Nava Atlas's Blog, page 83

Vita Sackville-West

Vita Sackville-West (March 9, 1892 – June 2, 1962), was a British poet, novelist, and garden designer. Born at Knole Park, a 365-room ancestral home, her writing career was launched with the publication of Poems of East and West.

She’s known for her private life and as a master gardener perhaps much as her literature. She was bisexual and had many affairs with women, including Virginia Woolf. It’s believed that she was the inspiration for the title character of Woolf’s novel, Orlando.

Vita was part of the literary Bloomsbury circle, which included Woolf and her husband, Leonard, as well as E.M. Forster, Lytton Strachey, John Maynard Keynes, and others.

Early life

Now in the care of the National Trust, Vita Sackville-West grew up at Knole in Kent, the famous “calendar house” with its three hundred sixty five rooms, fifty-two staircases, twelve entrances, and seven courtyards. Born to Lionel Sackville-West and his Spanish wife, Victoria, (his first cousin and the daughter of his uncle’s mistress), the couple split when Vita was young.

She was educated at home schooled during her earlier years, later attending Helen Wolff’s school for girls. Not one to befriend her peers easily, her biographies paint her childhood as lonely. While attending the school for girls, Vita met Violet Keppel and Rosamund Grosvenor, with whom she’d later develop intimate affairs.

Vita’s mother, Victoria, was courted by many men, most notably financier J.P. Morgan and Sir John Murray Scott. Vita spent a great deal of time with the latter during her childhood at his home in Paris, perfecting her French. Vita’s father, Lionel, had a relationship with an opera singer, moving her into Knole. The Sackville family inheritance custom disallowed for females to inherit the estate, and as the only child born to her parents, Knole was bequeathed to her father’s younger brother, the fourth Baron Sackville.

Vita had written prolifically at Knole, penning eight novels (unpublished), ballads, and plays while living there. The loss of Knole haunted Vita, especially in 1947 when signing the property over to the National Trust. She wrote that “the signing… nearly broke my heart, putting my signature to what I regarded as a betrayal of all the tradition of my ancestors and the house I loved.”

You might also like: Quotes by Vita Sackville-West

Open marriage

At age 21, Vita married Harold George Nicolson, a wealthy writer, politician, and diplomat who was also bisexual. The couple engaged in an open marriage, courting many same-sex affairs, fashioning a relationship structure ahead of its time. The couple had two sons, Nigel and Benedict. Nigel would later combine his mother’s diaries with his own observations in Portrait of a Marriage, the confessional autobiography Vita had written during her relationship with Violet Keppel.

One of the most notable of Vita’s affairs was with childhood friend Violet Keppel, which began before Vita’s marriage to Harold. By the age of sixteen, Vita and Violet had developed a strong emotional bond, and by their twenties were romantically involved. The relationship continued through Vita’s eventual marriage to Harold in 1913.

Later, Vita would become deeply infatuated with Virginia Woolf. The connection began in 1922, when Virginia Woolf was forty years old, ten years Vita’s senior. Upon meeting, Vita was instantly attracted. After meeting Woolf, she wrote in a letter to Harold dated in December 1922,

“I simply adore Virginia Woolf, and so would you. You would fall quite flat before her charm and personality… Mrs. Woolf is so simple: she does give the impression of something big. She is utterly unaffected: there are no outward adornments — she dresses quite atrociously. At first you think she is plain, then a sort of spiritual beauty imposes itself on you, and you find a fascination in watching her. She was smarter last night, that is to say, the woollen orange stockings were replaced by yellow silk ones, but she still wore the pumps. She is both detached and human, silent till she wants to say something, and then says it supremely well. I’ve rarely taken such a fancy to anyone, and I think she likes me. At least, she asked me to Richmond where she lives. Darling, I have quite lost my heart.”

Vita became Virginia’s lover and muse, and went on to inspire her groundbreaking 1928 novel Orlando.

See also: Portrait of a Marriage: Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson

Career and legacy

Vita chose the Hogarth Press (the publishing house run by Virginia Woolf and her husband, Leonard) to be her publisher for Seducers in Ecuador in 1924. The novel wasn’t as successful as she’d hoped, selling just 1,500 copies in its first year. The Edwardians, her second novel published with Hogarth Press in 1930, on the other hand, was a huge success. It sold 30,000 copies in its first six months, arguably remaining as one of her best known works. In 1932, Vita published Family History, boldly tackling the subject of lesbianism.

