Nava Atlas's Blog, page 81

Mary Shelley

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (August 30, 1797 – February 1, 1851) born Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, was born in London, England and is best known for her classic thriller, Frankenstein. Born to philosopher and political writer William Godwin and famed feminist Mary Wollstonecraft (author of The Vindication of the Rights of Woman), she and her half-sister, Fanny Imlay, (Wollstonecraft’s daughter from an affair she had with a soldier) were raised mainly by her father after her mother passed away ten days after giving birth to Mary.

Mary Shelley’s work crossed several genres (essays, biographies, short stories, and dramas) and often contained autobiographical elements.

Early life

After Mary’s father remarried to Mary Jane Clairmont in 1901, the family dynamic changed. Clairmont brought her own two children into the household, and she later had a son with Mary’s father. Mary never got along with her stepmother, who favored her own children over Mary and her step-sister, sending them away to school and neglecting to educate the others.

Mary gravitated towards writing as a creative outlet. According to The Life and Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft, she once explained that “As a child, I scribbled; and my favourite pastime, during the hours given me for recreation, was to ‘write stories.'” She published her first poem, “Mounseer Nongtongpaw,” in 1807, through her father’s company.

Marriage to Percy Shelley

In 1814, Mary began a relationship with poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. A devoted student of her father, Percy Shelley soon focused his attention on Mary. Still married to his first wife, he and the teenaged Mary fled to travel Europe together, and eventually returned to England, despite her father’s deep disapproval of the union. Ostracized from the family and sinking into debt, Mary became pregnant in 1815. The couple lost the baby a few days after her birth.

Later that year, Mary suffered the loss of her half-sister Fanny who committed suicide. A short time after, Percy’s wife committed suicide. Now able to wed, in December 1816 Mary and Percy married. Soon after she published a travelogue of their escape to Europe, History of a Six Weeks’ Tour (1817) while continuing to work on her soon-to-be-famous Frankenstein.

In 1818, Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus debuted as a new novel from an anonymous author. Many thought that Percy Bysshe Shelley had written it since he penned its introduction. Needless to say, the book was a huge success.

See also: How Mary Shelley Came to Write Frankenstein

Frankenstein — her lasting legacy

In the midst of her tumultuous, tragic, and romantic youth, Mary created Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus, one of the most memorable stories of all time. While in Switzerland with Shelley and Lord Byron in 1816, it was proposed that the members of the literary group each write a tale with supernatural elements. Mary herself tells of how she came to write Frankenstein. This, her first and most iconic novel was published in 1818 when she was barely twenty-one is still widely read and studied.

Frankenstein has been referenced and reworked in numerous formats, though the Hollywood versions bare scant resemblance to the original. A novel filled with universal themes like creation, maternal instinct, and death, it’s a pioneer in the tradition of the Gothic novel. The struggle between good and evil lies at the root of the story.

Tragic turns

Mary’s own story took even more tragic turns. She and Percy had five children in total, three of whom died before age three. In 1822, on an ocean voyage, Percy Shelley’s craft was lost at sea; his body was recovered days later. The loss was devastating.

In an 1824 journal entry, she wrote: “At the age of twenty-six I am in the condition of an aged person — all my old friends are gone … & my heart fails when I think by how few ties I hold to the world…”

Quotes from Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

Other works

Mary Shelley’s reputation is so bound with her first novel that it often goes unacknowledged that she was quite prolific. Following Frankenstein were the novels Valperga, or the Life and Adventures of Castruccio, Prince of Lucca (1823), a historic tale; The Last Man (1826), a rather dystopian novel about the spread of pestilence on humanity (the main character of this tale, Adrian, is thought to be based on Shelley); The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck (1830); Lodore (1835); and Falkner (1837).

Nonfiction works include Journal of a Six Weeks Tour (which covers the flight to Europe by the couple in 1814), and Rambles in Germany and Italy in 1840–1842–1843. 

Later years

Mary returned to London in 1823, the year after her husband died. She lived out her life with their one surviving son, Percy Florence Shelley. She and Percy Florence were quite close and devoted to one another.

She continued to eke out a living as a writer. After some time, Sir Timothy Shelley, her father-in-law, gave her an allowance on the condition that she refrain from writing a full biography of her husband. However, in 1838, she edited Shelley’s works and provided much valuable insight on his life and work. She also managed to put their son Percy through Harrow, and Cambridge University.

Perhaps she lived by the words in her novel, The Last Man (1826):

“A truce to philosophy! — Life is before me, and I rush into possession. Hope, glory, love, and blameless ambition are my guides, and my soul knows no dread. What has been, though sweet, is gone; the present is good only because it is about to change … ”

Mary Shelley died from a brain tumor in London in 1850, at age 53. Her other novels and writings have received renewed interest, especially since the 1970s.

Mary Shelley page on Amazon

More about Mary Shelley on this site

How Mary Shelley Came to Write Frankenstein (1818)
Quotes from Frankenstein (1818) by Mary Shelley

Major Works

Frankenstein
Falkner
Valperga
The Last Man
Maurice

More Information

Wikipedia
Reader discussion of Mary Shelley’s books on Goodreads

Read and listen online

Mary Shelley on Project Gutenberg
Mary Shelley on Librivox

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Maud Hart Lovelace

Maud Hart Lovelace (April 26, 1892 – March 11, 1980) was an American author best known for the Betsy-Tacy series of books for girls. Born and raised in Mankato, Minnesota, she enjoyed a happy childhood filled with friends, culture, and a loving family. She was the middle of three children born to Thomas and Stella (Palmer) Hart. As soon as she could hold a pencil, she began writing stories and poems.

Maud Hart started her college studies at the University of Minnesota but shortly thereafter had to withdraw when she came diagnosed with appendicitis. More than willing to take a break from her studies and continue her recuperation at her maternal grandmother’s home, she escaped to the sun and warmth of California to rest and recover.

