everything her way, at a time when women weren’t supposed to pick up a pen. Reading her today, we can be grateful she did. 

Further reading

Belle van Zuylen: An Emancipated Woman of the Enlightenment Isabelle de Charrier – Voltaire Foundation Isabelle de Charrier Biography & Facts – Britannica

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Shakespeare’s Sisters: How Women Wrote the Renaissance – a review

Ramie Targoff begins Shakespeare’s Sisters: How Women Wrote the Renaissance (Knopf, 2024), her fascinating exploration of four female writers of the English Renaissance, not with a reference to a 16th-century woman, but to Virginia Woolf.

The title of Targoff’s book comes from Woolf’s assertion that if Shakespeare had had a sister, whom she names Judith Shakespeare, who shared his talent for writing, she never would have been able to achieve anything like her brother’s success, given the oppressive conditions women faced in sixteenth and seventeenth century England.

In fact, Woolf claims, she would have “gone crazed, shot herself, or ended her days in some lonely cottage outside the village, half witch, half wizard, feared and mocked at … so thwarted and hindered by other people … she must have lost her health and sanity.”

Targoff doesn’t dispute the limitations placed on women in Shakespeare’s England. She recognizes that the vast majority of women were barred from educational opportunities. If married, they were not allowed to own property. Nor could they vote nor hold political office, or become lawyers, doctors, or actors.

Even so, Targoff contends, there were women who managed to write, who were in fact, despite restrictions and obstacles, driven to write, and not just write but to challenge some of the assumptions of the world in which they lived by writing poetry, history, religious texts, and plays.

 

Four Remarkable Women

Ramie Targoff focuses her book on four of these remarkable women—Mary Sidney, Æmilia Lanyer, Elizabeth Cary, and Anne Clifford—and in doing so, invites readers to see the history of women’s literature with fresh eyes. The work of these women was literally lost for centuries—and as a result it was not discussed, not taught—even in academic programs focusing on this era.

Recognizing the work of these women, Targoff argues, changes our perception of women’s literary history and of the possibilities for women writing today. Unlike others of their time and place, whether through social status or through sheer luck, they succeeded in what was an excellent education for their time. Some even managed to become significant property owners.

Their work is important not simply because they were women and writers, but because they shared their perspective as women, questioning the patriarchal structures that ruled their lives and bringing the lives of women to the forefront. And these women challenged these structures not only through what they wrote, but also in the ways they lived their lives.

 

The Death and Funeral of Queen Elizabeth I

Targoff begins her account of the literary careers of Sidney, Lanyer, Cary, and Clifford in 1603, with a vivid description of Queen Elizabeth I and the aftermath of her death. Thirteen-year-old Anne Clifford’s mother Margaret was among those who sat up with the Queen’s coffin for several nights during the many weeks it lay in state before burial.

Æmilia Lanyer’s father, a musician in the Queen’s court, marched in Elizabeth’s funeral procession, as did newly married Elizabeth Cary’s father-in-law, Sir Edward Cary, the Master of the Jewel House.

Mary Sidney’s son, the Earl of Pembroke, carried the Great Banner of England hat day. Right behind him, four horses pulled an open chariot that carried the queen’s velvet-draped coffin, a life-size wax-and-wood effigy atop it.   

Thus the lives of all four of these women were closely linked to that of the queen. Yet Targoff warns against any assumptions regarding the role of this powerful woman on any sense of entitlement on the part of these four women. She makes it clear that Elizabeth was “both a woman and more than a woman, or not woman at all.” She refused to become a wife or a mother.

She never experienced the lack of power and agency over her body or her property that affected her female subjects. “I know I have the body but of a weak and feeble woman,” she famously said, “but I have the heart and stomach of a king.”

Nor did she look for ways to identify with the women of her realm: “Thou has willed me,” she wrote in a prayer she published in 1563, “to be not some wretched girl from the meanest rank of the common people who would pass her life miserably in poverty and squalor, but to a kingdom.”

In other words, the concerns of ordinary women were not the concerns of Elizabeth. But Clifford, Lanyer, Cary, and Sidney, though they married and bore children, were like the queen in one important way: like Elizabeth, all were widely read and highly educated.

 

Interconnected Lives

The lives of these women were interconnected, even beyond their shared proximity to the queen. Mary Sidney’s writing was cited as an inspiration by Æmelia Lanyer; Lanyer served briefly as Anne Clifford’s tutor.

And yet they came from different economic strata of their era: Anne Clifford came from the highest levels of wealth and aristocratic background; Mary Sidney, who was descended from an aristocratic mother and a bureaucrat father, married into another aristocratic family despite her father having to go into debt to cover her dowry.

Æmelia Lanyer was the daughter of a court musician and married the same, but only after becoming pregnant by her lover, one of Queen Elizabeth’s cousins. Elizabeth Carey’s father had no aristocratic connections, yet he accumulated significant wealth through his legal practice.

With the exception of Anne Clifford, all were able to read and write in multiple languages, including French, Latin, and Italian. Clifford was highly educated as well, but her xenophobic father forbade her learning any language other than English.

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Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke

Mary Sidney (1561– 1621) first took over the work of her brother, a poet, completing and polishing work he had started but had yet to publish at the time of his death.

But she went beyond his work, expanding on his translations of the first 43 Psalms to complete all 150, and thus becoming the first person to translate the Book of Psalms into English at least a decade before publication of the King James Bible in 1611.

Sidney didn’t just translate the Psalms; some refer to her work as paraphrasing, because she added numerous literary elements and perspectives. Rather than supplying a simple literal translation, she included additional lines which reflected at times on the perspective of women.

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Æmelia Lanyer

Æmelia Bassano Lanyer (1569–1645) is credited with having written the first “country house” poem written in English. A “country house” poem was one written in praise of a house, its inhabitants, and its surroundings—the house she praised was that of the Margaret Clifford, mother of Anne Clifford.

By 1611, the year when the King James Bible first appeared in print, she had become the first woman in the 17th century to publish a book of original poetry, Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum. Part of Salve Deus is narrated by the wife of Pontius Pilate, who warns her husband that he will be killing the son of God if he allows Christ to be crucified. She then argues that if men crucify their savior, women should be exempt from their patriarchal rule

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Elizabeth Cary, Viscountess Falkland

Elizabeth Cary (1585–1639) was the first woman in England to publish an original play. The Tragedy of Mariam portrays the wife of Herod, falsely accused of infidelity, as a heroic figure. She proclaims her own innocence in a time when wives were barely allowed to speak on their own behalf, much less contradict their husbands.

Elizabeth was never comfortable with the Protestantism of England. After she converted to Catholicism, she was placed on house arrest and driven out of her husband’s household. Unbowed by the punishment for her religious views, she translated a French text, A Reply of the most illustrious Cardinal of Perron to the answer of the King of Great Britain.

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Anne Clifford, Countess of Dorset, Pembroke and Montgomery; 
14th Baroness de Clifford  

Anne Clifford (1590–1676) was a woman who believed in the importance of her own life and went to the trouble of recording it. Few women of this era kept diaries, and those who did tended to simply list their activities and prayers.

Clifford recorded her thoughts and reactions and engaged in self-reflection, making her the most important female diarist of her time. In 1923, her descendant Vita Sackville-West published her surviving diaries and a 1603 memoir under the title The Diary of Anne Clifford, with a Long Preface.

In 1649, Clifford wrote another memoir, The Life of Me, covering her life from 1590–1649, and she chronicled her family’s history in the Great Books of Record. This collection of over one thousand oversize pages is a history of the Clifford estate and dynasty, including short biographies of each of her ancestors.

She gave special attention to her female forebears, and transcribed numerous charters, royal grants, petitions, deeds, wills, and any other documents that confirmed that women had been the source of much of the property of this extremely wealthy family.

