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Fannie Hurst

Fannie Hurst (October 18, 1889 – February 23, 1968) was a prolific American novelist and short-story writer. Though largely forgotten today, her work was hugely popular in her heyday, roughly from the 1920s through the early 1950s.

Fannie’s books and short stories featured romantic and sentimental themes, into which were woven social issues that mattered to her. Her writing made her fabulously wealthy and she was acknowledged as one of the highest-paid American writers, male or female.

Early life and career

Fannie was born and raised in Hamilton, Ohio. Her parents were Jewish immigrants from Bavaria. Her financially comfortable parents provided her with many opportunities, and encouraged her talents. Writing was her ambition from childhood. “Nothing really mattered to me except writing,” she once recalled.

She studied at Washington University in St. Louis. After graduating in 1909, she held many odd jobs including shoe factory worker, waitress, salesperson, and actress.

She married a Russian emigre named Jacques Danielson who died young. Their marriage was mostly a secret. The kind of  relationship they had was coined into a phrase: “a Fannie Hurst marriage” was a marital arrangement in which the partners  maintained their independent lives, including separate residences.

At the start of her writing career she contributed to magazines including the Saturday Evening Post, Century, and Cosmopolitan. 

Fannie Hurst’s books on Amazon

Backstreet and Imitation of Life

Back Street (1931) is one of her many works that is arguably among her two best-remembered novels. It’s the story of a woman who devotes her life to being the mistress of a married man. It was twice adapted into a film, first in 1941, then again in 1961.

Imitation of Life (1933) was in keeping with the public debate about race and women’s roles. It’s the story of  Bea Pullman, a white single mother, and her African-American maid, Delilah Johnston, also a single mother. Together, they raise their daughters and eventually become business partners. Bea’s business sense and Delilah’s southern recipes combine to form an  an empire. The book and the two film versions were beloved as well as controversial.

These and some of Fannie’s novels and short stories were translated into numerous language. Her concern for the social issues woven through her stories and books spanned class, race, gender, and religious identification.

Today, most of her works are out of print and difficult to obtain, with the possible exception of Imitation of Life. It’s possible that despite their laudable themes, the kind of sentimental, tearjerking style she favored doesn’t resonate with modern readers.

From the 1999 biography Fannie by Brooke Kroeger, her career is encapsulated: “She wrote of immigrants and shop girls, love, drama, and trauma, and in no time the title ‘World’s Highest-Paid Short-Story Writer’ attached itself to her name. Hollywood fattened her bank account, making her works into films thirty-one times in forty years.”

You might also like: Conscious Quotes by Fannie Hurst

Famous friends and social activism

Fannie Hurst’s literary connections expanded during the Harlem Renaissance. She herself was Jewish (Jews weren’t exactly considered white at the time), but associated with black authors like Zora Neale Hurston. Zora first served as Fannie’s secretary and driver, and later, the two women became good friends. Fannie was also a patron to Zora, which was helpful to her. Zora was always stretched financially.

Fannie’s reputation declined through the 1950s and 1960s, and she didn’t publish nearly as much as she had earlier. Like her, Zora was virtually forgotten by the time she died, but of the two, it was Zora whose reputation was revived. Now she is revered as a literary icon, while Fannie has not been as lucky.

Fannie was a reformer (or what we call an activist today), advocating and raising money for the relief of Jews in Eastern Europe, and refugees from Nazi Germany. She served on the boards of the Committee on Workman’s Compensation (1940) and the National Housing Commission (1936 – 1937). She was a delegate to the U.N. World Health Organization and was involved in the causes of antivivisection (opposed to operating on live animals for research), workmen’s compensation, among others.

Later years and legacy

Fannie Hurst died in February of 1968 after a brief illness at the age of 78. She was still living in one of the spoils of her lucrative career, a triplex apartment overlooking Central Park in New York City.

At the height of her career she was best known for her novels and short stories, though she also wrote plays and essays. She was known for her personal sense of style, too. Her raven hair and ivory skin gave her a distinctive look. She always added a calla lily with whatever ensemble she dressed in; it became a trademark of sorts.

Having no heirs, she left half of her estate to her alma mater, Washington University, and the other half to Brandeis University. These institutions used the money to endow English department professorships.

Though she was still writing until the end, her stamina and reputation had waned. Unfairly, some of her work was called “trash,” and some critics even conjectured that her work influenced novelists like Jacqueline Susann and Jackie Collins.

Renewed interest in Fannie Hurst has focused on her Jewish background and social consciousness. In the 1990s, her life and work again started to gain serious critical attention. A full-scale biography by Brooke Kroeger was published in 1999, and in 2004, a collection of her stories was published by the Feminist Press to “propel a long overdue revival and reassessment of Hurst’s work,” praising her “depth, intelligence, and artistry as a writer.”

More about Fannie Hurst on this site

Fannie Hurst & Zora Neale Hurston — a Literary Friendship
Conscious Quotes by Fannie Hurst
What goes through your mind when you’re feeling blocked?

Major Works

Short Story Collections

Just Around the Corner (1914)
Every Soul Hath Its Song (1916)
Gaslight Sonatas (1918)
Humoresque: A Laugh on Life with a Tear Behind It (1919)
The Vertical City (1922)
Song of Life (1927)
Procession (1929)
We are Ten (1937)

Novels (Selected)

Star-Dust: The Story of an American Girl  (1921)
Lummox (1923)
Appassionata (1926)
A President is Born (1928)
Five and Ten (1929)
Back Street (1931)
Imitation of Life  (1933)
Anitra’s Dance (1934)
Great Laughter (1936)
Lonely Parade (1942)
Hallelujah (1944)
The Hands of Veronica (1947)
Anywoman (1950)
God Must Be Sad (1961)
Fool, Be Still (1964)

Biographies and Autobiographies

Fannie: The Talent for Success of Writer Fannie Hurst by Brooke Kroeger
Anatomy of Me: A Wonderer in Search of Herself by Fannie Hurst

More Information

Wikipedia
Jewish Women’s Archive
The ‘Anatomy’ of Fannie Hurst
Reader discussion of Fannie Hurst’s books on Goodreads

Film adaptations (selected)

Back Street (1941)
Back Street (1961)
Imitation of Life (1934)
Imitation of Life (1959)

*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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Audre Lorde

Audre Geraldine Lorde (February 18, 1934 – November 17, 1992) was a self-identified “black lesbian, mother, warrior, poet.” The daughter of West Indian parents, she grew up in New York City. Her love of writing took root at an early age, and she was first published in Seventeen magazine while in high school.