She preferred writing to college

After an uncle loaned her a typewriter, she soon wrote her first story, Number Eight. Only 18 years old at the time, she sold it to the Los Angeles Times Sunday Magazine for ten dollars. This stroke of good fortune paved the way for her writing ambitions.

Once recuperated and back to her studies, Maud continued to write and sell stories. College soon seemed less of a draw. She dropped out for good and instead she traveled solo to Europe to gather inspiration for her writing.

During her inspiring year in Europe in 1914, Maud met Paolo Conte, an Italian musician, who later inspired the character Marco in Betsy and the Great World. 

See also: Quotes from Maud Hart Lovelace’s Betsy Novels

Returned home to find great love

Maud returned to Minneapolis at the outbreak of World War I and began working for a fundraising program headed by Mrs. Harry B. Wakefield, the wife of the city editor of the Minneapolis Tribune. It was the spring of 1917 and the Wakefield Publicity Bureau offered Maud a steady day job. She was hired to replace Delos Lovelace, a young writer who was headed off for First Officers Training Camp. At a dinner hosted to hand off the position, the two hit it off and were married before the year was out when Maud was 25 years old. The couple lived apart until 1919, due to Delos’ military service. 

They returned to live in Minnesota a few years later and Maud began writing historical novels. Her first novel, The Black Angels, was published in 1926. Several more novels followed over the next decade, including three written with Delos.

Later, the couple divided their time between Minneapolis and New York for several years. After 1928, they lived in New York permanently until their retirement in Claremont, California.

The couple had one daughter, Merian (born in 1931) who was named after Delos’s friend Merian C. Cooper.

A fortuitous match in many ways, Maud Hart and Delos Lovelace collaborated on several books while she continued to write and sell short stories. The author’s own childhood inspired the bedtime stories she told their young daughter and eventually, she set them down in writing.

Betsy, Tacy, and Deep Valley

Not relying only on memory, Maud drew from the copious diaries and scrapbooks she’d kept growing up. Betsy was modeled after herself; Tacy after her best friend, Bick Kenney. Their town of Mankato became “Deep Valley.” Betsy-Tacy, the first of the series, was published in 1940 to immediate and resounding success.

The last book in the series, Betsy’s Wedding, was published in 1955. Maud had planned to write Betsy’s Bettina, but she eventually chose not to. It is possible that the miscarriage of her first child, a son, more than ten years before Merian’s birth, influenced her decision. She wrote to a friend that the last lines of Betsy’s Wedding “were a perfect ending for the series”:

“She was in the land of dreams now, Betsy thought. The future and the past seemed to melt together. She could feel the Big Hill looking down as the Crowd danced at Tib’s wedding in the chocolate-colored house.”

By this time, Maud was a seasoned author, having published numerous short stories and historical novels for adults. But it was the Betsy-Tacy series that sealed her legacy. Historical accuracy and detail were the threads that ran through her work, fiction and nonfiction, and her books for younger readers. Generations of readers have responded to the depiction of Betsy and her friends as creative, independent girls who valued friendship and loyalty.

Descriptions of music, books, plays, fashion, architecture, and social customs of the times in which these stories take place add to their immense charm. The books in this series, ten in all, have inspired such devotion that there is to this day a Betsy-Tacy Society that maintains the childhood homes of Maud Hart Lovelace and her friend Bick Kenney in Mankato, Minnesota, as well as protecting the author’s legacy.

Maud Hart Lovelace page on Amazon

Later years

Maud and Delos Lovelace moved from their home of many years in New York City to Claremont, California in 1952 after he retired from newspaper work. They enjoyed the stimulating atmosphere of the college town, founded its first Episcopal Church, and became involved with the Civil Rights movement.

When Delos Lovelace died in 1967 the couple was just shy of their 50th wedding anniversary. Maud Hart Lovelace remained in California, where she died in 1980. She is buried in the Glenwood Cemetery in Mankato, with a monument dedicated to her.

More about Maud Hart Lovelace on this site

Quotes from Maud Hart Lovelace’s Betsy Novels

Major works

The Black Angels (1926)
Early Candlelight (1929)
Petticoat Court (1930)
The Charming Sally (1932)
Carney’s House Party (1949)
Emily of Deep Valley (1950)

Betsy-Tacy series

Betsy-Tacy   (1940)
Betsy-Tacy and Tib (1941)
Betsy and Tacy Go Over the Big Hill   (1942)
Betsy and Tacy Go Downtown (1943)
Heaven to Betsy (1946)
Betsy in Spite of Herself   (1946)
Betsy Was a Junior (1947)
Betsy and Joe (1948)
Betsy and the Great World   (1952)
Betsy’s Wedding   (1955)

Biographies

The Betsy-Tacy Companion: A Biography of Maud Hart Lovelace

by Sharla Scannell Whalen (1995)

More information

Wikipedia
Maud Hart Lovelace’s Deep Valley
Maud Hart Lovelace Society
Betsy-Tacy’s Deep Valley: All Things Maud Hart Lovelace, etc.
The Betsy-Tacy Society (Mankato, MN)

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Tillie Olsen

Tillie Olsen (January 14, 1912 – January 1, 2007) was an American author of fiction and nonfiction whose body of work was small but influential, drawing upon her personal experiences. Her work spoke to the struggles of women and working-class families, placing her in the canon of second-wave feminist literature. While her birth was never recorded officially, it’s been determined she was born in either 1912 or 1913.

Born Tillie Lerner in Omaha, Nebraska, she was the second child of Ida Goldberg and Sam Lerner, Russian-Jewish immigrants. Her father, a laborer, was the Secretary of Nebraska’s Socialist party. Her parents’ socialist views and activism impacted Olsen’s childhood and influenced her later life.

Growing up fast

There was never a time when she was not doing something to help the family out financially. As a 10-year-old she had to work shelling peanuts after school. As the second oldest of six children, Olsen was responsible to take care of her younger siblings from an early age.