 

Structure of Shakespeare’s Sisters

Targoff made what seems to me to have been an unusual choice in the structuring of her account of these four women’s and their achievements. Their lifespans overlapped, and Targoff proceeds chronologically cutting back and forth among the women.

This was an intriguing approach but made a confusing read. It wasn’t easy for me, at least, to keep track of which woman I was reading about as we moved from one character to another in each chapter. Targoff could have employed other techniques to help readers keep track of these thematically connected lives.

For example, she includes several pages of Family Charts in the book’s front matter. These would have been far more useful had some dates (even if not exact) had been included. Likewise, a page of timelines of the four women’s lives would have been extremely helpful.

Targoff’s account ends by reflecting on her own experience as a Yale undergraduate and then as a graduate student at Berkeley immersed in Renaissance literature. During her studies, she never read anything written by a woman before 1800 and assumed that Virginia Woolf was right when she said that no woman of Shakespeare’s era could have been a writer.

She takes some responsibility for this: she never asked one of her professors about women writers of this era. Yet she suspects that even if she had raised the issue, she would not have found out about the women in this volume.

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Feminist Scholarship

What changed? Targoff credits the work of a number of feminist scholars with the increased visibility of these women. She cites in particular Margaret W. Ferguson, Margaret P. Hannay, Jessic L. Malay, Leah S. Marcus, Janel Mueller, Heather Wolfe, and Susanne Woods. I would have liked more details about what exactly these researchers have done.

She mentions that a number of the works produced by these women were finally made available to the general public in the 1990s. These include The Diaries of Lady Anne Clifford; Lanyer’s Salve Deus, Carey’s Tragedy of Mariam and her biography, The Lady Falkland, written by her daughters; and The Collected Works of May Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke.

Publication of these works laid the groundwork for further research, and since then, Targoff says, there have been numerous dissertations, anthologies, and scholarly articles about these women and others of their era.

Some of these works are starting to make their way into the occasional syllabus, but Targoff points out that it is still quite possible for a student to graduate with a degree in English without knowing anything about these women or any of the others who wrote in this era.

By extension, she says, many of those who study and read about this era of English history and literature know very little about the experiences and perspectives of the women who lived through it.

Access to such information, Targoff argues, has the potential to provide models and inspiration for women writing today. Access to such works, in fact, might have led Virginia Woolf to more fully imagine her Judith Shakespeare and give her greater possibilities than Woolf had previously considered.

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Contributed by Lynne Weiss: Lynne’s writing has appeared in Black Warrior Review; Brain, Child; The Common OnLine; the Ploughshares blog; the [PANK] blog; Wild Musette; Main Street Rag; and Radcliffe Magazine. She received an MFA from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and has won grants and residency awards from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the Millay Colony, the Vermont Studio Center, and Yaddo. She loves history, theater, and literature, and for many years, has earned her living by developing history and social studies materials for educational publishers. She lives outside Boston, where she is working on a novel set in Cornwall and London in the early 1930s. You can see more of her work at LynneWeiss.

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The Paris Bookseller by Kerry Maher – a novel of Sylvia Beach

The Paris Bookseller by Kerry Maher is a novelization of the life of Sylvia Beach, who in 1919 cofounded the legendary bookstore Shakespeare and Company. She’s also known for publishing Ulysses by James Joyce in 1922, at great personal and financial risk.

This review of The Paris Bookseller is contributed by N.J. Maher, from her site, Herstory Revisted: Biofiction Book Reviews. Reprinted by permission.

Certain people stick with you, whether you meet them in person, or, as with historical fiction, you meet them on the page. Such is the case for me with the protagonist in The Paris Bookseller, by Kerri Maher. It isn’t often a reader gets a front-row seat to a period in literary history, but Maher gives us one through Sylvia Beach, an American living in post-World War I Paris.

The book’s title hooked me before I opened the covers and smelled the familiar scent of fresh ink on pristine paper, before I ran my fingertips across the smooth, glossy jacket. I am a glutton for books. Some women go for shoes, but catchy titles and alluring cover art seduce me. I suppose that makes me a sinner and bookstores my house of ill repute. I love bookstores.

The Paris Bookseller reminded me just how special a bookstore is and why I appreciate bricks and mortar as compared to ordering online. I do my share of that, too, but it doesn’t result in the same experience. An actual store surrounds book lovers with something irresistible: books and like-minded individuals who value and appreciate the printed word as much as they do. Everyone inside those walls is a kindred soul.

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Sylvia Beach: Legendary Paris Bookseller and Publisher
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The digital age has robbed us of that kind of gathering space. I don’t want to take away anything from the online book groups I belong to. The energy is invigorating. And I’m thrilled at the number of authors we can interact with on Zoom these days. Woo-hoo! At least one good thing came out of the pandemic.

 

Libraries offer book lovers a similar experience to a bookstore, and to them, I offer a hearty shout out as well. But, if possible, I like to own my books. When I read a book, a part of me goes into that story, and the story becomes a part of me. The characters and I become intimate friends. I memorialize the setting in my mental travel log. The Paris Bookseller now occupies a place on my shelves and in my heart.

As the novel opens, Sylvia Beach (1887–1962) is living in Paris, in search of her next adventure. In due time, she opens Shakespeare and Company, a bookstore and lending library specializing in books written in English. In creating a space for readers to gather, she inadvertently creates a meeting place for writers. 

Members of the so-called Lost Generation trickle in. Word spreads, and soon, expatriates like Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, and Ezra Pound (the list is long) become friends with Sylvia, and sometimes, allies. There are the noteworthy Parisians as well.

 

The focus of Sylvia’s attention, however, is James Joyce, the writer from Ireland working on a new book called Ulysses. When Sylvia meets him, Joyce is serializing Ulysses it in an American literary magazine as he writes called The Little Review. 

But when a successful suit is filed in New York against Ulysses for being “obscene,” the United States bans any further publication or distribution on its soil. The United Kingdom also bans Ulysses, effectively barring Joyce from two gigantic markets. In the aftermath, Joyce finds it impossible to find a publisher for the finished book.

Though an odd twist of fate, Beach agrees to publish Ulysses, launching her on a journey she never imagined taking, one that eventually turns her into one of the literary world’s greatest heroes.

 So, who was Sylvia Beach?

Sylvia was born Nancy Woodbridge Beach in Baltimore, Maryland in 1887. She grew up primarily in New Jersey, and in high school she changed her name to Sylvia. Her father was a Presbyterian minister, and her mother had been raised in a missionary family in India. Both parents held very open world views, which they seemed to transmit to Sylvia.

Sylvia first moved to Paris in 1901 when her father became a minister at the American Church. She fell in love with the famed city and its people and, though her family moved back to America, she would return to Paris at every chance. She eventually took up residence there. During World I, she performed relief work and later was a volunteer for the Red Cross in Serbia.

Sylvia approached managing her bookstore the same way she approached life: with eyes and arms wide open. In his book, A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemingway wrote of Beach:

“Sylvia had a lively, sharply sculptured face, brown eyes that were as alive as a small animal’s and as gay as a young girl’s… She was kind, cheerful and interested, and loved to make jokes and gossip. No one that I ever knew was nicer to me.” [1]

Sylvia kept few records and spent most of her time talking with her patrons. She enjoyed people and went out of her way to help them. The list of writers and artists she met and became friends with is a veritable list of who’s who in twentieth-century literature. Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, André Gide, and composers like George Antheil and Aaron Copland were regulars.

 

It wasn’t all about books, however. Sylvia fell in love with Paris bookstore owner Adrienne Monnier, and the two enjoyed a Roaring Twenties’ social life. In Paris, gay, lesbian, bisexual, and queer individuals were free to live and love openly. Sylvia’s relationship with Monnier is a central theme in The Paris Bookseller.