As society progressed with the anti-war, feminist, and civil rights movements, Audre shifted her writing from themes of love to more political and personal matters. She used her platform as a writer to spread ideas about intersecting oppressions and experiences faced especially by women of color. 

Early life

Audre Lorde was born to Caribbean immigrant parents in New York City’s Harlem, the youngest of three daughters. By the time she was in eighth grade, she wrote her first poem, despite being so nearsighted that she was legally blind. It was around this time that she dropped the ‘y’ from her birth name, which she explains in her autobiography Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, where she expresses preferring the symmetry of Audre Lorde, a name with two ‘e’-endings.

Having grown up with a rather cold and distant relationship with her parents, Audre turned to poetry to express her emotions. Her difficult relationship with her mother is represented in her later poems such as “Story Books on a Kitchen Table.”

Continuing to express herself through poetry and the arts, Audre Lorde later became the editor of her school magazine at Hunter College High School, a secondary school for intellectually gifted children. When a faculty member rejected a sonnet she’d written about love, she pitched it to Seventeen magazine. They accepted and published it, paying her more than she would make over next decade of her writing career.

Education and start of an academic career

In 1954, Audre spent a year studying at the National University of Mexico, a pivotal time in the poet’s life. It was then that she publicly confirmed her identity as a lesbian and a poet. Upon her return to New York, she attended Hunter College and graduated in 1959. She worked as a librarian and continued writing while earning her master’s degree in library science at Columbia University, graduating in 1961.

In 1968, as a writer-in-resident at Tougaloo College in Mississippi, Audre had another transformative year as an artist. She held workshops with her black undergraduate students, leading discussions in civil and gay rights issues. This was in part the inspiration her book of poetry, Cables to Rage.

In 1970, Audre taught as an English professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. During her eleven years at the college, she fought for the creation of a Black Studies department. In 1981, she began teaching at her undergraduate alma mater, Hunter College.

Photo by Robert Alexander/Archive Photos/Getty Images

See also: Five Politically-Inspired Poems by Audre Lorde

Accomplished warrior

In 1977, Audre Lorde was diagnosed with breast cancer, undergoing surgery and later a mastectomy. She kept a detailed journal of her battle with cancer in her prose, The Cancer Journal, published in 1980.

A true warrior at heart, she continued to accomplish much in her life, using her voice and art to fight for what she believed in. In 1981, she became one of the founders of the Women’s Coalition of St. Croix, an organization dedicated to assisting women who have survived sexual abuse. In the late 1980’s, she also helped establish Sisterhood in Support of Sisters in South Africa to benefit black women affected by injustice.

Sponsored by The Black Scholar and the Union of Cuban Writers, Audre Lorde was a part of a group of black female writers invited to Cuba in 1985. Post-Cuban revolution, they discussed whether the status of people of color, lesbians, and gays had truly changed.

The Berlin Years

In 1984, Lorde started a visiting professorship in West Berlin at the Free University of Berlin. During her time in Germany, Lorde became an influential part of the Afro-German movement of that time. Together with a group of black female activists in Berlin, Audre Lorde coined “Afro-German” and gave significant rise to the Black movement in Germany.

Her impact on the movement was highlighted in the documentary Audre Lorde: The Berlin Years 1984-1992. The film was entered into the Berlin Film Festival, and continued to be viewed at festivals as recently as 2016.

A prolific poet

Lorde contributed poetry to many periodicals, anthologies, and other types of books. Some of her accomplishments include founding both the Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press in the late 1980’s with Barbara Smith. She also received multiple awards, including the Walt Whitman Citation of Merit, a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts (1981) and multiple National Book Awards.

A battle with cancer

Audre Lorde eventually succumbed to her battle with breast cancer on November 17, 1992 in St. Croix, U.S.Virgin Islands. Ever the powerful woman, she found inspiration throughout her battle, documented in the 1980 special edition issue of the Cancer Journals. Her story included a feminist analysis of her experience with the disease and her mastectomy.

Before passing away, she changed her name to Gambda Adisa which means “Warrior,” or “she who makes her meaning known.”

You may also enjoy: Poetry and Politics: Quotes by Audre Lorde

More about Audre Lorde on this site

Poetry & Politics: Quotes by Audre Lorde
5 Reasons to Love Audre Lorde
Five Politically-Inspired Quotes by Audre Lorde
10 Thought-Provoking Quotes from Sister Outsider

Major Works

Our Dead Behind Us (1986)
The Black Unicorn (1978)
A Burst of Light (1988)
Coal (1976)
New York Head Shop and Museum (1974)
From a Land Where Other People Live (1973)
The Cancer Journals 
Sister Outsider

Autobiographies, Biographies, and Literary Criticism

Audre Lorde: Radical Feminist, Writer & Civil Rights Activist 
Warrior Poet: A Biography of Audre Lorde

More Information

Wikipedia 
Audre Lorde: The Poetry Foundation
The Audre Lorde Project
Poets.org
Illinois University Publication 
The Lorde Concordance: A Traveling Resurrection of Audre (Our) Lorde

Research

Audre Lorde Berlin: An Online Journey
Audre Lorde Archive: JFK Institute

*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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Wise Blood by Flannery O’Connor (1952)

Wise Blood by Flannery O’Connor, first published in 1952, was this author’s first novel. Followed by The Violent Bear it Away, a novel, and A Good Man is Hard to Find, a collection of short stories, it was reissued in a new hardcover in 1962 as a nod how much O’Connor’s audience had grown in the intervening years.