Spirited, wild, and rebellious, Tillie gained popularity by producing a humor column in the high school newspaper, writing as “Tillie the Toiler.” She eventually dropped out to begin working to help support her parents and siblings. She worked at various blue-collar jobs including factory work, waitressing, and as a hotel maid.

She became politically active in her mid-teens as a writer for the Young Socialist League. In 1931, at age 18, she joined the Young Communist League. She attended the Party school for several weeks in Kansas City, where she began working in a tie factory. During this time Olsen was jailed for a month for distributing leaflets to packinghouse workers and, while in prison, was beaten up by one inmate for attempting to help another. Already weak from having contracted pleurisy and tuberculosis from the factory work conditions, she became so extremely ill that the Party sent her back to Omaha to recuperate.

While recovering, Olsen started writing her first novel, Yonnondio, which was to be put away for decades to come. That same year, she gave birth to the first of her four daughters.

Challenging times as a wife and mother

Olsen moved to San Francisco in 1933 and continued her pro-labor activism. She was arrested during the 1934 general strike and dispatched reports to The New Republic and The Partisan Review. It was then that she met Jack Olsen, another activist, whom she later married.

The couple married in 1944 and had three more daughters (she would eventually come to have many grandchildren and great-grandchildren). Olsen, working at various jobs to help support the family, found it challenging to be a mother and working to earn a living. She longed for time to write and made no secret of her frustration, which often shaded into bitterness.

Tell Me a Riddle

She didn’t have a book-length work published until 1961 when Tell Me a Riddle appeared. A collection of four short stories, it opened with “I Stand Here Ironing,” a first-person narrative of the frustration of motherhood, isolation, and poverty.

The last piece in the collection, “Tell Me a Riddle,” is arguably her best-known work. It’s the story of a working-class couple that also poignantly explores the author’s favored themes of poverty and gender. The slender short story received much critical acclaim. “Tell Me a Riddle” was adapted into a 1980 movie starring Melvyn Douglas and Lila Kedrova.

Silences

In Silences (1978), a collection of linked essays, Olsen looked at women authors of the past to comment on how societal and financial circumstances affected their creative lives. She also examined how marriage and motherhood impacted output and chances for success. Issues of gender and class were central to these meditations. Margaret Atwood wrote of the book:  “It begins with an account, first drafted in 1962, of her own long, circumstantially enforced silence. She did not write for a very simple reason: A day has 24 hours. For 20 years she had no time, no energy and none of the money that would have bought both.”

See also: Silences by Tillie Olsen: On Being a Writer and a Mother

A biographical reckoning

A post in the Jewish Daily Forward —A Brutal Narcissist: The Life of Feminist Icon Tillie Olsen — tells of biographer Panthea Reid’s decade-long journey to research and write Tillie Olsen: One Woman, Many Riddles. The article states that the biographer’s “initial admiration for Olsen disintegrated as time progressed.

Overcoming her resistance to seeing one of her heroines dethroned, Reid paints a harsh portrait of a self-involved and difficult woman who could often be manipulative and deceptive and brutally narcissistic.” The book ultimately paints a portrait of a woman who was self-involved, didn’t finish promised projects, and who could alienate those closest to her.

Olsen loved attention and famously hogged the spotlight at events and literary gatherings.

Tillie Olsen page on Amazon

Later life and legacy

Olsen also worked to restore forgotten, out-of-print women’s writing. She influenced several Feminist Press reprintings, including Rebecca Harding Davis’s Life in The Iron Mills (1972).

Ironically, after longing to write for two frustrating decades, once she did produce a few works, she published almost nothing after Silences. Despite her modest output, Olsen was invited to teach and to be writer-in-residence at a number of colleges and universities, including Stanford, MIT, Amherst College, and Kenyon College.

She received nine honorary degrees, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, a Guggenheim, and several other prestigious awards.

Olsen’s few works have been a staple in literature and women’s studies courses. She died in Oakland, California in 2007, at the age of 94.

More about Tillie Olsen on this site

Silences: On Being a Writer and a Mother
Quotes by Tillie Olsen

Major Works

Yonnondio: From the Thirties
Tell Me a Riddle
Silences
Mother to Daughter, Daughter to Mother

Biography

Tillie Olsen: One Woman, Many Riddles by Panthea Reid

More information

Wikipedia
Tillie Olsen Interview – The Progressive 
Reader discussion of Tillie Olsen’s books on Goodreads
Tillie Olsen, Feminist Writer, Dies at 94
A Brutal Narcissist: The Life of Feminist Icon Tillie Olsen

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

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4 Classic Horse Stories by Women Authors

What is it about horse stories that kids, and dare we say especially girls, love so much? There’s something grounding and down to earth about the bond between the beautiful animals and humans devoted to their welfare when translated to fiction.

Here, we’ll take a quick look at four of the most enduring classic horse stories, the novels Black Beauty by Anna Sewell, National Velvet by Enid Bagnold, My Friend Flicka by Mary O’Hara, and Misty of Chincoteague by Marguerite Henry.

Though they’re now classified as children’s books, they were intended by their authors to be enjoyed by “children of all ages.” Perhaps that’s one of the reasons why they were all adapted to film, reaching wide and appreciative audiences.

Black Beauty by Anna Sewell (1877)

More about Black Beauty

Black Beauty on Amazon

Though Black Beauty by Anna Sewell is one of the best-selling children’s classics of all time, Anna Sewell hadn’t intended as a children’s book. She wrote it for those who owned or worked with horses, “to induce kindness, sympathy, and an understanding treatment of horses.”

The story is told by the horse; it was, after all, subtitled The Autobiography of a Horse. Beauty shares his thoughts and feelings and thoughts as his story unfolds. His idyllic existence as he grows from a colt frolicking in the fields with his mother into a full-grown horse comes to an end. He falls on hard times, in spite of his devotion to his owners and his hard-working ways. Beauty passes through various masters— some kind, some careless, and others quite cruel. This moving story of Black Beauty’s quest for love and kindness, told from his own perspective, had inspired generations of readers to gain more empathy for animals. There have been numerous film adaptations and spinoffs of Black Beauty.