In 1959, Sylvia wrote her memoir, Shakespeare and Company. She passed away in 1962. The following anecdote included on the current Shakespeare and Company’s website seems to tell us a lot about the kind of person Sylvia Beach was:

“Beach’s bookstore was open until 1941, when the Germans occupied Paris. One day that December, a Nazi officer entered her store and demanded Beach’s last copy of Finnegans Wake. Beach declined to sell him the book. The officer said he would return in the afternoon to confiscate all of Beach’s goods and to close her bookstore. After he left, Beach immediately moved all the shop’s books and belongings to an upstairs apartment. In the end, she would spend six months in an internment camp in Vittel, and her bookshop would never reopen.” [2]

Ernest Hemingway is said to have liberated her bookshop in 1944. [3]  Whether that is true, it sure has a nice symmetry to it.

My takeaway in reading both fiction and nonfiction about Sylvia is that she was a woman with great drive, vision, and compassion. And she was the unsung hero behind a major book event during the twentieth century. Yet we know so little about her. While researching this article, I found it difficult to find biographical information about her.

How many other women have we missed giving credit to in history?

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The Paris Bookseller

In my posts about books, I try to avoid spoilers. I prefer to encourage you to read them for yourself. But there are a couple of things worth noting as you consider picking up this title.

Kerri Maher did an excellent job researching content for The Paris Bookseller. She sticks to the facts and blends them into the story. The engaging way she does this makes you want to learn more about her characters and the era.

The novel is about Sylvia Beach and about her efforts to publish James Joyce’s novel, but frequent appearances of famed authors make it also about The Lost Generation living in Paris. Maher presented these iconic figures in a way that is more than name dropping. The snippets of their comments and visits, imagined by the author, are authentic and entertaining.

 

The themes in The Paris Bookseller are timeless, the first among them censorship. In the book and in real life, Sylvia Beach defied the ban against Ulysses and published it, then took things a step further and smuggled the book into the United States and England. Sylvia dubbed herself a “booklegger.” The word was a take on “bootlegger.”

In 1917, Congress had passed the Volstead Act as the 18th amendment to the U.S. Constitution. When enough states ratified it a little over a year later, it prohibited alcohol in the United States. As you can see, Sylvia had a sense of humor.

Besides the Volstead Act, Sylvia was also up against the Comstock Law, which criminalized using the United States’ mail service to “corrupt public morals.” Also known as the “chastity law,” it forbade selling or distributing materials in the U.S. mail—or to import them from abroad—that could be used for contraception or abortion purposes.

Ulysses fell into this category. History credits the wave of conservative laws like the Volstead Act and the Comstock Law for driving so many of America’s talented artists and writers to places like Paris, where their art could flourish unencumbered by restrictive norms and policies during the twenties.

Another important theme of The Paris Bookseller is love. In the first pages of the novel, Sylvia meets the enchanting Adrienne Monnier, who owns a bookstore. With Adrienne, Sylvia explores her sexuality while working her way through becoming a businesswoman. In America, Sylvia could never have lived so openly with another woman. Paris allowed her to do that, and more. She could surround herself in a vibrant, welcoming community.

And like modern women, the demands on Sylvia stretch her in dizzying directions, forcing her to choose between what is most important. She struggles to set aside time for herself at the eventual expense of her health. Who among us can’t relate to that?

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Sylvia Beach’s own memoir, originally published in 1959
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I highly recommend The Paris Bookseller. An informative and entertaining read, it will leave you scouring the web for more details about Sylvia Beach, the era, and the causes this fascinating woman championed. The timing for reading this book couldn’t be better. February 2022 marks the one hundredth anniversary of the publication of Ulysses. It’s hard to comprehend that this many years later, books are still being banned.

Sylvia’s is a story of triumph at a time when women had very little room to maneuver outside the stranglehold of tradition. Here you’ll find some terrific images of Sylvia and of the old Shakespeare and Company. The pictures and anecdotes present a story unto themselves and make the past feel so much closer, so much more real.

Shakespeare and Company remains open today, but in name only. The store is under different management. The owner, however, honors Sylvia as its founder. This type of nod to history warms my heart, and I’m adding the bookstore to my list of places to visit one day.

 

Sources

Francis Booth. “ Sylvia Beach: Legendary Paris Bookseller and Publisher .” Literary Ladies Guide. May 30, 2021. Rachel Potter. “ Ulysses at 100: why it was banned for being obscene .” The Conversation. February 1, 2022. Samantha Barbas. “ How the banning of Joyce’s Ulysses let to ‘the grandest obscenity case in the history of law and literature .” June 22, 2021. Shakespeare and Company. “ History: Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare and Company, 1919-1941 .” Accessed February 8, 2022. Mantex. “ Sylvia Beach .” Accessed February 8, 2022. 

Footnotes

[1] Shakespeare and Company. “History: Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare and Company, 1919-1941.” Accessed February 8, 2022. 

[2] ibid

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sylvia_...

 

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Laura and Eleanor Marx, translators of Karl Marx

It’s striking that two daughters of Karl Marx, Laura and Eleanor, became important early translators of his work. Marx (1818 – 1883), the German-born social and economic theorist and philosopher, is best known for The Communist Manifesto (co-authored by Friedrich Engels) and Das Kapital.

Laura Marx (1845 – 1911) was the second daughter of Karl Marx and Jenny von Westphalen was instrumental in translating Marx’s works from German into French. Her sister Eleanor Marx (1855-1898), the youngest daughter in the Marx family, was involved in translation from German into English.

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Laura Marx, 
translator of Karl Marx’s works into French

Jenny Laura Marx (also known as Laura Lafargue) was a German social activist, and a translator from German to French. Born in Brussels, Belgium, she was the second daughter of Karl Marx and Jenny von Westphalen, an activist and social critic in her own right. Laura moved with her parents to France, and then to Prussia, before the family settled in London in 1849.

Laura married French revolutionary socialist Paul Lafargue in 1868. They spent decades doing political work together, translating Karl Marx’s work into French, and spreading Marxism in France and Spain, while being financially supported by German philosopher Friedrich Engels.

Laura Marx died in 1911 in a suicide pact with her husband Paul Lafargue. She was 66, and he was 69. She left this letter, she wrote in part: “I die with the supreme joy of knowing that at some future time, the cause to which I have been devoted for forty-five years will triumph. Long live Communism! Long Live the international socialism!”

Laura Marx’s main translations were:

The Communist Manifesto (Manifeste du parti communiste, 1897) by Karl Marx and Friedrich EngelsRevolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany (Révolution et contre-révolution en Allemagne, 1900) by Karl MarxReligion, philosophie, socialisme (translated with Paul Lafargue, 1901) by Friedrich EngelsA Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (Contribution à la critique de l’économie politique, 1909) by Karl Marx

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Eleanor Marx,
translator of Karl Marx’s works into English

Eleanor Marx (1855-1898) was an English socialist activist and a translator from German, French and Norwegian to English. Known to her family as Tussy, she was the English-born youngest daughter Karl Marx and Jenny von Westphalen.

As a child, Eleanor Marx often played in in her father’s study while he was writing Capital (Das Kapital), the foundational text of what would become known as Marxism.

According to her biographer Rachel Holmes, “Tussy’s childhood intimacy with Marx whilst he wrote the first volume of Capital provided her with a thorough grounding in British economic, political and social history. Tussy and Capital grew together.” (quoted in Eleanor Marx: A Life, Bloomsbury, 2014).

Eleanor Marx became her father’s secretary at age sixteen and accompanied him to socialist conferences around the world.

In London, she met with French revolutionary socialist Prosper-Olivier Lissagaray, who had fled to England after participating in the Paris Commune, a revolutionary socialist government that briefly ruled Paris in 1871.