O’Connor was best known for fiction (primarily short stories) in the form of morally driven narratives populated with flawed characters sometimes described as grotesque. As she herself reminded readers in her essay “The Teaching of Literature”:

“The freak in modern fiction is usually disturbing to us because he keeps us from forgetting that we share in his state. The only time he should be disturbing to us is when he is held up as a whole man.”

This review of Wise Blood from the date of its reissue in 1962, takes note of this, and assures readers that if they had already read the book, a second look would be rewarding:

Adapted from the August 24, 1962 edition of Oakland Tribune: Wise Blood unquestionably deserves a second reading. As a first effort, it has several uncommon qualities. Among them is a sense of economy and selection in the writing. We aren’t asked to ferret out the promising passages from the masses of tedious verbiage.

No less effective is the author’s artistic objectivity and her ability to create a small world and people it with creatures of the imagination. Miss O’Connor’a prose is never excessive, always maintaining a sort of tough precision.

See also A Good Man is Hard to Find: An Analysis

If Miss O’Connor has artistic debts as a writer, they are to Sherwood Anderson. Her novel is filled with a gallery of fascinating grotesques. And while they perhaps do not have the largeness of the citizens of Winesburg, Ohio, they are a haunting lot.

Introducing Hazel Motes

The central figure of Wise Blood is a young man from Tennessee named Hazel Motes. At twenty-two, Hazel is released from the Army and goes to a Southern town to make his way. The obsession that has bade a grotesque figure of Hazel is a religious one. Outwardly, he tries valiantly to deny Christ in a particularly violent way.

Standing on the hood of his ancient car, he loudly addresses unsuspecting crowds as they leave movie theaters. Hazel declares that he is the preacher of a new and different sort of religion, a “Church without Christ.” But he is unable to find converts, and his obsessive denial of Christ — always in fierce battle with his hidden need to return to the conventional teachings of his childhood — takes more violent forms.

Wise Blood by Flannery O’Connor on Amazon

The religious charlatan Asa Hawks

At large in the city, Hazel meets Asa Hawks, a religious fanatic who feigns blindness, and his predatory daughter, Sabbath. Although Hazel believes himself completely at odds with the Christian doctrines of Hawks, he finds himself irresistibly drawn to the old charlatan and his daughter.

Hazel finds another friend of sorts in Enoch, who loves to browse at lengths in supermarkets inspecting the labels of the canned goods and reading the picture stories on the backs of cereal boxes. Enoch is a guard at the city zoo and his great need to belong to the human community brings him to some grimly comic actions. Like those of Hazel, Enoch’s pathetic efforts often evoke a kind of grotesque comedy.

Flannery O’Connor’s people are not drawn from life in the manner with which we are most familiar. Yet in another way they are, for in the authors hands they embody more than the characteristics of individuals. Wise Blood is an unusual and highly satisfying reading experience.

A review of

The Violent Bear it Away by Flannery O’Connor

More about Wise Blood by Flannery O’Connor

Wikipedia
Reader discussion on Goodreads
Sin and Symbolism in Wise Blood
The Grotesque in Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood

*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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Quotes From Kindred by Octavia E. Butler

Octavia E. Butler (1947 – 2006) was an American author of science fiction. In the white male-dominated genre of science fiction, she broke ground not only as a woman, but as an African-American.

After publishing some short stories, Octavia Butler’s first novel was Patternmaster (1976). It was the first in what would become a four-volume series. But it was Kindred (1979) that really put Octavia Butler on the literary map. It follows the tale of Dana, a contemporary African-American woman who travels back in time to save an ancestor who happens to be a white slave owner. By saving him in his time, she ensures her own survival in the future. Following is a selection of quotes from Kindred, showcasing Octavia Butler’s keen observations of human nature: 

“Better to stay alive,” I said. “At least while there’s a chance to get free.” I thought of the sleeping pills in my bag and wondered just how great a hypocrite I was. It was so easy to advise other people to live with their pain.”

“Repressive societies always seemed to understand the danger of ‘wrong’ ideas.”

“…I realized that I knew less about loneliness than I had thought — and much less than I would know when he went away.”

“I’d rather see the others.”

“What others?”

“The ones who make it. The ones living in freedom now.”

“If any do.”

“They do.”

“Some say they do. It’s like dying, though, and going to heaven. Nobody ever comes back to tell you about it.”

You may also like: 12 Fast Facts About Octavia Butler

“As a kind of castaway myself, I was happy to escape into the fictional world of someone else’s trouble.”

“Frankly, it never occurred to me that I needed someone who looked like me to show me the way. I was ignorant and arrogant and persistent and the writing left me no choice at all.”

“ … slavery of any kind fostered strange relationships. Only the overseer drew simple, unconflicting emotions of hatred and fear when he appeared briefly. But then, it was part of the overseer’s job to be hated and feared while the master kept his hands clean.”

“Nothing in my education or knowledge of the future had helped me to escape. Yet in a few years an illiterate runaway named Harriet Tubman would make nineteen trips into this country and lead three hundred fugitives to freedom.”

“She was strange now, erratic, sometimes needing my friendship, trusting me with her dangerous longings for freedom, her wild plans to run away again; and sometimes hating me, blaming me for her trouble. One.”

See also: Parable of the Sower & Parable of the Talents by Octavia Butler

“Sometimes I wrote things because I couldn’t say them, couldn’t sort out my feelings about them, couldn’t keep them bottled inside me.”

“I didn’t want to depend on someone else’s chance violence again — violence that, if it came, could be more effective than I wanted.”

“I got caught up in one of Kevin’s World War II books — a book of excerpts from the recollections of concentration camp survivors. Stories of beatings, starvation, filth, disease, torture, every possible degradation. As though the Germans had been trying to do in only a few years what the Americans had worked at for nearly two hundred … Like the Nazis, antebellum whites had known quite a bit about torture – quite a bit more than I ever wanted to learn.”

“I’m not sure it’s possible for a lone black woman — or even a black man — to be protected in that place.”

The Theme of Survival in Kindred

“In fact, [the South Africans] were living in the past as far as their race relations went. They lived in ease and comfort supported by huge numbers of blacks whom they kept in poverty and held in contempt.”