National Velvet by Enid Bagnold (1935)

More about National Velvet

National Velvet on Amazon.com

National Velvet by Enid Bagnold stars 14-year-old Velvet Brown, the daughter of a working-class family in England. She’s so horse-crazy that she imagines herself taking journeys on them, leading them to pastures, and grooming them. Miraculously she wins a piebald horse in the village raffle, and at the same time inherits five other horses from a rich old gentleman. 

Velvet and Mi Taylor, her father’s hired man, train the unruly piebald horse to race in the Nationals. However unlikely, the story of overcoming long odds to realize a dream, has captured the imagination of generations of readers. In her breakout role, a young Elizabeth Taylor starred as Velvet Brown in the 1944 film version of National Velvet.

My Friend Flicka by Mary O’Hara (1941)

More about Mary O’Hara

My Friend Flicka on Amazon

My Friend Flicka, the 1941 novel by Mary O’Hara, was this author’s most enduring work. The ranch life and rugged Wyoming backdrop that she actually experienced inspired the novel. It’s the story of Ken McLaughlin, a rancher’s son, and his horse Flicka. Ken’s father, a practical Scotsman, had no patience for his son’s dreaminess, so out of place in the harsh realities of the family’s horse breeding farm. Ken was smitten with a wild colt, who he called Flicka, meaning “little filly.” His devotion to the horse and to taming her grows along with his acceptance of responsibility as a young man.

My Friend Flicka became part of a trilogy, followed by Thunderhead (1943) and Green Grass of Wyoming (1946). My Friend Flicka was the basis of a successful 1943 film starring Roddy MacDowell. It was a 1956-57 television show and was re-run throughout the 1960s.

Misty of Chincoteague by Marguerite Henry

Misty of Chincoteague on Amazon

Misty of Chincoteague by Marguerite Henry (1947) is set in the island town of Chincoteague, Virginia. It’s the story of Paul and Maureen Beebe, orphan siblings, who work to earn enough money to by Phantom, a wild pony mare. The children save Phantom from a cruel fate and raise Misty, her filly born. Misty was inspired by a real-life pony of the same name, and real events and people of Chincoteague. 

Marguerite Henry followed the success of this book with a series of sequels about Misty, including one about her own foal, Stormy. A 1961 film titled Misty was based on the book.

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

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12 Lesser-Known Classic Women Novelists Worth Rediscovering

On the subject of classic women novelists worth rediscovering, we could make the argument that ninety percent of the authors on this site are ripe for rediscovery. Some authors are still read and considered, even if only in the academic realm of women’s studies classes. These include Zora Neale Hurston who was indeed rediscovered after falling into obscurity, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, whose story The Yellow Wallpaper is an iconic work of feminist literature.

A few (not enough!) women authors’ books are still staples in and out of the classroom including To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee and The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck. Then there are the ever-respected Virginia Woolf, and of course, the beloved Jane Austen and the Brontë sisters.

Sadly, though, there are quite a number of women who were widely read in their time but have fallen under the literary radar. Here are 12 of them — classic women novelists who whose books deserve to be read and enjoyed just today as much as they were in their time.

Jessie Redmon Fauset (1882 – 1961) was an American editor, poet, essayist, and novelist who was deeply involved with the Harlem Renaissance literary movement. She wrote four novels about race and class, the best known of which was arguably Plum Bun.

Edna Ferber (1885 – 1968), American novelist and playwright, was considered one of the most successful mid-20th-century authors Her sprawling novels each captured a slice of Americana, and several became famous films, including Giant and Show Boat.

Miles Franklin (1879 – 1954) was an Australian author with a feminist bent. Her best-known novel, My Brilliant Career, is the story of a teenage girl growing up in the Australian bush in the late 1800s still seems fresh and relevant today. It was adapted into a charming 1979 film.

Rumer Godden (1907 – 1998), the British-born novelist and memoirist, was raised mainly in India at the height of colonial rule. A mid-20th-century favorite whose novels melded the commercial and literary; nine of them, including In This House of Brede, became films.

Laura Z. Hobson (1900 – 1986) is an author whose name has been eclipsed by her best-known novel, Gentleman’s Agreement. The film version went on to win multiple Academy Awards. Laura wrote a number of other fascinating and readable novels that have fallen into obscurity.

Nella Larsen (1891 – 1964), was an American author associated with the Harlem Renaissance movement. She only wrote two novels — Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929), both of which are back in print! These exquisite short novels about race and identity are worth enjoying as well as studying.

Ann Petry (1908 – 1997) was the first African-American woman to produce a book (The Street) whose sales topped one million. At its peak, the 1946 novel sold 1.5 million copies and was reissued in 1992. Her three other novels also depicted slices of black life in America.

Jean Rhys (1890 – 1979) is best remembered for Wide Sargasso Sea, considered a prequel to Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. She wrote other novels, but her imagining of how Rochester’s wife came to be “the madwoman in the attic” is her most remarkable.

May Sarton (1912 – 1995), might be better known for her memoir series that began with Plant Dreaming Deep, but she was also a pioneer of modern queer fiction. Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing was pretty radical for 1965 and The Education of Harriet Hatfield could still have been ahead of its time in 1989.

Margery Sharp (1905 – 1991), once a popular British author, wrote in the comic novel genre. Recently some of her novels, including Cluny Brown, were reissued in new editions. She was also known for The Rescuers series for children, two of which were adapted into animated Disney films.

Dodie Smith (1896 – 1990) was a  British novelist and playwright. Surely you’ve heard of The Hundred and One Dalmatians (later better known as The 101 Dalmatians), and perhaps even the young adult novel I Capture the Castle. She has other titles to her credit as well, all worth another look.