Vita focused mainly on fiction, but also used her considerable passion for gardening to produce essays and columns on the subject. In 1947, Vita was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and Companion of Honour. Her distinguished body of  work includes twelve poetry collections, seventeen novels, and nine works of non-fiction and biographies.

Vita died at Sissinghurst at age seventy from abdominal cancer. She was cremated and her ashes buried in the family crypt in eastern Sussex. Her son Nigel lived at Sissinghurst after her death, and after his own passing in 2004, his son moved in with his family. The gardens Vita and Harold designed at Sissinghurst Castle are still visited and admired today.

More about Vita on this site

Quotes by Vita Sackville-West
The Butterfly of the Moment

Major Works

The Edwardians
All Passion Spent
Saint Joan of Arc
Twelve Days in Persia
In Your Garden
Passenger to Teheran
No Signposts in the Sea

Autobiographies

Violet to Vita: The Letters of Violet Trefusis to Vita Sackville-West, 1910-1921
The Letters of Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf

Biographies about Vita Sackville-West

Portrait of a Marriage: Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson by Nigel Nicolson
Vita: The Life of V. Sackville by Victoria Glendinning

More Information

Wikipedia
Amazon.com
Reader discussion on Goodreads

Visit Vita Sackville-West’s home

Sissinghurst Castle  – Weald of Kent, UK


Harold Nicolson,Vita Sackville-West, Rosamund Grosvenor & Lionel Sackville-West, 1913

 

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Dickey Chapelle: Photojournalist and War Correspondent

Dickey Chapelle (March 14, 1919 – November 4, 1965) was a pioneering American war correspondent and photojournalist who covered world conflicts from World War II to Vietnam.

Born Georgette Louise Meyer, she was fascinated by air travel throughout her childhood in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. She renamed herself after the explorer Admiral Richard “Dickey” Bird.

Even as a child, Georgie Lou, as she was called, marched to her own drum. She was short and nearsighted, and always quirky and precocious. From a young age, she dreamed of flying planes. She was patriotic — always saluting the flag on her way to school. “I believed I could do anything I wanted to do, and I still believe it.”

Her father gave her a taste for adventure, and encouraged her to reach for her dreams. Her mother wanted her to be an English major, and perhaps become a writer. She had other ideas, though; she wanted to become an engineer. Her mom did her best to discourage her from her interest in planes.

Obsessed with aviation

Dickey was precocious. She skipped a grade and by age sixteen, graduated high school. The class valedictorian entered the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to study aeronautical design on a full scholarship. Alas, the classroom bored her and she flunked out after two years, itching for more hands-on experience, and some adventure in the skies.

Going to work at a local air field, Dickey photographed planes and wrote articles about them. However, when her mother learned that she’d been having an affair with a pilot, she sent her to live with her grandparents in Coral Gables, Florida. This did nothing to dampen her interest in planes nor in having adventures.

She took flying lessons and logged hours in her pilot’s book. wrote releases for a local air show, which landed her an assignment in Havana, Cuba. She submitted a story on an air show disaster that took place in Cuba to The New York Times, which in turn caught the eye of  Transcontinental and Western Air (TWA). She moved to New York City to work in this airline’s publicity bureau.

Watch this fascinating documentary about Dickey Chapelle:

“Behind the Pearl Earrings”

Introduction to photography

It was in New York City that Dickey met Tony Chapelle, a former naval photographer, while taking his classes in photography. “The picture is your reason for being,” is a lesson she learned from him. Twenty years older than she and much more worldly, she married him in 1940. No doubt he helped launch her professional career, and the two seemed a good match, at least at first.

She sold her first portfolio of photos to Look magazine the following year. One thing Tony neglected to tell her was that he was still married to his first wife; and he was known as something of a con artist. Yet for all of that, Dickey stayed with him for fifteen years before they their marriage was annulled.

When Dickey started freelancing after studying with Tony, she worked for a number of women’s magazines, but her photos were rather mediocre. She wasn’t and would never become a technician, but what she lacked in technical skills she made up with an eye for the dramatic and she was a master at composition.

First big break: World War II

Dickey Chapelle’s first big break was a story she sold to the New York Times detailing how American pilots were enlisting in in the Canadian Air Force to fight against Hitler.