“Was that why I was here? Not only to insure the survival of one accident-prone small boy, but to insure my family’s survival, my own birth.”

“He was like me – a kindred spirit crazy enough to keep on trying.”

“He had already found the way to control me – by threatening others.”

“Slavery is a long slow process of dulling.”

‘Strength. Endurance. To survive, my ancestors had to put up with more than I ever could. Much more.”

“And I began to realize why Kevin and I had fitted in so easily into this time. We weren’t really in. We were observers watching a show. We were watching history happen around us. And we were actors. While we waited to go home, we humored the people around us by pretending to be like them. But we were poor actors. We never really got into our roles. We never forgot that we were acting.”

You may also enjoy:

Octavia Butler Quotes on Writing and Human Nature

“She had done the safe thing — had accepted a life of slavery because she was afraid. She was the kind of woman who might have been called ‘mammy’ in some other household. She was the kind of woman who would be held in contempt during the militant nineteen sixties.”

“I had seen people beaten on television and in the movies. I had seen the too-red blood substitute streaked across their backs and heard their well-rehearsed screams. But I hadn’t lain nearby and smelled their sweat or heard them pleading and praying, shamed before their families and themselves. I was probably less prepared for the reality than the child crying not far from me. In fact, she and I were reacting very much alike.”

“I felt as though I were losing my place here in my own time. Rufus’s time was a sharper, stronger reality. The work was harder, the smells and tastes were stronger, the danger was greater, the pain was worse.”

The post Quotes From Kindred by Octavia E. Butler appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.

Fascinating Facts About Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath (1932 – 1963) was a gifted poet who on the surface seemed to have it all: ambition, brains, and beauty. But she was beset by a lifelong struggle with depression that led to suicide at the age of thirty.

Because most of her work was published after her untimely death, she wasn’t able to enjoy the fruits of her labors. Yet her place in the American literary canon is well deserved. Here are some facts about Sylvia Plath, some known well, others less so, but all contributing to a fascinating portrait of this beloved poet’s brief life:

She published her first poem at age 9

A week after her eighth birthday, Plath’s father died from complications due to a foot amputation. In the same year, she published her first poem in the Boston Herald’s children’s section. Over the course of the next few years, she continued to publish multiple poems in regional magazines and newspapers. Her first published poem was called “Poem” (Boston Herald, 1941)

“Hear the crickets chirping

In the dewy grass.

Bright little fireflies

Twinkle as they pass.”

She first pursued studio art

When Sylvia Plath initially enrolled at Smith College, her first choice of major was studio art, but after discovering her brilliance in writing, her professors encouraged her to major in English instead. The Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery mounted a retrospective of her work in 2017.

Triple-Face Portrait by Sylvia Plath, c. 1950-1951

Courtesy The Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana,

© Estate of Sylvia Plath

She went missing while a student at Smith

In 1950, Plath began attending Smith College and at first, seemed to flourish. She edited The Smith Review, and during the summer after her third year of college was awarded a coveted position as guest editor at Mademoiselle magazine, spending a month in New York City. The experience wasn’t what she had hoped, and it began a downward spiral. Plath made her first suicide attempt in 1953 by crawling under her house and taking her mother’s sleeping pills.

She survived this first suicide attempt after lying unfound in a crawl space for three days, later writing that she “blissfully succumbed to the whirling blackness that I honestly believed was eternal oblivion.” The incident was reported in local papers, reporting her disappearance and recovery:

She was a guest editor for Mademoiselle

In August of 1952, Sylvia Plath won a fiction writing contest held by Mademoiselle, the New York City based women’s magazine, earning her the position as guest editor in June 1953. Her experiences during this time in NYC later became an episode in her novel The Bell Jar (1963).

She married Ted Hughes less than four months after meeting him

Plath first met poet Ted Hughes on February 25, 1956, at a party in Cambridge, England. She was there on a prestigious Fulbright Scholarship. The couple married on June 16, 1956, and honeymooned in Benidorm, Spain.

The following year, Plath and Hughes moved to the Massachusetts, where she taught at her alma mater, Smith College. It was a challenge for her to find the time and energy to write when she was teaching. By the end of 1959 after another move and extensive travel, the couple moved back to London.

She was a secret collage artist

Although often associated with a darker, perhaps more dramatic spirit, Sylvia Plath also had a wry sense of humor, evidenced in her collages. She would create visual art out of anything she could find, including the American magazines her mother mailed to her in England.

Collage by Sylvia Plath

Mortimer Rare Book Collection, Smith College,

Northampton, Massachusetts, © Estate of Sylvia Plath

The Bell Jar was first published under a pseudonym

The Bell Jar was published in England just prior her suicide in 1963 under a pseudonym, Victoria Lucas. It was published in the U.S. under her real name in 1971. Her only novel, it is semi-autobiographical, portraying the author’s struggles with mental illness.

She committed suicide in the same house W. B. Yeats had once lived

From 1962 to 1963, Plath and her two children lived in the same flat that the Irish poet W. B. Yeats had once occupied; she considered this a good omen for her own writing. As is well known, she committed suicide by gassing herself in her kitchen while her children slept soundly in a room nearby.

Her suicide note consisted of four words

It may be surprising given how extensively and evocatively Plath wrote of death and suicide in her poetry, that she left a note of only four words before taking her own life. Her suicide note said simply “Please call Dr. Horder” — along with this doctor’s phone number. The debate has stirred ever since — was her suicide intentional, or a cry for help? Could this even be considered a suicide note at all?

See also: Sylvia Plath’s Suicide Note: Death Knell, or Cry for Help?

Most of her poetry was published posthumously

The Colossus was published in 1960, while she was still alive The poetry in this collection was intense, personal, and delicately crafted.

Though she had been separated from him at the time of her death, Ted Hughes inherited Plath’s literary estate. Much of Plath’s work was unpublished while she was alive, and Hughes decided to publish some of the collections she left behind.

In 1965 Hughes  released Ariel, a collection of poems Plath wrote expressing her battle with the darkness of depression, and of their relationship. Throughout the 1970s Hughes continued to release Plath’s poems, but was met with criticism over his selections and decisions.