Elizabeth von Arnim (1866 – 1941), an Australian-born novelist, was best known for The Enchanted April and Elizabeth and her German Garden. Not much is known about this mysterious author, but tales of unhappy marriages told with a dry wit are still a treat to read.

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Quotes from A Wrinkle in Time

A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle was published in 1962, but not without its share of challenges. “A Wrinkle in Time was almost never published,” Madeleine L’Engle wrote. “You can’t name a major publisher who didn’t reject it. When we’d run through forty-odd publishers, my agent sent it back. We gave up.” Editors found the fantasy novel too dark and complex for children. But the following  selection of quotes from A Wrinkle in Time prove that this beloved novel is a timeless work of fiction for all ages.

Eventually, the book found its home. Published in 1962, A Wrinkle in Time is still in print, with millions of copies sold worldwide. Its legacy lives on, as it’s still in print and is the basis of the 2018 film version. It has the distinction of having won some of the most prestigious publishing awards, as well as being one of the most frequently banned books of all time.

“Life, with its rules, its obligations, and its freedoms, is like a sonnet: You’re given the form, but you have to write the sonnet yourself.”

“We can’t take any credit for our talents. It’s how we use them that counts.”

“I do not know everything; still many things I understand.”

“The only way to cope with something deadly serious is to try to treat it a little lightly.”

“Like and equal are not the same thing at all.”

See also: Madeleine L’Engle: “A Wrinkle in Time Was Almost Never Published”

“It seemed to travel with her, to sweep her aloft in the power of song, so that she was moving in glory among the stars, and for a moment she, too, felt that the words Darkness and Light had no meaning, and only this melody was real.”

“If you aren’t unhappy sometimes you don’t know how to be happy.”

“I don’t understand it any more than you do, but one thing I’ve learned is that you don’t have to understand things for them to be.”

“A book, too, can be a star, ‘explosive material, capable of stirring up fresh life endlessly,’ a living fire to lighten the darkness, leading out into the expanding universe.”

“Only a fool is not afraid.”

“The truth is that I hate to think about other people reading my books,” Miranda said. “It’s like watching someone go through the box of private stuff that I keep under my bed.”

“Experiment is the mother of knowledge.”

A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle on Amazon

“Silence fell between them, as tangible as the dark tree shadows that fell across their laps and that now seemed to rest upon them as heavily as though they possessed a measurable weight of their own.”

“There’s nothing left except to try.”

“There will no longer be so many pleasant things to look at if responsible people do not do something about the unpleasant ones.”

“To love is to be vulnerable; and it is only in vulnerability and risk—not safety and security—that we overcome darkness.”

“Just because we don’t understand doesn’t mean that the explanation doesn’t exist.”

“Explanations are not easy … about things for which your civilization still has no words.”

“A straight line is not the shortest distance between two points.”

You might also like: A Ring of Endless Light by Madeleine L’Engle

“There’s very little difference in the size of the tiniest microbe and the greatest galaxy.”

“All your great artists. They’ve been lights for us to see by.”

“I am peace and utter rest. I am freedom from all responsibility.”

“Differences create problems.”

“Maybe if you aren’t unhappy sometimes you don’t know how to be happy.”

“We know nothing … We’re children playing with dynamite.”

“We do not know what things look like … We know what things are like.”

“The things which are seen are temporal … the things which are not seen are eternal.”

“You’re given the form, but you have to write the sonnet yourself.”

“Love. That was what she had that IT did not have.”

“It’s my worst trouble, getting fond. If I didn’t get fond I could be happy all the time.”

See also: Quotes by Madeleine L’Engle on Writing and the Writing Life

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

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Simone de Beauvoir and Jean Paul Sartre: An Existential Love Story

The two intellectuals known as the mother of modern feminism and father of existentialism shared a half-century partnership that defied the conventions of their time and ours.

From 1929, when Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre met in the same elite graduate program in philosophy, to when they were buried side-by-side in the Cimetiere du Montparnasse, they shared each other’s work and lives without ever sharing a home.

The love affair

De Beauvoir and Sartre were classmates and competitors at the Sorbonne in 1929, studying for the aggregate in philosophy, a prestigious graduate degree. Although Sartre’s marks surpassed de Beauvoir’s, she was, at 21, the youngest person ever to pass the exam.

In October of that year, the two began their romantic partnership, an experiment in personal responsibility and open-heartedness. De Beauvoir, who had defied social pressures earlier in life by renouncing the Catholic faith, flouted expectation yet again by turning down a marriage proposal from Sartre.

Instead, the couple came to an agreement that rejected what they considered bourgeois hypocrisy – that is, the patriarchal expectation that married men engage in extramarital affairs and lie to their wives, who, in turn, stoically feign ignorance. Rather than pretending at monogamy, the lovers each had the freedom to pursue sexual and romantic relationships outside their own. The only condition was total transparency.

An open relationship

The pair never married or shared a home. Instead, they met daily in Parisian cafés to talk, write, edit each other’s work, and often, share details of their secondary liaisons. Their intellectual and emotional intimacy persisted for 51 years, through Sartre’s traumatic service and capture in World War II and long after the sexual component of the philosophers’ “soul marriage” had faded away.

Simone de Beauvoir, who Sartre playfully referred to as “The Beaver,” never published a piece of writing without her partner’s input until after his death. Likewise, he referred to her as a “filter” for his books, and some scholars have even made the case that she wrote some of them for him.

More about Simone de Beauvoir’s life and work 

Trouble in paradise

De Beauvoir and Sartre’s partnership and unconventional relationship had high visibility within the tightly-knit social circle that was the center of both their social and professional lives. As part of the Parisian intellectual community, their circumstances created a keenly-felt pressure to present a harmonious front.

Scholars and journalists often accuse de Beauvoir of publicly masking painful bouts of jealousy. While her inner emotional life is unclear, what’s evident is the manipulative, often dishonest, and arguably cruel treatment to which both Sartre and de Beauvoir subjected much-younger female consorts.