Dickey was then hired by National Geographic as a war correspondent and photojournalist during World War II. She covered U.S. Marines on training missions as well as the battles of Iwo Jima and Okinawa. Women rarely covered combat, so this was an unusual achievement. The only other prominent female photojournalist was Margaret Bourke-White, who worked for Life magazine. Dickey was willing to go into harm’s way, especially in service of the troops. During the war, one editor she worked for fired her because her photos were too graphic.

A commitment to covering global conflicts

After World War II, Dickey continued to cover major wars and conflicts around the globe. Bold and fearless, she would do whatever it took to get close to the action to get close to battle zones.

Dickey was petite and became known for her unique style: At work on the battlefield, she wore pearl earrings, Harlequin glasses, and an Australian bush hat with her combat fatigues. It was her way of showing she wasn’t just “one of the boys” but that she still deserved her place in a man’s world. Yet she never asked for any favoritism or concession for her gender.

She said, “The main thing you have to remember about covering combat is that you have to survive to get the picture and the story out to the world.” She was described as feisty, tough as nails, and hard-bitten. She never wanted her gender to get in the way but also felt she had to prove herself. She told the stories she wanted to tell, on her own terms. Concerned with the troops, she also wanted to give voice to civilians caught in the crossfire. 

Arrested as a spy

Dickey’s fearlessness got her into a number of scrapes. While covering the Hungarian Revolution in 1956, she also agreed to transport penicillin to Hungarian refugees. She was caught and arrested as a spy by Russian forces (the Red Army).

On the way to her interrogation, she wrapped her small camera in a glove and tossed it out the window. She was told she would be hanged. Still, she spent nearly two months in a Hungarian prison, as a prisoner of the Russians, 38 days of which were in solitary confinement.

Anti-war but pro-military

Dickey wrote that the purpose of her work was to to document “the wreckage resulting from man’s inhumanity to man.” She wanted to share personal stories of those in combat with the rest of the world. She wasn’t pro-war, but was definitely pro-military.

In the course of her career, Dickey the Algerian rebels, Fidel Castro’s Cuban revolution, Post-war Korea, Laos, and more. At age forty, she received permission to parachute jump with troops, the first female to do so, and she jumped six times.

Dickey Chapelle on the USS Boxer

Photo: Wisconsin Historical Society

Vietnam, and death in the field

She spent a lot of time traveling back and forth from Vietnam in the 1960s to cover the war, and took the first photograph of an American soldier engaged in combat.

In 1965, Dickey was with the U.S. Marines near Chu Lai Air Base. She was walking behind a lieutenant who accidentally tripped a landmine and she was hit in the neck by a piece of shrapnel, severing an artery. She died from her wound, at age forty-seven. A statement by the marines: “She was one of us, and we will miss her.” She was buried with full military honors, something quite unusual tribute for a civilian journalist.

Legacy

Always bold and fearless, Dickey Chapelle documented global conflicts from World War II through Vietnam. In her thirty-year career as a war photojournalist, she earned great respect in a profession that had been unfriendly, if not completely closed, to women who came before her. That respect came from both the military and from the press, and she received many prestigious awards. The United States Marines honor her memory with the annual Dickey Chapelle Award, which is given to recognize women who have contributed “to the morale, welfare and wellbeing of the corps.”

Dickey received the George Polk Memorial Award, the Overseas Press Club’s highest honor, in 1961. Her citation read that she could “hold her own with men twice her size when it comes to covering a war.” Her autobiography, What’s a Woman Doing Here? A Combat Reporter’s Report on Herself, describes her trial by fire in her quest to become a war correspondent.

Dickey Chapelle was the first American female reporter to be killed in action and the female war correspondent to be killed in Vietnam.

“[War] is not a woman’s place. There’s no question about it. There’s only one other species on earth for whom the war zone is no place, and that’s men. But as long as men continue to fight wars, I think observers of both sexes will be sent to see what happens.”

“When I die, I want it to be on patrol with the United States Marines.”

More about Dickey Chapelle

Wikipedia
The Heroine Collective
Wisconsin’s Pioneering War Correspondent

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Caroline: Little House, Revisited by Sarah Miller

Caroline: Little House, Revisited by Sarah Miller is a captivating novel that illuminates one courageous, resilient, and loving pioneer woman as never before — Caroline Ingalls, “Ma” in Laura Ingalls Wilder’s beloved Little House books. It’s now available in paperback (as well as in audio and e-book editions).