The suicide of Hughes’ mistress mirrored Plath’s

Ted Hughes left Sylvia Plath for Assia Wevill in 1962. In time, their relationship became fraught and troubled. In a tragic twist of fate, the stresses of scrutiny over her continued relationship with Hughes, the disapproval of his family, and his continued infidelity took their toll on Assia. She dragged a bed into the kitchen of her Clapham flat, dissolved sleeping tablets in a glass of water and gave the drink to her daughter (generally believed to be Hughes’ child) before finishing the rest herself. Mirroring Plath’s suicide method, she then turned on the gas stove and got into bed with her daughter; both died.

You might also enjoy: The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

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The Theme of Survival in Kindred by Octavia E. Butler

For Octavia E. Butler (1947 – 2006), writing science fiction wasn’t merely a vehicle for escaping into fantasy, but a means to explore universal issues. This is certainly true of Kindred, the 1979 novel that is arguably her most iconic.

In the white male-dominated genre of science fiction, she broke ground not only as a woman, but as an African-American.Her deep and abiding interest in and observation of human nature — even within fantastical realms — is what makes her work so compelling, and complex. And yet her storytelling is flowing and natural. Her novels are tightly plotted page-turners; many of her protagonists are strong and believable black women.

After struggling to gain a foothold in the world of publishing, Butler found a home for some short stories and broke through with her first novel, Patternmaster (1976). It was the first in what would become a four-volume series.

It was Kindred (1979) that really launched Butler’s career. Whereas most of her work, before and after, fits squarely into the sci-fi realm, Kindred falls more into the category of speculative fiction. It tells of a contemporary African-American woman who travels back in time to save an ancestor who happens to be a white slave owner. By saving him in his time, she ensures her own survival in the future.

Slavery from a unique perspective

Kindred looks at the practice of slavery in the American South from the perspective of a black woman in the 1970s. Like many of Butler’s other books, this one engages the reader with themes of race, power, gender, and class through the use of skillful storytelling.

Kindred’s protagonist, Dana Franklin, is an African-American woman writer in her twenties living in 1970s California. She’s repeatedly hurtled back in time to a slave plantation in 1815 Maryland.

Witnessing the first-hand the brutality of slavery, Dana learns the true meaning of survival. Her repeated attempts to escape go beyond her personal desire to return to what she comes to realize is, to say the least, a much easier existence. Because many events in the past have already happened and shaped the course of personal and cultural histories, may be beyond Dana’s ability to alter.

Kindred by Octavia E. Butler on Amazon

Kindred is also available as a graphic novel adaptation

Thus, she needs to navigate a tricky balance. Seeking to do as little harm as possible, she is compelled — repeatedly — to rescue Rufus, a ruthless white slave owner who she comes to learn is her ancestor. Thus, her own future existence depends on ensuring his survival.

Dana is also enormously conflicted about Rufus’s rape and concubinage of Alice, a proud black woman who, as it turns out, is also Dana’s ancestor, one that Dana also needs to ensure her own future. Alice’s attempts to escape have even more dire consequences than Dana’s.

The theme of survival

The theme of escape, while ever-present, is overshadowed by the theme of survival — of the self, family, and community. In the present, Dana has lived a life of freedom, and naturally wants to return to it. Yet through her own attempts she comes to know how difficult escape can be for her black kindred of the past:

“Nothing in my education or knowledge of the future had helped me to escape. Yet in a few years an illiterate runaway named Harriet Tubman would make nineteen trips into this country and lead three hundred fugitives to freedom … Why was I still slave to a man who had repaid me for saving his life by nearly killing me? And why … why was I so frightened now — frightened sick at the thought that sooner or later, I would have to run again?”

More about Kindred by Octavia E. Butler

Wikipedia
Reader discussion on Goodreads
Time Travel and Slavery
The Joy (and Fear) of Making Kindred into a Graphic Novel

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Quotes from Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen

Jane Austen (1775 – 1817) was an esteemed British author known for six distinguished novels that secured her legacy in literary history. Despite myths of her modesty when it came to writing (all of her novels were published anonymously) she cared deeply about getting published and being read. Her first novel, Sense and Sensibility, was published in 1911 under the nom de plume “a Lady.”

Sense and Sensibility is an exquisitely crafted portrait of two sisters, Elinor and Marianne Dashwood who are forced to leave their home after their father’s death. Like other women of their time and class, they must make good marriages. Along the way they encounter meddling matriarchs, conniving rakes, and competitive contemporaries, all standing in their path to love and security.

Following are some beloved quotes from Sense and Sensibility, demonstrating the author’s trademark wisdom and subtle wit.

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

“If I could but know his heart, everything would become easy.”

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

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

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

You might also like: The Biggest Myth About Jane Austen’s Writing Life

“I come here with no expectations, only to profess, now that I am at liberty to do so, that my heart is and always will be…yours.”

“I will be calm. I will be mistress of myself.”

“If a book is well written, I always find it too short.”

“Always resignation and acceptance. Always prudence and honour and duty. Elinor, where is your heart?”

“There is something so amiable in the prejudices of a young mind, that one is sorry to see them give way to the reception of more general opinions.”

“I could not be happy with a man whose taste did not in every point coincide with my own. He must enter in all my feelings; the same books, the same music must charm us both.”

“I have not wanted syllables where actions have spoken so plainly.”

Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen on Amazon

“She was stronger alone; and her own good sense so well supported her, that her firmness was as unshaken, her appearance of cheerfulness as invariable, as, with regrets so poignant and so fresh, it was possible for them to be.”

“I am excessively fond of a cottage; there is always so much comfort, so much elegance about them. And I protest, if I had any money to spare, I should buy a little land and build one myself, within a short distance of London, where I might drive myself down at any time, and collect a few friends about me and be happy. I advise everybody who is going to build, to build a cottage.”

“But remember that the pain of parting from friends will be felt by everybody at times, whatever be their education or state. Know your own happiness. You want nothing but patience; or give it a more fascinating name: call it hope.”

“Money can only give happiness where there is nothing else to give it.”

See also: Why Has Mr. Darcy Been Attractive to Generations of Women?