Dangerous liaisons

Take, for example, 16-year-old Bianca Bienenfeld, a student of de Beauvoir’s who was 14 years her junior. Soon after the two women began their affair, de Beauvoir introduced her lover to Sartre. He promptly made it his mission to seduce Bienenfeld. After a romantic entanglement between the three of them, de Beauvoir told Sartre to end it, which he abruptly did in a letter.

Bienenfeld, who was Jewish, later narrowly escaped the Nazi occupation of France. Neither de Beauvoir nor Sartre tried to find her. When she read “Letters to Sartre” and saw the flippant tone the pair took toward her, she said, “Their perversity was carefully concealed beneath Sartre’s meek and mild exterior and the Beaver’s serious and austere appearance. In fact, they were acting out a commonplace version of ‘Dangerous Liaisons.’”

You might also like: Philosophical Quotes by Simone de Beauvoir

An appetite for conquest

Bienenfeld may be an extreme example, but she’s not atypical. Sartre tended to treat younger romantic prospects (all of whom were female) more as conquests than partners, spending months or years persuading them to get into bed with him and then bouncing off to regale “the Beaver” with details. He would pay his mistresses’ rent to ensure they were nearby while trying to keep them ignorant of each other. De Beauvoir was sometimes among the deceived, but at other times she was his accomplice in deception.

For her part, de Beauvoir’s outside relationships appear more amorous and tended to be longer-term. There was Nelson Algren, the American novelist, with whom she shared a decade of transatlantic love letters, addressing him as her “beloved husband.” He was a thinly veiled character in her 1954 novel, The Mandarins.

She even lived with Claude Lanzmann, a French filmmaker, for the bulk of the 1950s. But these were her relationships with men. When it came to her same-gender partnerships, de Beauvoir tended to be more exploitative. There was the painful entanglement with Bienenfeld described earlier, for example, and an affair with Natalie Sorokine, a 17-year-old student, which cost de Beauvoir her teaching license.

Iconic but flawed

If we can learn anything from looking back on Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre’s romantic lives and partnerships, it’s that an incredible intellect and a world-changing body of work don’t render a person free of flaws. The love they had for each other is as undeniable as the harm that befell many who became entangled with it.

Still, we can count among the many questions that de Beauvoir raised in her life and writing: When free of gendered and oppressive social expectations, what does love look like?

“We were two of a kind, and our relationship would endure as long as we did: but it could not make up entirely for the fleeting riches to be had from encounters with different people.” — Simone de Beauvoir, on her relationship with Sartre

— Contributed by Hannah Brown

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Giant by Edna Ferber (1952)

When Giant by Edna Ferber was published in 1952, some critics, especially those in the Southern U.S., weren’t impressed. In fact, the book made them hopping mad. Ferber’s books, considered by some as dramatic pot-boilers, often managed to weave in themes of racism and injustice and that didn’t sit too well in areas where racism was prevalent.

A 2011 re-evaluation of the novel in The Texas Observer had this to say: “Though it now boggles the mind, when Edna Ferber’s classic potboiler Giant was first published in 1952, it scandalized Texans from the Pecos to the Sabine. Critics ripped the novel, a hard-nosed satire of Lone Star mores, and Ferber herself to shreds in papers across the state. The Houston Press suggested she be lynched. And The Dallas Morning News headline on Lon Tinkle’s review read ‘Ferber Goes Both Native and Berserk: Parody, Not Portrait, of Texas Life.’ Reviewers outside the state also thought she’d been a trifle tough on Texas.”

It was nevertheless a huge bestseller (as were most of Ferber’s books) and in 1956 became a blockbuster film. Giant was as big and sprawling as a film as it was as a book. The saga of a wealthy Texas ranching family starred Rock Hudson, Elizabeth Taylor, and James Dean (in his final film role before his untimely death).

The book naturally received plenty of positive reviews, including the one following:

From the original review by W. W. Baker of Giant by Edna Ferber in The Kansas City Times, September, 1952: Since her first novel was published in 1911, Edna Ferber has turned her attention to such typically American matters at the show boat, small-town and farm life, and the traveling saleswoman. Now, tongue in cheek and pen in hand, she goes beyond matters American and delves into the modern-dan folklore of that strange land to the south known as Texas.

The result is Giant, a title aptly applied to the subject and to the length of the book. It tells the story of a Virginia girl (by way of Ohio) who marries a Texas ranch overlord, proprietor of a modest estate of some 2.5 million acres.

It is a well-drawn plot, with the usual Ferber niceties; the characters, though mostly of the race known as Texan, emerge as essentially human beings, as lovable or unlikable as Miss Ferber’s people usually are. The only real quarrel might be with the style of writing, about as smooth as a jeep ride over one of those Texas ranch roads; but perhaps that merely adds to the over-all effect of an essentially penetrating and understanding novel of a country made up of geographical bigness and, on occasion, human pettiness.

Giant by Edna Ferber on Amazon

A Ranch Bride

Leslie Benedict arrives at Reata ranch a bride of only a few days. There is the 50-room house in the midst of ran land heat; the filth of the Mexican dwellings; the herds of cattle, much better cared for than their Mexican cowboys; there are the neighbors, the nearest one ninety miles away, and there is Luz Benedict, her husbands unmarried sister, betrothed to the ranch and mistress of the big house.

The enormity of it all, and the conflict with Luz, stun this bookish girl from the east. Two children are born to the Benedicts, a boy as un-Texan as it is possible to be, and a girl who rides with the best of them, yet is of a different and more modern generation of Texans. Slowly the mystery of Texas penetrates Leslie’s mind, as she watches her children grow and the ranch shrink, threatened by the new get-rich-quick catalyst, oil. Her love for her husband lasts through it all, the one permanent, sustaining thing she found in this strange world.

In time Leslie begins to understand Texas and Texans, a race of men that deals in superlatives and millions, obsessed with size, not quality. In time, too, she realizes what seems to happen to the human mind and spirit; they, too, seem to shrink with the ranchland.