Eleanor Marx took her own life at age 43 after discovering that her partner, English Marxist Edward Aveling, had secretly married a young actress the previous year.

Translations of Karl Marx’s work

Eleanor translated some parts of Capital from German to English. She also edited the translations of Marx’s lectures Value, Price and Profit (Lohn, Preis und Profit) and Wage Labour and Capital (Lohnarbeit und Kapital) for them to be published into books.

After Karl Marx’s death in 1883, Eleanor Marx published her father’s unfinished manuscripts and the English edition of Capital (1887).

Other translations

Eleanor translated Lissagaray’s History of the Paris Commune of 1871 (L’Histoire de la Commune de 1871). The English edition was published in 1876. She also translated literary works, including French novelist Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary in 1886.

Eleanor expressly learned Norwegian to translate Norwegian writer Henrik Ibsen’s plays, including An Enemy of the People (En Folkefiende) in 1888, and The Lady from the Sea (Fruen fra havet) in 1890.

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Source: A history of translation in 150 portraits

See also: 10 Lost Ladies of Literary Translation

Contributed by Marie Lebert. Reprinted by permission. Marie is a bilingual French-English translator. She has worked as a translator and/or librarian for international organizations and has written ebooks, articles and essays about translation and translators, ebooks, libraries and librarians, and medieval art. She holds a doctorate of linguistics (digital publishing) from the Sorbonne University, Paris, and a master of social science (society and culture) from the University of Caen, Normandy. Find more about women translators of the past at Marie Lebert.

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How to Burn a Book: Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness

In a forthcoming book, I argue that 1928, when The Well of Loneliness (Radclyffe Hall) and Lady Chatterley’s Lover (D.H. Lawrence) were published, was the year in which sex and sexuality were first described openly in the novel without any authorial moral judgement.

So the passage below, from The Well of Loneliness, would not have been a problem in 1928 if Stephen Gordon had been a man; but Stephen is a woman.

But her eyes would look cold, though her voice might be gentle, and her hand when it fondled would be tentative, unwilling. The hand would be making an effort to fondle, and Stephen would be conscious of that effort. Then looking up at the calm, lovely face, Stephen would be filled with a sudden contrition, with a sudden deep sense of her own shortcomings; she would long to blurt all this out to her mother, yet would stand there tongue-tied, saying nothing at all. (Radclyffe Hall, The Well of Loneliness, 1928)

By 1928 it was accepted that women in novels should have a sexual life – younger women and older women, women married and unmarried, modern women and flappers.

A sexual relationship in the 1928 novel could be inside or outside marriage, with the woman as an adulteress or as a single woman with an adulterous man. The novels of 1928 mostly did not judge. Fidelity was no longer considered a necessary virtue for women, just as it had never been for men; 1928 saw women in Great Britain get equal voting rights to men and novelists gave them equal sexual rights to match.

The only caveat was that a woman’s sexual life should not involve other women, though even then the serious literary critic was prepared to accept such a serious treatment of such a serious subject as Radclyffe Hall’s, especially if it made being gay (in the contemporary sense) seem the opposite of gay (in the 1928 sense), as it certainly did.

No one in The Well of Loneliness is having any fun and lesbianism is made to seem very gloomy indeed. Surely no bi-curious adolescent has ever been converted to the Sapphic cause by reading it.

The Well of Loneliness is often regarded as the first lesbian novel though this is an assertion which I have tried to refute elsewhere.

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Positive early reviews

Radclyffe Hall’s fifth published novel, The Well of Loneliness  was released as a very high-priced hardback in 1928 and treated with the same polite earnestness by the erudite reviewers in the heavyweight British literary magazines and newspapers as her previous four. All had received mostly respectful but unenthusiastic reviews in the “serious” press.

 Hall and her partner Una Troubridge were well-known and accepted on the British literary and social scene despite always cross-dressing in a very provocative manner. Because of its high price, the novel was expected only to sell to these cognoscenti: educated, progressive people who would not be expected to be upset by its lesbian subject matter.

The early reviewers mostly treated it as a literary, even a philosophical work, rather than a provocatively sexual one – not that there is any sex in The Well of Loneliness. There is a sympathetic forward by the prominent sexologist Havelock Ellis.

Here are a couple of positive early, published before a sensational article in a tabloid newspaper stirred up a public outrage.

Miss Radclyffe Hall’s latest work, The Well of Loneliness (Cape, 15s. net) is a novel, and we propose to treat it as such. We therefore rather regret that it should have been thought necessary to insert at the beginning a “commentary” by Mr. Havelock Ellis to the effect that, apart from its qualities as a novel, it “possesses a notable psychological and sociological significance” as a presentation, in a completely faithful and uncompromising form, of a particular aspect of sexual life to the book as a work of art this testimony adds nothing; on the other hand, the documentary significance of a work of fiction seems to us small.

The presence of this commentary, however, points to the criticism which, with all our admiration for much of the detail, we feel compelled to express – namely, that this long novel, sincere, courageous, high-minded, and often beautifully expressed as it is, fails as a work of art through divided purpose. It is meant as a thesis and a challenge as well as an artistic creation. (Times Literary Supplement, August 2, 1928)

. . . . . . . . . .

The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall, is a very difficult work to review. Should I praise it, then I can literally hear the huge army of the narrow-minded hinting that I am in sympathy with its publication.

Should, on the other hand, I dismiss it as a novel written on a subject which is unmentionable, then I should condemn a work of considerable art; a story which is poignantly tragic to a degree; one of the few books I have ever read which illustrates the pitiful loneliness of sexual perversity as it is, apart from the pervert’s psychological and biological significance.

Every work of art, every undertaking designed in all seriousness, must, however, be viewed objectively. One may have little or no sympathy with the subject – but that is not the point. Criticism should not be prejudice disguised as erudition, though only too often it is thus bedecked. In any case, only the bigoted and the foolish seek to ignore an aspect of life which is as undeniable a fact as any concrete thing. To deny something because you dislike to confess that it is true belongs to the mentality of the undeveloped.  (Richard King, The Tatler, August 15, 1928)

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Quotes from The Well of Loneliness
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“The Book That Must be Suppressed”

On August 19, 1928, the editor of the British tabloid paper The Sunday Express published a hysterical article entitled “The Book That Must be Suppressed” accompanied by a picture of Hall with her severe haircut, then called an Eton crop, dressed in a very masculine black smoking jacket with bow tie, holding a cigarette and looking out disdainfully.

Almost all press photographs of Hall from the time show her apparently wearing a man’s suit; in fact she nearly always wore a bespoke, tailored, knee-length skirt rather than trousers to match the tailored jacket but photos hardly ever showed below the knee.

In the Express article, the editor states that, “So far as I know, it is the first English novel which presents, in a completely faithful and uncompromising form, one particular aspect of sexual life as it exists among us today.”

The editor notes that the book is intended to present the lives of its characters sympathetically in order that they may be understood.

But he is not convinced. “This is the defence and the justification of what I regard as an intolerable outrage – the first outrage of this kind in the annals of English fiction.” The editor also says that artistic merit is no defense; quite the reverse in fact.

The adroitness and cleverness of the book intensifies its moral danger. It is a seductive and insidious piece of special pleading designed to display perverted decadence as a martyrdom inflicted upon these outcasts by a cruel society. It flings a veil of sentiment over their depravity. It even suggests that their self-made debasement is unavoidable, because they cannot save themselves.

In the most infamous quote in the article, the editor says, “I would rather give a healthy boy or a healthy girl a phial of prussic acid than this novel. Poison kills the body, but moral poison kills the soul. . . The book must at once be withdrawn.”

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Rebuttal to the negative reviews

At least one serious British newspaper returned fire to the growing number of negative reviews, including this article titled “The Stunters and the Stunted.”