For over 80 years, the Little House stories of Laura Ingalls Wilder have captivated generations of audiences. Caroline: Little House, Revisited is a fresh look at the classic Little House on the Prairie, told through the eyes of Caroline “Ma” Ingalls. In this novel, authorized by Little House Heritage Trust, Sarah Miller vividly recreates the beauty, hardship, and joys of the frontier in this dazzling work of adult historical fiction.

Caroline “Ma” Ingalls has forever been a mainstay in the world of Little House, but readers have yet to experience her story. In Caroline: Little House, Revisited, Sarah Miller’s research into family letters and Wilder’s handwritten drafts and manuscripts, along with an in-depth look into Pioneer Girl and the Little House canon, shapes a magnificent portrait of the matriarch so many of us have grown to love.

During the frigid winter of 1870, Caroline Ingalls and her family leave the Big Woods of Wisconsin for a new life in Kansas’s Indian Territory. The pioneer life is a hard one, especially for a pregnant woman with no friends or kin to turn to for comfort. In adapting to this strange new place, Caroline must draw on untapped wells of strength she does not know she possesses to forge a home, raise children, and survive.

Deprived of the support network they depended on in Wisconsin, work is daunting and the days are lonesome, yet Caroline’s life is still filled with tender joys, especially in her husband and children. Caroline’s experiences provide an entirely new point of view for readers who grew up with Laura’s perspective on the adventure of pioneering.

Not only will Caroline: Little House Revisited appeal to grown up Little House enthusiasts, but all readers of compelling historical fiction will be entranced by Miller’s conceptualization of the Ingalls family.

Caroline: Little House, Revisited by Sarah Miller on Amazon

Caroline: Little House Revisited — how it begins:

Caroline’s wrist turned and flicked as the steel tongue of her crochet hook dipped in and out, mirroring the movement of the fiddle’s bow. With each note, the white thread licked a warm line across her finger. Her pattern had just begun to repeat, chorus-like, as the tune ended. She smoothed the frilled cluster of scallops against her cuff and smiled. So long as she could keep ahead of the mending, a pair of lace wrists would freshen her second-best wool before snowmelt. There would be no time for a collar — once the trees began to bud, she must turn her hans to the tedious seams of a new set of diapers, bonnets, and gowns.

Charles  rested the fiddle on his knee and primed himself with a breath.

“What is it, Charles?” Caroline asked, plucking a slouching festoon of thread into place.

“I’ve had an offer for this place,” he said.

Carolines hook stilled. “An offer?”

“Gustafson’s agreed to pay one thousand twelve dollars and fifty cents for our half of this quarter section.”

The sum swept her mind clean as a gust of wind. “My goodness,” she said. One thousand twelve dollars And the delightful absurdity of fifty cents besides, like a a sprinkling of sugar. They could use it to buy a week’s worth of satin hair ribbons for Mary and Laura …

(Excerpt from Caroline: Little House, Revisited by Sarah Miller. Copyright © 2018 by Sarah Miller. Reprinted by permission of William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers)

Reviews of Caroline

“Beguiling, pulse-pounding historical fiction.”—Kirkus

“Not to be missed by Wilder’s grown-up fans or those who enjoy historical fiction about the settling of the American West in the late 1800s.”—Library Journal

“A stunning novel…Miller’s research is impeccable and her writing exquisite.”

—Historical Novel Society

“Full of lyrical descriptions of the wild beauty of the Kansas countryside, Caroline is a well-researched and thoughtful look at the inner life of one of America’s most famous frontier women.” —BookPage

About the author

Sarah Miller began writing her first novel at the age of ten, and has spent the last two decades working in libraries and bookstores. She is the author of two previous historical novels, Miss Spitfire: Reaching Helen Keller, and The Lost Crown. Her non-fiction debut, The Borden Murders: Lizzie Borden and the Trial of the Century, was hailed by the New York Times as “a historical version of Law & Order.” Sarah lives in Michigan.

Learn more about Laura Ingalls Wilder

*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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On First Reading Pride and Prejudice

I first read Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice in the spring of 2005, while my mother-in-law recuperated in rehab from a broken leg. A year earlier she moved in with my husband Bruce and me. It had been a difficult year, and she was soon to return. I wanted to make things easier for all of us, and was earnestly making lists of how to do that. “This time it will be different,” I told myself. And I turned back to Pride and Prejudice.