You may also enjoy: Show Boat by Edna Ferber (1926)

Fly a DC-6

Giant opens as the Benedicts and their friends (including an unemployed king and queen) head, in their private DC-6, for the fabulous opening-day celebration of the fabulous new Hermoso airport, built by the fabulous Jett Rink. Jett is of the new rich, a wildcatting oil baron whose story is strangely tied in with the of the Benedicts. Even here there is a last vicious triumph by Jett, who, as a penniless ranch laborer, had sworn her would get the Benedicts; then the story flashes back to Leslie’s arrival in Texas, and the events leading up to the night in Hermoso.

The characters are created as masterfully as would be expected of the writer of “Show Boat,” “So Big,” “Cimarron” and the Emma McChesney stories. Leslie herself is the inquiring intellectual, unable to accepts things on the surface as Benedict would want her to. Her husband is the blustering rancher, good at heart, yet callous to the feudal state of his Mexicans who never will earn the right to be called Texans, although their labor had done much to create Texas.

The other Benedicts – Luz, Uncle Bawley (a cattleman allergic to cattle), and the two children – are as real as a touch of Ferber irony allows to be. And there are the neighbors, ranchers described most aptly as Texans all.

Best Since “Cimarron”

Giant is probably the best Ferber production since Cimarron (1930). It’s one of four novels about Texas scheduled for autumn publication, opening up a new filed previously tapped only by the writers of cowboy fiction.

Texas, though many a citizen would deny it, is only another segment of American. Its people an customs, in fiction, should fall in live with the people and customs of other sections which go to make up the unwritable great American novel. Miss Ferber has taken a stride in the direction of making them fall in line.

On the other hand, should her strides now take her toward Texas itself, she is well advised to keep alert and avoid isolated spots and trees which support a rope. Reports from the Lone Stare state indicate a controversy over the best mode of revenge on the author, which Carl Victor Little of the Houston Press planning a hanging party on publication day next Monday, and a Beaumont Enterprise reader recommending shooting.

See also: Edna Ferber Quotes on Writing and Living 

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Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter by Simone de Beauvoir

Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter by Simone de Beauvoir (1959) is the first of a multi-part autobiography series by a great intellectual and literary figures of the twentieth century. It depicts her early years growing up in a bourgeois French family, her adolescent rebellion against the convention and religious doctrine, and college education at the Sorbonne. Toward the end of this memoir, she strikes out as part of an intellectual set in Paris in the 1920s, and cements her lifelong open relationship with Jean-Paul Sartre.

Simone de Beauvoir’s friendships, early lovers, teachers, and mentors come to life in this vivid portrait of a fascinating and brilliant women. It begins like this:

“I was born at four o’clock in the morning on the ninth of January 1908, in a room fitted with white-enameled furniture and overlooking the Boulevard Raspail. In the family photographs taken the following summer there are ladies in long dresses and ostrich feather hats and gentlemen wearing boaters and panamas, all smiling at a baby: they are my parents, my grandfather, uncles, aunts; and the baby is me. My father was thirty, my mother twenty-one, and I was their first child.”

Following is a review of the English translation of Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, from when it came out in the U.S.:

From the original review by John Barkham in the Tucson Daily Citizen, June 6, 1959: Both as a woman and as an intellectual, Simone de Beauvoir is very much sui generis. Men have played a part in her life,  but mostly on an intellectual plane. The truth is that Simone de Beauvoir had a mind superior to that of all the men she knew — except one. That one, Jean-Paul Sartre, was destined to play a significant role in her life.

Her formidable qualities of mind and insatiable intellectual curiosity made her something of a problem to her strictly bourgeois family. In this opening volume of her autobiography — a serious, revealing, and extraordinarily  vivid book — she describes in detail her years growing up in a family that would have preferred a boy.

Her parents were reasonably well-to-do Parisians, who tried to raise her as a a dutiful daughter and an obedient Catholic. Simone obliged in the first instance but her intelligence made it impossible for her to comply in the second.

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Challenging beliefs early on

The first thing that strikes the reader of this engrossing book is that its author apparently possesses powers of total recall. She can remember minute details of events that occurred when she was three  years old. She was only five when her questioning mind led her to wonder why “the all-powerful Christ child should prefer to come down the chimney like a common sweep at Christmas.” Her parents felt impelled to confess the deception.

Ever since, de Beauvoir has questioned face values and challenged beliefs. During World War I she became a pacifist after seeing some of the horrors of war in her country. “Peace was more important to me than victory,” she recalled. In her teens she had been taught “the vanity of vanity, the futility of futility.” This doctrine of meek acceptance, too, she discarded.

Simone de Beauvoir page on Amazon

Meeting Sartre

As a student at the Sorbonne she began to mix with a group of brilliant left wing intellectuals, the leader of whom was Sartre. She wasn’t quite sure what she believed in, beyond the fact that she detested the extreme right. Sartre attracted her enormously. “It was the first time in my life that I had felt intellectually inferior to anyone else.”

“From now on, I’m going to take you under my wing,” Sartre told me when he had brought me the news that I had passed (Sorbonne). He had a liking for feminine friendships. During the fortnight of the oral examinations we hardly ever left each other except to sleep. I was now beginning to feel that time not spent in his company was time wasted …

“Whatever happened, I would have to try to preserve what was best in me: my love of personal freedom, my passion for life, my curiosity, my determination to be a writer. Not only did he give me encouragement but he also intended to give me active help in achieving this ambition.”

An accomplished woman

In her twenty-first year, the book ends.

It is rare indeed that a woman of Simone de Beauvoir’s attainment bares her mind and hear. Everything in these pages has, of course, been filtered through the cool detachment of her memory, but one cannot withhold admiration for her unshakable poise, her zest for new ideas, the effortless ease with which she faces every challenge from whatever quarter it may come.

Yet this is not an austere self-portrait of a bluestocking; on the contrary, it breathes life, warmth, and a desire to know.