Will stunt journalism be allowed to cripple and degrade English literature? The question is raised by an article in a Sunday newspaper clamouring for the suppression of a novel, The Well of Loneliness, written by Miss Radclyffe Hall and published by Messrs. Jonathan Cape, Ltd, price 15s.

The book is the story of an abnormal woman. It is a restrained and serious psychological study. It is written “with understanding and practice, with sympathy and feeling,” says The Nation. It is “sincere, courageous, high-minded and often beautifully expressed,” says The Times Literary Supplement.

But the stunt journalist, writing for a Sunday newspaper which revels in the revelations of murderers and in the views and confessions of the unfortunate persons made notorious by the terrible ordeal of trial for murder, can see here an opportunity for sensation-mongering . . .

In this book there is nothing pornographic. The evil-minded will seek in vain in these pages for any stimulant to sexual excitement. The lustful sheikhs and cavemen and vamps of popular fiction may continue their sadistic course unchecked in those pornographic novels which are sold by the millions, but Miss Radclyffe Hall has entirely ignored these crude and violent figures of sexual melodrama. She has given to English literature a profound and moving study of a profound and moving problem. (Arnold Dawson, The Daily Herald, August 20, 1928)

The British Establishment very quickly came down on the side of the tabloids; the British publishers offered to withdraw it just a few days later in a letter to The Times – knowing, however, that they could quickly reprint it in France and sell it there without fear of censorship.

Sir, – We have today received a request from the Home Secretary asking us to discontinue publication of Miss Radclyffe Hall’s novel: “The Well of Loneliness.” We have already expressed our readiness to fall in with the wishes of the Home Office in this matter, and we have therefore stopped publication.

I have the honour to be your obedient servant,
Jonathan Cape (for and on behalf of Jonathan Cape, Ltd), August 23, 1928

Just a few days later, another British tabloid newspaper, The People, also jumped on the censorship bandwagon, claiming that it was them who had originally asked for a ban of this “revolting” book.

The “secret novel” to which “The People” drew attention last week has been withdrawn by the publishers at the request of the Home Secretary.

While other newspapers were trying to make up their minds about the book, “The People” had already decided that the revolting aspect of modern life with which it dealt made its publication undesirable.

Further, “The People” announced exclusively, a week ago, that the novel, and the banning of it, were under official consideration.

The Home Secretary’s acceded request for the books withdrawal is a triumphant vindication of “The People’s” judgement. (The People, August 26, 1928)

Banning and, in the case of The Well of Loneliness, literally burning copies of a book is always a great way to increase sales, as the writer of a letter to another newspaper very quickly found.

I happened to visit two well-known London bookshops today, and I had not been in either five minutes before I heard mention made of Miss Radclyffe Hall’s suppressed book.

In one shop a customer enquired whether a copy could still be obtained through the circulating library department, and was told that the probable policy of the library would be to withdraw all copies in circulation as soon as they were returned, and issue no more.

In the other shop a customer was expressing at some length to an assistant his views on the unfairness, not so much of the suppression, as of the methods adopted to bring it about. (Yorkshire Post, August 28, 1928)

Nevertheless, even some of the more serious, upmarket British journals also jumped swiftly onto the ban-the-book bandwagon, including The Tatler which only two weeks earlier had reviewed The Well of Loneliness fairly and sympathetically.

The Home Secretary is to be congratulated on having secured the suppression of “The Well of Loneliness” without setting the Public Prosecutor in action. The book is mischievous and unwholesome; but a prosecution would certainly have failed, because there is not an indecent word or an obscene image in it from the first to the last page.

The police authorities are well aware that prosecutions for sexual abnormality, even when a conviction is obtained, do more harm than good, and always, if they can, avoid proceedings . . . The female “invert,” up to now regarded as a hysterical half-wit, is by Miss Radclyffe Hall described as the victim of a pre-disposition or pre-natal taint.

Possibly, but is not the same true of the male invert? Happily the question has been settled by the good taste and common sense of  Messrs. Cape, who agreed at once to withdraw the book. (The Tatler, September 5, 1928)

 

The Home Secretary in question was the aristocratic Sir William Joynson-Hicks, Viscount Bedford, who had been described as “the most prudish, puritanical and protestant Home Secretary of the twentieth century.” Jix, as he was known, was loved by the tabloid press but treated as a laughing stock by the serious journals.

As Home Secretary he cracked down on many aspects of the Roaring Twenties of which he disapproved, including the existence of London nightclubs, many of which he ordered the Metropolitan police to raid. Hicks said he was trying to stem “the flood of filth coming across the Channel,” banning the works of D. H. Lawrence whose Lady Chatterley’s Lover was published privately in 1928 in Italy partly because of him – Jix forced the publishers to issue an expurgated version in Britain.

He also clamped down on books on birth control and a translation of Boccaccio’s admittedly raunchy The Decameron which nevertheless dates from the 1350s. Hicks even opposed the revision of The Church of England’s Book of Common Prayer in his own book The Prayer Book Crisis, published in May 1928.

However, despite his disapproval of the “modern woman,” Hicks did personally drive through Parliament the Equal Franchise Act of 1928 which gave women equal voting rights to men – rights they unhesitatingly used to unseat Hicks’ own Conservative party in the General Election of the following year.

 

Fellow writers try to appeal to reason

Fellow writers generally agreed that books should not be banned because of their subject matter. British novelist E. M. Delafield (whose 1928 novel What is Love? has contrasting heroines in Vicky and Ellie who are reminiscent of Vanity Fair’s Becky and Amelia but with more of a sex life) gave a talk to a woman’s group in Leeds while the controversy was raging in which she directly addressed the issue.

Virginia Woolf, whose pansexual novel Orlando was also published in 1928, was tepid about The Well of Loneliness, though it was the literary style she disapproved of rather than the content. She wrote in a letter, “At this moment our thoughts centre upon Sapphism. We have to uphold the morality of that Well of all that’s stagnant and lukewarm and neither one thing or the other; The Well of Loneliness.”

And in another letter, “The dulness [sic] of the book is such that any indecency may lurk there — one simply can’t keep one’s eyes on the page.” She also wrote in her diary about the publisher’s appeal in court of “The pale tepid vapid book which lay damp and slab all about the court.”

However, she and E. M. Forster attended the appeal together and wrote a letter to The Nation in support.

The Well of Loneliness is restrained and perfectly decent, and the treatment of its theme is unexceptionable. It has obviously been suppressed because of the theme itself. May we add a few words on this point?

The subject-matter of the book exists as a fact among the many other facts of life. It is recognised by science and recognisable in history. It forms, of course, an extremely small fraction of the sum-total of human emotions, it enters personally into very few lives, and is uninteresting or repellent to the majority; nevertheless it exists, and novelists in England have now been forbidden to mention it by Sir W. Joynson-Hicks.

May they mention it incidentally? Although it is forbidden as a main theme, may it be alluded to, or ascribed to subsidiary characters? Perhaps the Home Secretary will issue further orders on this point.

 

Seizure of and destruction of printed copies proceeds

Despite the support of well-known writers, the publisher’s appeal against the seizure of two hundred and forty seven copies of the book and the decision to destroy them failed; the appeal judge made no attempt to hide his prejudice, as reported in another tabloid newspaper.

In giving the decision of the Court, Sir Robert Wallace said there were plenty of people who would not be depraved or corrupted by reading this book, but there were also those whose minds were open to such immoral influences.

The view of this Court is that this book is very subtle, insinuating in the theme it propounds, and much more dangerous because of that fact.