“That is what I like; that is what a young man ought to be. Whatever be his pursuits, his eagerness in them should know no moderation, and leave him no sense of fatigue.”

“She was without any power, because she was without any desire of command over herself.”

“You are in a melancholy humour, and fancy that any one unlike yourself must be happy. But remember that the pain of parting from friends will be felt by every body at times, whatever be their education or state. Know your own happiness. You want nothing but patience — or give it a more fascinating name, call it hope.”

“She expected from other people the same opinions and feeling as her own, and she judged their motives by the immediate effect of their actions on herself.”

“…the pleasantness of an employment does not always evince its propriety.”

“Every thing he did was right. Every thing he said was clever. If their evenings at the park included cards, he cheated himself and all the rest of the party to get her a good hand.”

“Shyness is only the effect of a sense of inferiority in some way or other. If I could persuade myself that my manner were perfectly easy and graceful, I should not be shy.”

“For to be unaffected was all that a pretty girl could want to make her mind as captivating as her person.”

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The Gilded Six-Bits by Zora Neale Hurston

In “The Gilded Six-Bits,” a short story, as well as her other works of fiction and essays, one sees Zora Neale Hurston’s wide scope as a writer. She takes on various topics from marital bliss to the national welfare, writing as a gifted author of fiction, a knowledgeable anthropologist, and a rigorous critic. Hurston was a key player in the Harlem Renaissance. Her membership there, however, was never secure. Langston Hughes, once a friend and collaborator, became one of her bitterest detractors.

Always unconventional, she struck many as overly conservative, as she actually promoted southern segregation for a while, arguing that forced integration was an insult to the African-American community. She died penniless and nearly forgotten. Alice Walker (author of The Color Purple) receives credit for tracking down Hurston’s lost grave and bringing her celebrated works back to the public eye.

Today, Hurston is probably the most famous writer from that movement (along with Langston Hughes) and second only to Toni Morrison as a highly acclaimed black woman writer. She published her canonical novel Their Eyes Were Watching God in 1937.

Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)

A Ritual of Love

In “The Gilded Six-Bits” (1933), Missie May and Joe carry out a playful ritual of tossing the week’s pay in silver coins down the hall and hiding candy kisses in pockets, solidifying their connection and expressing their deep affection for one and other. Their bond is strengthened each week by this predictable game of hide-and-seek that ends with sweetness and a “rough and tumble.”

Both characters are entranced by an outsider, a glamorous, if physically unappealing man who comes into town dripping with gold that proves to be nothing but gilded, nearly worthless coins. The destruction Otis D. Slemmons wreaks on their marriage nearly drives Missie May and Joe apart permanently. Motifs of light, silver coins, the gilded “gold” coin, candy kisses, and the laugh, take on special meaning and hold this story together.

A simple, linear plot line and vernacular language

Hurston, like the poet Paul Lawrence Dunbar, was celebrated for writing what people considered an authentic, African-American version of English. Thus, an invaluable aspect of black culture was preserved and publicized. Writing this way could be both a gift and a liability. When this one expressive mode was promoted or required by publishers at the exclusion of African-American works in “standard” English, this fed stereotypical depictions of an entire race and restricted the freedoms of black writers to express themselves however they wished.

The simple, linear plot and the vernacular language mask the complexity of Hurston’s text. When Joe claims, “Ah know Ah can’t hold no light to Otis D. Slemmons,” he foreshadows the awful moment when, coming home early from work, he will illuminate, with a match, the scene of betrayal in which he finds Missie May and Slemmons in bed together.

Omniscient narration

The omniscient narration reveals much more of Joe’s thought and motivation than it does Missie May’s. Walking home from work where “a lean moon rode the lake in a silver boat,” Joe craves fatherhood and imagines Missie May “making little feet for shoes.” Hurston also incorporates biblical references, authenticating the discourse community she illustrates. Within the linear narration, whole stories open up with a shared set of illusions: “Ah could… drink Jurdan [river] dry.” Bringing a comic edge to a scene of tragedy, Hurston uses the mock-heroic mode with her high-flying diction: “The great belt on the wheel of Time slipped and eternity stood still.”

This sounds as though the narrator describes the epic world of Greek gods (at a mechanic’s shop) instead of a mundane scene of adultery. In a similar metaphorical depiction of the agonies of time, Hurston writes, “The hours went past on their rusty ankles” (94) as Joe and Missie May live through the excruciating crisis in their marriage.

This apparently straightforward story holds various ambiguities. Why did Missie May betray Joe, after all? Was it for money for Joe, a lust for gold, or naive curiosity about an outsider? Was Missie May as lowly as her mother-in-law believed her to be? Did she “fan her foot” (flirt) like her own disreputable mother? Hurston complicates the tale with her open-ended approach.

What White Publishers Won’t Print

Dismantling stereotypes

Through her story, she has dismantled the racist stereotype of the “happy darky” by presenting Joe, a fully drawn, complex character, deeply in love with his wife, somewhat flawed in his vindictive impulses (when he leaves the coin under her pillow as though she were a prostitute), who deals with a horrible situation. She has delivered what William Faulkner demands in his 1950 Nobel Prize for literature address, stories of “the human heart in conflict with itself.”

In “The Gilded Six-Bits,” Zora Neale Hurston offers a story of normal, African-American people dealing with typical human concerns of intimacy, hope, betrayal, and forgiveness. Their dilemmas are universal, in that people from any culture, ethnicity, state of health, sexual orientation, profession, fashion category, or social class, etc., can relate to them.

Hurston’s story is just the type of literature she calls for in her editorial, “What White Publishers Won’t Print” (1950) published in I Love Myself When I am Laughing … And Then Again When I am Looking Mean and Impressive, edited by Alice Walker (Feminist Press, 1979). In this article, she argues that U.S. publishing companies only publish books by African-Americans that “treat the race problem.” Why? Well, because stories of racial tension sold well in the 1950s just before the rise of the Civil Rights movement.