More about Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter by Simone de Beauvoir

Reader discussion on Goodreads
Review on Whispering Gums

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Patricia Highsmith

Patricia Highsmith (January 19, 1921 – February 4, 1995) was an American writer known for novels and short stories best described as psychological thrillers. She wove murder, crime, and intrigue through her plots, which were often driven by sociopathic antiheroes.

Born Mary Patricia Plangman in Fort Worth Texas, her parents divorced just days before her birth. She acquired the name Highsmith when her mother remarried a few years later. Recalling her unhappy childhood as “a little hell,” she disliked her mother and stepfather, who argued constantly. Perhaps that figured into her dim view of human nature, as by age eight she was reading studies of mental illness. Finding them fascinating, some of what she learned may have been tucked away for use in her writing.

Highsmith attended Barnard College in New York City, where she majored in English, focusing on playwriting and composition. For some years after graduating, she worked as a scriptwriter for comic books. 

Strangers on a Train

She burst onto the the literary scene when her first novel, Strangers on a Train, was published in 1950. It was followed just a year later by the 1951 film version directed by Alfred Hitchcock. With that, her reputation was secured.

Her prolific output was dominated by thrillers that didn’t shy away from the dark places of the human psyche. She seemed to especially like creating plot lines that exposed torturous relationships between men (not in the romantic sense). She wasn’t influenced by other crime and mystery authors, preferring to get her inspiration from reading about crimes in the press.

Sociopaths, murderers, and Ripley

Sociopaths and murderers populate Highsmith’s most enduring works, which, in addition to the aforementioned Strangers on a Train, include the “Ripliad” — five novels featuring Tom Ripley, starting with The Talented Mr. Ripley. Tom Ripley is a likable sort of fellow, setting aside the fact that he murders his best friend and then goes about Europe impersonating him.

Highsmith once said, “I rather like criminals and find them extremely interesting, unless they are monotonously and stupidly brutal.

Several film adaptations emerged from that series. The first was The American Friend (1977) starring Dennis Hopper and based on Ripley’s Game. the most successful of which was the 1999 film of the same name starring Matt Damon and Jude Law. Fascinated by the criminal mind, she specialized in creating morally corrupt characters who often managed to escape punishment. “Is there anything more artificial and boring than justice?” she pondered. “I invent stories, it is not my aim to morally re-arm the reader — I want to entertain.”

Patricia Highsmith page on Amazon

The misanthrope

Highsmith was bisexual; her relationships with men and women never lasted more than a few years. She never married or had children. She was an alcoholic, and was sometimes cruel to her intimates, though plenty of people found her engaging and fascinating.

Often described as a misanthrope who preferred animals (especially cats) to people. In her 1975 collection of short stories, The Animal Lovers Book of Beastly Murders, humans are killed by animals. She was known to say, “My imagination functions much better when I don’t have to speak to people.”

The Price of Salt

Early in her career, Highsmith took a hiatus from criminals and murderers to write The Price of Salt  (1952) under the pseudonym Claire Morgan. It was first time a published book about a lesbian love affair didn’t end in tragedy — quite a breakthrough for its time. The book sold nearly a million copies. Many decades after its publication, the novel has been adapted for the screen (the 2015 film version is titled Carol), and stars Rooney Mara and Cate Blanchett.

Legacy

Patricia Highsmith won numerous accolades for her work. She received awards from organizations like the Mystery Writers of America, and won the praise of fellow authors. Graham Greene described her as a “writer who has created a world of her own — a world claustrophobic and irrational which we enter each time with a sense of personal danger.” About Greene, she said: “I have Graham Greene’s telephone number, but I wouldn’t dream of using it. I don’t seek out writers because we all want to be alone.”

The London Times Literary Supplement described her in 1975 as “the crime writer who comes closest to giving crime a good name.”

Highsmith moved to Europe in 1963. She lived her later years in Italy, France, and Switzerland, and criticized Americans of being too provincial and not understanding the rest of the world. She died at age 74 in Switzerland of unknown cause.

You might also like: Romantic Quotes from The Price of Salt

More about Patricia Highsmith on this site

Romantic Quotes from The Price of Salt

Major Works (fiction)

Strangers on a Train (1950)
The Price of Salt (Claire Morgan, pseudonym, 1952)
The Blunderer (1954)
Deep Water (1957)
A Game for the Living (1958)
This Sweet Sickness (1960)
The Cry of the Owl (1962)
The Two Faces of January (1964)
The Glass Cell (1964)
A Suspension of Mercy (1965)
Those Who Walk Away  (1967)
The Tremor of Forgery (1969)
A Dog’s Ransom (1972)
Little Tales of Misogyny (1974)
Edith’s Diary (1977)
The Black House (1981)
Mermaids on the Golf Course (1985)
Small g: a Summer Idyll (1995)

The Ripley Novels (known as “The Ripliad”)

The Talented Mr. Ripley  (1955)
Ripley Under Ground (1970)
Ripley’s Game (1974)
The Boy Who Followed Ripley (1980)
Ripley Under Water  (1991)

More about Patricia Highsmith

Highsmith on Wikipedia
Highsmith’s books discussed on Goodreads
The Haunts of Miss Highsmith
My Hero: Patricia Highsmith
Joan Schenkar on Patricia Highsmith (The New Yorker)
NYFF Review: Carol

Biographies 

Beautiful Shadow: A Life of Patricia Highsmith by Andrew Wilson
The Talented Miss Highsmith by Joan Schenkar
Highsmith: A Romance of the 1950s by Marijane Meaker

Archive

The Patricia Highsmith Papers at the Swiss Literary Archives

Selected Film and Television adaptations

More than two dozen film adaptations have been made of Highsmith’s works. Here are a few of the best known:

Strangers on a Train (1951)
The American Friend (1977)
The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999)
Ripley’s Game (2003)
Carol (adaptation of The Price of Salt, 2015)

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