It is the view of this Court that this is a most dangerous and corrupting book  . . . that it is a disgusting book, a book which is prejudicial to the morals of the community, and in our view the order made by the magistrate was a fair one, and the appeal is dismissed with costs. (Daily Mirror, December 15, 1928)

After the appeal court decision, the seized copies of the novel were very quickly burned “in the King’s furnace” – five years before the first fascist book burnings in Germany – a notorious occasion reported, mostly approvingly, in the popular press.

All the seized copies of Miss Radclyffe Hall’s novel, “The Well of Loneliness,” will early this week help to warm the many rooms of New Scotland Yard.

It is understood that the copies of the book, which are now under lock and key, will be fed into the furnaces in the basement of New Scotland Yard and be destroyed. The destruction of the books will be conducted under the supervision of at least one officer of high rank. (Aberdeen Press and Journal, December 17, 1928)

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More about Radclyffe Hall
(photo, ca 1930, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)
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Reprinted immediately in Paris

Meanwhile, The Well of Loneliness had swiftly been reprinted in Paris and was openly and very successfully on sale there, as attested by a couple of sympathetic female journalists, including the Paris correspondent of the very Tatler which had just the week earlier condemned the book.

At my flat in Paris I found a copy of Radclyffe Hall’s “Well of Loneliness” and, incidentally, many thanks to the sender whose handwriting on the address I did not recognise! I read it from cover to cover with breathless interest, and very soon, no doubt, I shall read it again.

Rarely has Paris “been so well done,” and not only the pages referring to a certain Paris and a certain milieu of that certain Paris, but the whole atmosphere of my beloved city. I am told that this novel has started a certain amount of yapping, and this seems curious to me, for I have read several notices of it in the columns of such “pillars of the Press” as “The Sunday Times,” “The Morning Post,” “The Saturday Review,” and “The Telegraph,” which were, in most cases, understanding and appreciative.

Strange the difficulty that some people have to keep calm when any pitiful aspect of sexual life is discussed. Pitiful? Why, of course. No one deliberately wants to be uncomfortable, and anything abnormal is dashed uncomfy. (“Priscilla in Paris,” The Tatler, September 12, 1928)

And early the next year the Paris correspondent of the prestigious New Yorker, a journalist and novelist – and lesbian – herself, reported that the novel was openly on sale and highly popular there.

It may be interesting to know that Radclyffe Hall’s novel about Lesbians, The Well of Loneliness, though banned in England and under fire in New York, has escaped condemnation in France, where it now enjoys a local printing. Its biggest daily sale takes place from the news vendor’s cart serving the deluxe train for London, La Flèche d’Or, at the Garde du Nord.

The price is one hundred and twenty-five francs a copy. For first English editions, dealers in the Rue de Castiglione offered to buy for as high as six thousand francs, and to sell at as high as anything you are silly enough to pay. (Janet Flanner, ‘Letter from Paris,’ New Yorker, 1929)

In Flanner’s native New York however things did not go so well for the Well, as reported in the New York Times for February 22, 1929.

Magistrate Hyman Bushel in the Tombs Court ruled yesterday that the book “The Well of Loneliness” by the Englishwoman writer Radclyffe Hall is obscene and was printed and distributed in this city in violation of the penal law. He ordered a complaint drawn against the Covici, Friede Corporation, American publishers of the book . . .

Mr. Friede, who was in court when the decision was announced, was promptly arrested, but freed in $500 bail, which he furnished in cash. No bail was fixed in the case of the corporation. Hearings were held several weeks ago by the magistrate in the West Side Court in a proceeding started by John S. Simner, superintendent of the Society for the Suppression of Vice, who had seized 855 copies of the novel at the publisher’s office.

Friede had gambled big by taking out a huge $10,000 dollar loan to buy the US publication rights from Cape in England but he could still easily afford to pay the $500 bail, which he probably did with a triumphant smile, since he had already sold 100,000 copies of the paperback at $5 each – double the normal price of a paperback novel at the time.

As Una Troubridge said, “What nobody foresaw was that the re-publication in Paris would be followed by translation into eleven languages, by the triumph of the book in the United States of America and the sale of more than a million copies.”  Censorship works in the short run, but rarely in the censor’s favor.

Contributed by Francis Booth, the author of several books on twentieth-century culture: Amongst Those Left: The British Experimental Novel 1940-1960 (published by Dalkey Archive); Everybody I Can Think of Ever: Meetings That Made the Avant-Garde; Girls in Bloom: Coming of Age in the Mid-Twentieth Century Woman’s Novel; Text Acts: Twentieth-Century Literary Eroticism; Comrades in Art: Revolutionary Art in America 1926-1938; High Collars & Monocles: 1920s Novels by British Female Couples; and A Girl Named Vera Can Never Tell a Lie: The Fiction of Vera Caspary.

Francis has also published several novels: The Code 17 series, set in the Swinging London of the 1960s and featuring aristocratic spy Lady Laura Summers; Young adult fantasy series The Watchers; and Young Adult fantasy novel Mirror Mirror. Francis lives on the South Coast of England. 

The post How to Burn a Book: Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.

Ban if You Can: Banning & Censorship in Contemporary India

India’s celebrated diversity and, by and large, a sense of peaceful co-existence has taken a severe hit since the past decade. This has been linked with the rise of right-wing Hindutva in politics, which has bred a sense of injured pride in the Hindu majority accompanied by a phobia created about the threat from minorities, most of all Islam. 

The myths being perpetrated include the uncontrolled rise in the Muslim population, as also the physical threats that could result from this change in demographics. 

There is no data to substantiate these claims but with the power of social media and its ability to make a piece of fake news viral, nobody seems to care anymore to do a fact check and most people are quite content to believe all the lies that land on their telephones, day in and day out.

At such a juncture, all forms of media including books, have the power to influence people and change minds. Hence, governments and powerful religious groups are very sensitive about certain topics, which they feel the public should be denied access to. With this started the history of bans in India, though it is not as if other more progressive countries have not done their share of banning.

Book banning in India

Aubrey Menen and Salman Rushdie

One of the earliest books to be banned in India was Rama Retold. Written in 1954 by the British writer Aubrey Menen as a spoof with a dose of humor, it clearly did not appeal to the funny bone of Indians and the book was prevented from being imported into India. 

The author, labeled as a satirist, novelist and theatre critic, was probably much more, as he took pot shots at all the characters in the Ramayana, including the one who is said to have authored the Ramayana, Valmiki. 

In today’s India, this retelling might have brought him death threats and though he chose to make India his home in later life, he fortunately didn’t live to see this phase of India’s authoritarian grip on the written and spoken word.    

Sometimes, as it happened with Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses, it is the fear of communal conflagrations that can result in a ban. Even though the book made it to the Booker shortlist, the government headed by the Congress party under Rajiv Gandhi, decided to play safe and enforce a ban on the book. 

In 1989, there was a fatwa put on Rushdie by Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran and the author had to go into hiding for long years. It is tragic how Rushdie nearly paid with his life in August 2022, despite years having gone by, since the fatwa was lifted. 

One is not sure whether the misguided assailant had even read the book. Rushdie’s cup of woes did not end with the Satanic Verses in India. 

His Moor’s Last Sigh, also came in for criticism and protests in the state of Maharashtra, as one of the characters seemed to bear a resemblance to Balasaheb Thackeray, the founder of a political party called the Shiva Sena. That Thackeray started his career as a journalist, makes this all the more ironic. 

Dan Brown

When it came to Dan Brown’sThe Da Vinci Code, it was India’s Christian population that rose up in protest claiming that the book had made profane statements on Christ. 

Despite selling millions of copies worldwide, after the movie version was released in 2006, the book was prevented from being “sold, distributed and read.” The movie also came in for a ban in several states of India, where the Christian population were located in large numbers. 