Hurston argues, in a risky and provocative way, that these typical texts promote negative stereotypes of African-Americans and other non-white segments of the population. The lack of knowledge that North Americans have about each other is deeply divisive, truly a national crisis when post-WWII U.S. needed to come together. She warns, “Man, like all the other ani.mals fears and is repelled by that which he does not understand, and mere difference is apt to connote something malign.”

See also: I Love Myself When I am Laughing …

Hurston demands, “For the national welfare, it is urgent to realize that the minorities do think, and think about something other than the race problem.” Her works constitute a marvelous effort to address this need for everyday stories about everyday people who are not white.

At the very end of the story, the question of race does come up, but on Hurston’s terms. Joe resumes the bonding ritual with Missie May by spending his silver coins at the candy store. The white store clerk’s ignorant and stereotypical comment, “Wisht I could be like these darkies. Laughin’ all the time. Nothin’ worries ‘em,” evokes the “sambo” stereotype of the happy, carefree black man. With great dramatic irony, the clerk enacts the misreading of a stranger while the reader understands that Joe is far deeper than a surface caricature. He has suffered tremendous loss, conflict, and heartache, and is in the process of forgiving his wife, accepting their son, and healing their marriage.

— Contributed by Sarah Wyman, Associate Professor of English, SUNY-New Paltz, © 2018

References

Zora Neale Hurston, The Complete Stories, Harper, 1995.

Zora Neale Hurston, I Love Myself When I am Laughing…And Then Again When I am Looking Mean and Impressive, edited by Alice Walker (Feminist Press, 1979).

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Miles Franklin: “Brent of Bin Bin,” My Career Goes Bung, and More

Miles Franklin (1879 – 1954) is best known for her first novel, My Brilliant Career. Published in 1901, when the author was just 21, it’s a semi-autobiographical story of a teenage girl growing up in the Australian bush who longs to break free as her own person. Just after the novel’s publication and early success she wrote only sporadically, having become involved in World War I efforts and the woman suffrage cause.

During this period, she wrote a sequel to My Brilliant Career titled My Career Goes Bung, finishing it around 1915 –1916. But it proved too far ahead of its time and wasn’t published until some decades later.

In the 1920s, Franklin wrote a set of historical novels set in the Australian bush and published them under the odd pseudonym “Brent of Bin Bin.” She worried that nothing she did would ever live up to the success of My Brilliant Career. She was  also  daunted by the prospect of negative reviews and believed that using a nom de plume would shield her from them.

Under this pseudonym, Up the Country (1928), Ten Creeks Run (1929), and Back to Bool Bool (1931) came out in quick succession. This suite of Brent of Bin Bin novels would grow to six volumes, but the remaining three didn’t appear until the 1950s.

By the time the eagerly received My Career Goes Bung was published in 1946, there was some suspicion that “Brent of Bin Bin” might have been written by the same pen. Here is one such article from that year that posited this theory:

Who is “Brent of Bin Bin”?

From the original article in The Age, Melbourn, Australia – August, 1946: Recently, a Melbourne literary society held an informal discussion on the subject, “Who is ‘Brent of Bin Bin?’” The identity of the author of Up the Country, Ten Creeks Run, and Back to Bool Bool has never been clearly established – at least not publicly.

Some speakers professed to have conclusive evidence that the pseudonym is that of Miles Franklin; others were equally positive that “Brent” was the pen name of a writer living in England, though it was conceded that “he” and Miss Franklin might have collaborated. The discussion did little more than deepen the mystery.

Brent of Bin Bin books on Amazon

It is possible that Miss Franklin does not relish these attempts to pry into her secret. She has stated, sometimes obliquely, sometimes definitely, that she is not “Brent.” Obviously she has a valid reason for maintaining secrecy. But it is perhaps only natural that readers who have noticed any resemblances between her own and “Brent’s” books – similarities of style, content, locale – should at least be curious. 

A pointer to “Brent’s” identity might be given in Miles Franklin’s latest book, My Career Goes Bung. Her first book, My Brilliant Career, was published in 1901 by William Blackwood and Sons (who also published the “Brent” series). A fictitious autobiography of “Sybylla Melvyn,” a young Australian bush girl, from childhood to her 21st year, it was a remarkable achievement for a bush-bred girl of sixteen.

My Career Goes Bung

In My Career Goes Bung, Sybylla now reappears to tell of the trouble in which that first literary venture involved her. When her English publishers, “Messrs. McMurwood,” suggest a new edition of her first book, she declines the offer, adding: “In future I could have a nom de plume, carefully guarded, so that my attempts could be taken on their own demerits without the impetus of scandal …”

My Career Goes Bung on Amazon

Second Publication

Miles Franklin’s second book, Some Everyday Folk and Dawn, appeared in 1909. Then followed an interval of 22 years before her next novel, Old Blastus of Bandicoot, was published. During part of that period she was in America and England. The “Brent of Bin Bin” books appeared between 1928 and 1931, and generally received higher commendation than Miss Franklin’s work.

Even her prize-winning chronicle novel, All That Swagger (1936), was compared adversely to the “Brent” series by some critics – a point in which she has not failed to note. This is not the place to attempt an exhaustive inquiry into the relationship, nor to comment on the implications, but is it not conceivable that the paragraph quoted might have some significance? But perhaps Sybylla alone could provide the answer!

My Career Goes Bung is, as the author says, “an irrefutable period piece … equally as autobiographical as my first printed piece; no more, no less.” Sybylla tells how she secretly wrote the manuscript of My Brilliant Career, submitted it to “our greatest Australian author” (Henry Lawson wrote the preface to My Brilliant Career) and how some time later she was astonished to receive “six presentation copies” of the book from the overseas publisher.

Trouble Begins

Then the trouble began! The inhabitants of ‘Possum Gully, Stony Flat, Stringbark Hill and adjacent districts identified themselves with her imaginary characters. It was generally held to be “indelicate” for a young girl to have written a book at all. Neighbors were offended, the church shocked, her family commiserated with. But the book was read, and eventually the young author received an invitation to stay with Sydney friends.

In Sydney, Sybylla was introduced to “society,” lionized as a “budding genius.” However, she survived the month’s ordeal — and the attentions of a number of amorous gentlemen — and returned to the drought-stricken dairy farm near Goulbourn, much richer for the experience, though feeling that her “career had gone bung.”