Flo Gibson narrates the Pride and Prejudice audio book. Flo (I think of her as Flo) pronounces the famous opening sentence: “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.” And off we went again. She never tired of reading to me and I never tired of listening.

Entering the world of Pride and Prejudice

Each time I entered the world of Pride and Prejudice, I felt a physical high. Each time, listening or reading, my only responsibility to this fictional world was to continue listening or reading. The novel’s wit and irony provided relief. Those single men in possession of good fortunes… do they know they are in want of wives?

Pride and Prejudice asked nothing of me. I could like or dislike the characters in the novel and it did not matter, my emotions were safe to roam.

Listening to Flo, spatial awareness dissolved. I bumped into corners, or got a shirt caught on a doorknob. Getting ready for bed, Bruce would ask me, “How did you get that bruise on your arm … your thigh?”

“I wasn’t paying attention. I ran into something.” In fact, I was paying attention—just not to the world I materially inhabited. Pride and Prejudice took up residence in my brain and shifted the furniture inside of it.

I asked Bruce, “What’s the matter with me? Why can’t I stop doing this?”

Bruce replied, “I’m glad you have passion.” He did not see it as an addiction. But it felt like an addiction. Like one of Austen’s characters—Catherine Morland in Northanger Abbey or Edward Denham in Sanditon — I was possessed by books: hers.

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10 Memorable Quotes from Pride and Prejudice

A passion or an obsession?

Another day, another discussion of my obsessive reading. Cabin fever, Bruce said. It’s Texas; it’s summertime; it’s hot. We use cabin fever to explain any abnormal behavior that occurs during the long hot Texas summers.

I did not want my love of Austen’s writing reduced to cabin fever. “No,” I said, “It is her humor. It restores – or enhances – or stirs my faith in humanity. That there is a writer like that.”

Maybe my love for Pride and Prejudice was a passion, not an obsession. I asked my journal, Why can’t I have a passion for P and P? Isn’t something that gives me joy intrinsically worth doing? I thought of the one hundred times that Michael Cunningham read Mrs. Dalloway before he wrote his novel The Hours.

I vacillated: passion, one day; obsession, the next. I wrote in my journal, Not so much pray to be relieved from this obsession over P & P but that its meaning might reveal itself to me.

My friend Pat knew about my non-stop immersion in Pride and Prejudice. I asked her, “What’s come over me?”

She reassured me that it was okay to be so enthralled by Austen. It was not a fixation. “You are learning from it. It is very important to you. You are working it out. It will be revealed to you.”

The BBC’s 1995 Pride and Prejudice opens with the central male figures, Bingley and Darcy, on horseback galloping over the English countryside. Screenwriter Andrew Davies invented that image to represent how, once begun, the story of Pride and Prejudice moves like a swift horse, galloping away with us, never letting up. Medical crises are like that, too, except with time in waiting rooms to ruminate, worry, and try to read.

A salve for a medical crisis

My mother-in-law returned home with an inflamed foot. The foot, on the leg that had only recently healed from its break, did not improve. We convinced her to see a podiatrist who referred her to a circulation specialist. He placed a handheld Doppler sonar reader against her ankle but found no pulse. Her cold foot signaled a possible blood clot. We rushed her to the hospital. There, the nurse took one look at her foot and said, “You brought her in just in time.” An arterioplasty was scheduled to look into her arteries. Two hours later, the surgeon appeared. “Her artery is like cement.” He could not pass a catheter past the knee. His technical medical language was at first incomprehensible. Slowly it cohered around the words gangrene, phantom pain. Her leg would have to be amputated.

The surgeon who would perform the amputation was out of the country.

I stayed with my mother-in-law in the hospital the nights before the amputation, as we awaited the surgeon’s return. Bruce stayed with her during the day.

Monday night, the orthopedic surgeon walked in and placed his hands on her foot. His directness seemed shocking. ”It’s cold. There’s no urgency, but it will have to be cut off.” 

Bruce told him, “She is in pain.”

“Then tomorrow or Wednesday.”

I said, “At some point it looked a little better.” 

“No, it’s cold. It has to come off.” He touched where he could feel coldness – the calf – and where not. He showed us where in the middle of the knee he thought he could cut it off. 

Later that evening, as he left to go home, Bruce and I lingered in the hallway. I would remain overnight again. I looked down and discovered I was clutching one of my books on Jane Austen.

Bruce said, “You need happy endings and Jane Austen gives them to you.” He kissed me good night and I re-entered the room, where one of us had morphine and the other Jane Austen.