Arundhati Roy

In a country steeped in patriarchy, many women authors have had to face criticism of their books, if not outright bans. Arundhati Roy, who won the Booker Prize for her God of Small Things, had to fight a case, as a lawyer in Kerala was offended by her book with its reference to an upper caste Kerala woman cohabiting with a man from a lower caste. 

But truth is stranger than fiction. Even today the papers are full of stories of families attacking couples belonging to different castes, with some of them ending in the tragic death of one or both.

Indian patriarchy strangely extends across the different religions that have incubated here. At the heart of this sense of ownership of a woman is likely linked to an ancient lawmaker, Manu, who in his Manusmriti, has clearly spoken of a woman as a piece of property and drawn the most demeaning parallels about her position in society. 

That the present Union government is trying to bring in the Manusmriti as a part of its newly amended criminal laws, has led to a lot of protests, including from those of the legal fraternity.  If Manu’s code is revived by this government, it will certainly be back to the dark ages for the women of India, especially those who live in the villages and small towns, with less access to education and an already internalized acceptance of patriarchy.

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Kamala Das 

Another woman author who had to face a great deal of censure was the Malayalam author, Kamala Das, who wrote fearlessly about a woman’s body and its needs. 

Her writings shook society and Das had to face a huge backlash from an orthodox society. But she was unfazed and continued writing till her last breath. Even today, her writings make up a big part of feminist Indian writing. 

Poet, author, social scientist and feminist Kamla Bhasin put it succinctly when she observed, “My honour is not in my vagina.” The tragedy of patriarchy is in its belief that this is where a woman’s honor vests. 

In recent times, the politics surrounding food have also led to the banning of movies, including those available for live streaming. While propaganda films have managed to garner awards in the last ten years, the right-wing ecosystem seems to exercise strict control about what films are suitable for viewing by the Indian public.  

A contemporary film banned

It’s enough for just one person to see a movie, feel outraged by it and have it banned by posting about it on social media.  One such film, which was removed from Netflix was Annapoorani: The Goddess of Food. The furor over “hurting Hindu religious sentiment,” resulted in its removal at its “licensor’s request.” 

The gist of the story revolves around actor, Nayanthara, aspiring to become a cook by learning to eat and prepare non-vegetarian dishes, which are taboo in a Brahmin home. It’s another story that many Indians from the upper castes have broken this taboo, but of course this is again a question of patriarchy rearing its head in that a woman does not have a right over her food choices either.

The role of India’s government in banning and censorship

In earlier times, governments banned books or movies in anticipation of trouble, or because they felt jittery over certain allusions in books and the popular media. 

Today the government has managed a huge stranglehold on the dissemination of information. The mainstream media has largely become a propaganda machine for the government and has earned for itself the title of Godi or Lap Media. 

Many activists find themselves in jail over trumped up charges of spreading fake news.  The independent media is always up for censure with several journalists feeling threatened about how they cover news.  Even stand-up comics have not been spared, with many of their shows being called off because someone protested during the event, or prior to the staging. 

The author Aubrey Menen, mentioned earlier, put it best in his closing lines of Rama Retold, which he reserved for his favorite character, Valmiki:

“There are three things, which are real: God, human folly and laughter. Since the first two pass our comprehension, we must do what we can with the third.” 

It is sad that Indians seem to have missed out on the joys of laughing at their own foibles because at the end of the day, it is just the fact of having a very thin skin, especially our politicians.

Contributed by Melanie P. Kumar: Melanie is a Bangalore, India-based independent writer who has always been fascinated with the magic of words. Links to some of her pieces can be found at gonewiththewindwithmelanie.wordpress.com.

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But Gentlemen Marry Brunettes, the sequel to Gentlemen Prefer Blondes

Anita Loos’ wildly successful 1925 novel Gentlemen Prefer Blondes was followed by a sequel, But Gentlemen Marry Brunettes. Published in the U.S. in 1927 and in England in 1928, it continued the adventures of the free, independent but ditzy Lorelei Lee and her friend, Dorothy Shaw.

Despite her misspellings and malapropisms, Lorelei is very much the modern, free 1920s woman and though she is deliberately written to appear as a “dumb blonde,” she is actually extremely sharp (and beautifully written in a virtuoso performance by Loos).

Lorelei wants us to understand that she is not a gold digger but a “diamond collector” and her faux-naïve monologue – the novel purports to be Lorelei’s diary – contains many other gems that sound in retrospect as though they were written specifically for Marilyn Monroe, even though Monroe was only two years old when the novel was published:

“Diamonds are a girl’s best friend.”“Money may not buy happiness, but it sure does make it easier to be glamorous.”“Being blond means never having to say sorry for being fabulous.”

Not that Lorelei intends to be dependent on a man —“Why chase after a man when you can chase after a job and have both?” And, as she says, “success is the best revenge, especially when you’re wearing a stunning dress.”

The famous 1953 film adaptation of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, starring Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell, bears only passing resemblance to the original book, and 1955’s Gentlemen Marry Brunettes film, starring Jane Russell and Jeanne Crain as Dorothy Shaw’s daughters, even less so.

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Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1925 novel) 
by Anita Loos
. . . . . . . . . .

Lorelei Lee doesn’t need to be saved

Like the best of modern 1920s women, Lorelei doesn’t need to be saved, she just needs a man to spend his savings on her. “I don’t need a knight in shining armor, I need a man who can keep up with me.”

And: “I refuse to be just another pretty face. I’m here to own the room and conquer the world.”

There is also a quote in the original novel that gives the clue to the incomplete nature of the book’s title, “Gentlemen may prefer blondes, but smart men prefer a blonde with a brain.”

At the beginning of this sequel, Lorelei tells us that she is “going to begin a diary again, because I have quite a little time on my hands.” The new diary, like the one in the previous novel, is full of the delightful non-standard spellings and howlers as the first one – Loos’ technical skill is severely underrated in my opinion.

In the new diary, Lorelei’s foil Dorothy is back as her sounding board. “I mean sometimes Dorothy becomes Philosophical, and says something that really makes a girl wonder how anyone who can make such a Philosophical remark can waste her time like Dorothy does.”

. . . . . . . . . .

More about Anita Loos
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Lorelei tries on some careers

Now married to Henry, who is of “the wealthy classes,” Lorelei says that “practically every married girl ought to have a career if she is wealthy enough to have the home life carried on by the servants.” And especially, as in her case, if she is married to husband like Henry, who is “quite a homebody and, if the girl was a homebody to, she would encounter him quite often.” So

Lorelei tells her diary that she needs to get out of the house and “to meet brainy gentlemen who have got ideas on the outside.”

The first career Lorelei tries is the cinema, where she stars in “a superproduction based on sex life in the period of Dolly Madison” [wife of James Madison, fourth president of the United States at the beginning of the 1800s].

The production team argue as to whether it should be full of “Psychology,” mob scenes and ornamental sets or full of a “great moral lesson,” as Henry wants. “I did not care what it was full of, as long as it was full of plenty of cute scenes where the leading man would chase me round the trunk of a tree and I would peek out at him, like Lillian Gish.”

Well, when our cinema was finished the title turned out to be “Stronger than Sex,” which was thought up by quite a bright girl in Mister Goldmark’s suite of offices. And the great moral lesson was, that girls could always help it, if they would only think of Mother.

 

Lorelei has a baby

But Lorelei becomes pregnant and has to give up her career in the cinema. Dorothy says that “a kid that looks like any rich father is as good as money in the bank,” and Lorelei is happy to be pregnant so soon after the marriage because “the sooner a girl becomes a Mother after the ceremony, the more likely it is to look like Daddy.”

Dorothy advises her however to only have one “kiddie” because she thinks that “one is enough of almost anything that looks like Henry. But Dorothy has no reverents for Motherhood.”