There is much lively humor (and some delicious satire) in this little book, an intense love of country, an intolerance of all forms of humbug and “un-Australian” attitudes. The manuscript of My Career Goes Bung, rescued from the depths of an old trunk, was designed as a “corrective” to the earlier work. What faults there are may be attributed to the inexperience of this high-spirited and rebellious 20-year-old bush girl writing in the early part of the century. 

More about My Career Goes Bung by Miles Franklin

Wikipedia
Reader discussion on Goodreads

More about “Brent of Bin Bin”

National Library of Australia
About Brent of Bin Bin at The Australian Treasure

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The Five Children and It Trilogy by E. Nesbit

Five Children and It was the first of a trilogy by E. Nesbit (1858 – 1924), followed by The Phoenix and the Carpet and The Story of the Amulet. In those books the readers met Robert, Anthea, Jane, Cyril, and the baby called The Lamb. But it was not the children who fascinated readers, and Nesbit had no intention that they should, for all her life she love magic. So it was a first the Psammead and then the Phoenix that she placed in the foreground.

This was deliberately and carefully done so that she, who created in the Bastables one of the most vivid families in all of children’s literature, could be sure the children in this trilogy were so faintly drawn that none of us would recognize them if we met them in the street, whereas nobody could in contrast miss either the Psammead or the Phoenix.

The following description of Five Children and It is adapted from her autobiography Long Ago When I was Young (Franklin Watts, 1966). It was written by Mary Noel Streatfeild (herself the author of a classic children’s book series known as the “shoes” books, which began in 1936 with Ballet Shoes):

Introducing the Psammead

The Psammead, when it was first seen in Five Children and It, was coming out of the sand yawning and rubbing its eyes. It was a strange creature:

“Its eyes were on long horns like a snail’s eyes, and it could move them in and out like telescopes; it had ears like a bat’s ears, and its tubby body was shaped like a spider’s and covered with thick short fur, and it had hands and feet like a monkey’s.”

But is was not its appearance that made it immediately popular with everybody who read the book; it was its personality. It was the most contrary beast.

“It isn’t talking I mind — as long as you’re reasonably civil. But I’m not going to make polite conversation for you. If you talk nicely to me, perhaps I’ll answer you and perhaps I won’t. Now say something.”

Now what child faced with such a command could find anything to say?

Like all her best creations E. Nesbit knew far more about the Psammead that she told her readers. She had knowledge of its life over thousands of years. As well, she knew how it would make out in its future and in the past. The Psammead was so sly about its ability to grant wishes, yet it was dignified at the same time. It had to grant wishes, like it or not, but it never admitted to it, always it hinted that it could refuse a wish if it wanted to.

“You want another wish I expect. But I can’t keep on slaving from morning to night giving people their wishes. I must have some time to myself.”

All who read Five Children and It waited eagerly or the next book about the Psammead, but they had to wait, which must have been a disappointment. For E. Nesbit had promised that it would come back. The promise had been given at the end of Five Children and It. The Psammead, on its way into the Past, heard one of the girls say: “I hope we shall see you again some day.” Its weak but still dry and husky voice asked: “Is that a wish?” “Yes, please,” said the girls. Then the Psammead, as it did when it was wish granting, blew itself up before disappearing in the sand.

Five Children and It on Amazon

The Phoenix and the Carpet

Although E. Nesbit did not give her readers the Psammead in her next book, two years later she published The Phoenix and the Carpet about the same family of children. What a bird was the Phoenix! Its golden egg arrived rolled up in a magic carpet.

The children put the egg on the nursery chimney-piece and it would never have hatched out if they had not tired to build a magic fire. The bird, exquisitely beautiful, rose from the flames saying, as it perched on the fender:

“Be careful; I am not nearly cool yet.” Later, when in singed the tablecloth, it said, “It will come out in the wash.” A startling memory feat for a bird who had been hatched out two thousand years before.

The Psammead had been well educated, but the Phoenix was only superficially brilliant. It covered what it did not know with what it had picked up two thousand years before. It was conceited beyond bearing, but so beautiful it was hard not to forgive it. Besides, it knew some delightful things. “These wishing creatures know all about each other — they’re so clannish; like the Scots you know — all related.”

The Phoenix could not, of course, grant wishes but it didn’t have to for there was the magic carpet. It was at its best when all the children plus the cook travelled on this magic carpet to “a sunny southern shore.”

The Phoenix, like the Psammead, though vastly popular with E. Nesbit’s readers was allowed to vanish, but alas, it vanished for good. It left presents and one golden feather behind it. It departed for ever as it had arrived — in the heart of a magic fire.

The Phoenix and the Carpet on Amazon

The return of the Psammead

Then two years later the Psammead was back. It came in The Story of the Amulet. Nothing shows more clearly how hard E. Nesbit tried not to allow the creatures of her imagination rule her stories the way she allowed the Psammead to return. She had promised her readers that he would, and she kept that promise, but only insofar as he fit in with her new interests.

The poor creature reappeared in a most humiliating way. The children found it for sale in a pet shop, where it was called a ‘mangy old monkey.’ It could not be said to be humbled by its circumstances, nothing could get it to do that, but it almost pleaded with the children to get it away.

… From the beginning, even though it could no longer grant the children’s wishes, the Psammead stole the story. It utterly refused to be kept in its place. “You’ve saved my life and I am not ungrateful — but it doesn’t change your nature or mine. You’re still very ignorant, and rather silly, and I am worth a thousand of you any day of the week.”

If E. Nesbit’s readers hoped because the Psammead was back he was going to remain with them they were disappointed. By the end of The Story of the Amulet she had finished with amulets and  Psammeads … The Psammead vanished, to live as far as is know forever, by the great temple of Baalbec. (—Mary Noel Streatfeild)

The Story of the Amulet on Amazon

More about The Five Children and It trilogy by E. Nesbit

Wikipedia
Reader discussion on Goodreads
Dramatic reading on Librivox
Five Children and It (2005 film)

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