After the amputation, my mother-in-law was returned to her room. We waited in the hallway as two recovery nurses, two floor nurses, and the supervising nurse settled her into her bed. Suddenly we heard her moaning and crying out, “My leg! My leg!” A nurse threw open the door and signaled to Bruce and me to enter.

Her hands were bound to the bed. She once told us that having one’s hands bound drives a patient crazy. We could see why her hands were tied: she was wildly tearing at the bandages and grabbing at her IV to pull it out. Bruce and I positioned ourselves on either side of the bed and took her hands, trying to calm her down. Her leg was shortened, bandaged, footless; I felt queasy.

“Bruce, Bruce!” she cried.

I rubbed her forehead and told her how brave she was. She listened for a minute, but became delirious again. “Carol! My leg! My leg!”

Shocked by her energy and distress, the nurses debated giving her more morphine. As she screamed again, “My leg, my leg,” the doctor arrived. In a lucid moment, she asked him, “Did you take my leg?” He said yes, and left to order more morphine.

It was suppertime but we lived in unanchored hospital time. The nurses offered to unbind her hands if we promised to keep her from pulling out the IV. After three nights in the hospital, I needed some rest. Bruce would stay the night.

At home, I headed to the bedroom, where the sheets welcomed me. I picked up Carol Shield’s short biography of Austen. The page I opened to discussed a moment in Pride and Prejudice when Elizabeth cries. “The tumult of her mind was now painfully great. She knew not how to support herself, and from actual weakness sat down and cried for half an hour.”

Shields says this detail of crying for thirty minutes is perfect. “A fifteen-minute howl would show lack of sensibility and a full hour, lack of sense.” Maybe I would not always have thirty minutes, but I could give myself fifteen minutes to retreat to the bed and howl and then go on with my tasks. I felt better as the idea settled: cry fifteen minutes. And I did.

Carol J. Adams is a feminist-vegan advocate, activist, and independent scholar and the author of numerous books including her pathbreaking The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory, now in a Bloomsbury Revelations edition celebrating its 25th anniversary.

Carol is also the author of books on living as a vegan, including Never Too Late to Go Vegan: The Over-50 Guide to Adopting and Thriving on a Vegan Diet (with Patti Breitman and Virginia Messina), Living Among Meat Eaters: The Vegetarian’s Survival Guide, How to Eat Like a Vegetarian Even if You Never Want to Be One. Her recent books are Even Vegans Die: A Practical Guide to Caregiving, Acceptance, and Protecting Your Legacy of Compassion, with co-authors Patti Breitman, and Virginia Messina, and Burger (Object Lessons).

See more of Carol’s writing on caregiving. You may also enjoy her essay, Jane Austen’s Guide to Alzheimer’s, in the New York Times. She is completing a manuscript on Jane Austen’s Guide to Caregiving.

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“The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” by Ursula Le Guin (1973)

In the short story “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” (Variations on a Theme by William James), Ursula Le Guin presents us with a utopia that turns out to include an imperfect, even nightmarish dystopia. The tension between these two heaven-and-hell extremes could be summed up in a pull between the impulse to leave in the title and the joyous arrival of the festival that sets the stage.

A carefree community that seems pleasing and just, turns out to be structured on injustice and ultimately untenable for some of its citizens. Ethical confusion arises both within the fictional world of the story and when the reader attempts to reconcile that textual space with the real world counterpart to which it refers. Le Guin considers the story an allegory of U.S. culture at the time of the Vietnam War, inspired by the “shock of recognition” she experienced upon reading this passage from William James:

“If the hypothesis were offered us of a world in which … millions [should be] kept permanently happy on the one simple condition that a certain lost soul on the far-off edge of things should lead a life of lonely torment… even though an impulse arose within us to clutch at the happiness so offered, how hideous a thing would be its enjoyment when deliberately accepted as the fruit of such a bargain?”

Le Guin contends that in this passage, “The dilemma of the American conscience can hardly be better stated.” In the story, a community inhabits a wonderful, fairy tale world free of illness, anxiety, and social strife. The Omalasians subscribe to a social contract contingent upon the exploitation of one child to ensure the happiness of all other citizens.

A hideous bargain

The author pits brute reality against fiction’s capacity to conjure illusory solutions and offers no easy answers. Some mistakenly argue that Le Guin supports the non-compliance of those who walk away. Neither Le Guin nor James, however, would necessarily applaud the members who choose to leave this community, for to do so, would not change the status of the suffering child.