Henry wants to stay in Philadelphia to have the baby because, as Lorelei says, in Philadelphia he is quite “promanent,” whereas Lorelei is desperate to move to New York, even knowing that “the riskay things that Henry can think up may intreege the suberbs of Philadelphia, but they really would not be such a thrill in New York.”

She asks a New York friend, who is “very, very promanent” to get invitations for Henry to join various societies. It works; “when Henry started in to receive all of those invitations, it made him feel very good to think that his promanents had reached New York.”

She decides to “become literary”

After the baby comes, Henry settles “quite a large settlement on me.” But Lorelei is bored and soon starts to think of a new career. “I decided not to produce any more cinemas, because ‘Stronger Than Sex’ went right over people’s heads and became a financial failure. So I decided to become literary instead and spend more time in some literary envirament, outside the home.”

Lorelei starts with probably the most literary environment in New York, the Algonquin Hotel, still the real-life home in 1928 to Dorothy Parker and the Vicious Circle; she goes for lunch and charms the waiter into sitting them next to the famous writers.

After Dorothy gets bored and leaves, Lorelei is invited to sit at the table of “all the geniuses” by one of them, who says to his companions, “you are always discovering a Duse, or a Sapho or a Cleopatra every week, and I think it is my turn. Because I have discovered a young lady who is all three rolled into one.”

Lorelei has already said of this man that he “is always falling in love with some new girl” so she is not surprised when he says he has “noted my reverants for everything they said and he finally told me that he realised I had more in me than I looked, so he issued me an invitation to come to luncheon every day.”

But Lorelei has already decided to join another organization, the Lucy Stone League – a real-life women’s establishment founded in 1921 that advocated women keeping their name after marriage. Lorelei wants to be able to “write my book without my identity being sunk by having the name of a husband to crush me.”

Because a girl’s name should be Sacred, and when she uses her husband’s it only sinks her identity. And when a girl always insists on her own maiden name, with vialents, it lets people know that she must be important some place or other.

And quite a good place to insist on an unmarried name, is when you go to some strange hotel accompanied by a husband. Because when the room clerck notes that a girl with a maiden name is in the same room with a gentleman, it starts quite a little explanation, and makes a girl feel quite promanent before everybody in the lobby.

But Dorothy said I had better be careful. I mean she says that most Lucy Stoners do not really worry the room clerck, because they are generally the type that are only brought to hotels on account of matrimony.

But Dorothy said that when Henry and I waltz in and ask for a room with my maiden name the clerck would probably get one good look at me, and hand Henry a room in the local jail for the Man act [the Mann Act of 1910 criminalized the transportation of “any woman or girl for the purpose of prostitution or debauchery, or for any other immoral purpose”].

“I do not listen to any advice about literature from a girl like Dorothy. And so I joined it.”

 

Lorelei’s novel and Dorothy’s misadventures

Lorelei decides to write her novel about Dorothy, which “is not going to be so much for girls to resemble, as it is to give them a warning what they should stop doing.” Dorothy turns out to have had a very interesting childhood, starting from “quite a low enviranment,” and though she has improved herself to the extent of living at the Ritz, Dorothy still “does nothing but fall madly in love with the kind of gentlemen who were born without money and have not made any since.”

By the age of sixteen Dorothy has ended up working among grifters and tricksters in a “Carnaval Company” but still seems to be a virgin, “without the subjeck of ‘Life’ being brought to turn notice. Because when I was only 13, I sang in our church quire, and practically every boy in our quire had at least mentioned the subjeck and some of them had done even more.”

Lorelei’s reasoning for this is that in a Carnaval Company “nothing is Sacred,” and people can make jokes about matters of Life. “But Love is so Sacred in a church quire, that they never even mention it above a whisper, and it becomes more of a mistery. And when a thing is a mistery, it is always more intrieging.”

So for Lorelei growing up there was ironically “quite a lot more Love going on” than in Dorothy’s traveling circus.

Eventually, Dorothy has come to the conclusion that it is time that she gave the “love racket” a whirl, “and find out for herself if it had really been over-advertised.” Her skepticism is not surprising to Lorelei, given that she lives in the company of people whose whole lives involve swindling the public. But when Dorothy “decided to do it,” and “find out about ‘Things,’” the only person she could think of who might be interested is the “Deputy Sherif” so she gives him “a kind word.”

After going with him to the cinema, Dorothy decides to let the Deputy Sherif kiss her, Dorothy’s first kiss. It is a big disappointment. “Dorothy says she felt like a little boy who had just found out that Santy Clause was the Sunday School Superintendant.”

Dorothy passes up the chance to marry into the Deputy Sherif’s wealthy family and runs away to join an acting company run by a Frederik Morgan, having decided on her new career after seeing Morgan playing the lead in “The Tail of Two Cities,” after which “the whole subjeck of Sex Appeal had taken on quite a new aspeck to Dorothy. And Dorothy says she decided that all of the things the Deputy Sherif had tried on her, that only made her squirm, would be a Horse of a different color with that leading man in the role.”

So Dorothy accompanies Mr Morgan up to his apartment where he tells her the story of “his Life,” which includes the fact that he has a wife but had to send her away because “an Artist must use all of his feelings to develop his temprament by.”

And then he told Dorothy that she would probably turn out to be an Artist herself, as soon as she got her temprament developed and found out about Life.

And he said that he himself would be willing to teach her about Life and give her all his ade. And he told her it was really quite a large opertunity for a girl like her, when society women with strings of pearls were after it. So after he finished his recomendation, he asked Dorothy whether she would like to go home, or take off her things and stay awhile.

So Dorothy took off her things.

But it turns out that learning about Life does not improve Dorothy’s acting “temperament” and, worse, it “did not turn out to be so enjoyable to her, after all. I mean, Dorothy is never at her best in a tate-a-tate.”

Both parties agree to “let the matter drop,” but Dorothy continues to act and then gets a job at the Follies, where she impresses a millionaire polo player, Charlie Breene. But the rich boy bores her and she gives him the slip. “And Dorothy says that running out on millionaires has been her specialty ever since.”

So, despite impressing the polo player’s millionaire society mother, Dorothy runs off with a “saxaphone player” she met at the Follies. The marriage goes wrong for Dorothy on the way to the wedding, when she sees her future husband Lester in the daylight for the first time and is not impressed; she spends the next several chapters trying to get away from him, with the ostensible help of the Breene family’s money and lawyer, during which Dorothy goes on a trip to Paris.

The polo player’s family money had actually been secretly supporting Lester and when the money stops, he blackmails the Breenes’ lawyer into paying him $10,000 to go away. The upshot is that Dorothy is now free to marry Charlie so her worried family pay the lawyer to frame her on a drugs charge and the police lock her up.

But Lorelei comes to her rescue and then Charlie reappears, having been cut off from his family’s money and got himself sober. Dorothy falls in love and, reader, she married him.

. . . . . . . . . . . 

The 1955 film, Gentlemen Marry Brunettes, 
has little in common with the 1927 original novel
. . . . . . . . . .

Contributed by Francis Booth, the author of several books on twentieth-century culture: Amongst Those Left: The British Experimental Novel 1940-1960 (published by Dalkey Archive); Everybody I Can Think of Ever: Meetings That Made the Avant-Garde; Girls in Bloom: Coming of Age in the Mid-Twentieth Century Woman’s Novel; Text Acts: Twentieth-Century Literary Eroticism; Comrades in Art: Revolutionary Art in America 1926-1938; High Collars & Monocles: 1920s Novels by British Female Couples; and A Girl Named Vera Can Never Tell a Lie: The Fiction of Vera Caspary.

Francis has also published several novels: The Code 17 series, set in the Swinging London of the 1960s and featuring aristocratic spy Lady Laura Summers; Young adult fantasy series The Watchers; and Young Adult fantasy novel Mirror Mirror. Francis lives on the South Coast of England. 

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