While the choice to walk away from the hideous bargain Le Guin puts forth may seem correct at first, a more careful reading suggests that both Le Guin and James would elect to stay in Omelas, imperfect as it turns out to be. Each would likely insist on a dynamic ethical system existing and evolving among and dependent upon all community members. To withdraw from this fellowship would be comparable to betraying the social contract and abdicating responsibility for the child’s lot.

Rather than offer a utilitarian excuse — the good of the many outweighs the good of the one — they would likely place emphasis on the incarcerated lost soul, who stands simultaneously inside and outside the society, sequestered in its dungeon in the center of town. Instead of dallying with escapist fantasies, Le Guin ultimately engages the utopian trope in order to put forth a political statement that becomes increasingly clear as the story evolves.

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Quotes by Ursula Le Guin on Writing, Reading, and Storytelling

Holding the reader accountable

A key aspect of this story and a clue to Le Guin’s opinion on the dilemma of departure manifests in the way the fiction itself contrives to hold the reader accountable as a virtual Omalasian, fully aware of parallels between the imaginary land and contemporary Western capitalist, imperialist society. The reader cannot not participate in the fiction, just as each citizen cannot not participate in Omelas’ horrible social contract. Le Guin creates a narrator who acts as a Jamesian “judicial investigator,” inviting the reader to wrestle with the moral dilemma presented whilst roping him/her/them into a terribly uncomfortable position by using several rhetorical tactics.

The author sets up structural tensions in order to lure the reader into making a choice that she refuses to make overtly. By involving the reader as co-creator of this fantasy world, she implicates the reader in the decision acted out by the characters, both those who stay and those who leave. “Perhaps it would be best if you imagined it as your own fancy bids … for certainly I cannot suit you all” declares the narrator.

So, Omelas becomes a relative utopia, perfectly modeled in the mind of each reader. The lushness of the language and the rhetorical power of the telling augment the seduction of this collaborative relationship between narrator and reader.

Who will stay and who will leave?

Le Guin starts us off in a highly poetic mode. She foregrounds the neat tension that will be the central dilemma of the story when she titles it with a “walk [ing] from,” then starts the narration with a “[coming] to.” Who will stay and who will leave? The main problem of the tale has already evidenced itself.  She has stylized her text so that we are far from the realm of the “standard” language of communication.

Instead, our eyes and minds rest on the page where she foregrounds the materiality of language itself. The breathless, long lines of the first paragraph mimic the festival parade the words describe. Le Guin alliterates the sounds of the words: “mauve and grey, grave…” echoing the sonic features with a chiastic au-gr / gr-a flip. She employs the assonance of the long i-sound in the line, “high calls rising like the swallows’ crossing flights…” as the birds spread their wings. The horses themselves are personified as the scene springs to life.

The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas on Amazon

A jarring wake-up   

Next, the narrator makes two moves that jerk us out of traditional fairy tale mode, waking us from the lull of gorgeous language. First, she takes a meta-textual (or meta-discursive) turn in which the text calls attention to its own project: telling a story. The narrative voice seems to stand outside the text and comment on it, reflexively. She problematizes her own tale-telling goal by questioning the effort of expression itself: “How is one to tell about joy? How to describe the citizens of Omelas? … I wish I could describe it better.”

This clumsy gesture comes across as ironic, following on the heels of the first paragraph’s masterful display of technical skill in crafting a story. The narrative voice’s move to divest herself of authority and responsibility for defining Omelas further implicates the reader in completing the construction of this anti-utopia.

In a second important turn, the narrator addresses us directly. Thus, we as readers are drawn into the story, as virtual or contingent inhabitants of Omelas as well. Once the narrator starts generalizing about our “bad habit,” we become a bit uncomfortable, without a voice of our own in the text with which to explain or defend ourselves. We do not want to accept her definition of us: “we have a bad habit… of considering happiness as something rather stupid.” 

The treason of the artist

Echoing the philosophy of Hannah Arendt, she dismantles the very artistry she just demonstrated, “This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain.” We begin to understand that our delicious picture of the city of Omelas actually disguises a dirty secret, necessary to its survival. We eagerly let ourselves be drawn into the initial festivities, only to find ourselves abruptly confronted with a serious moral dilemma.

The ungendered, incarcerated child locked in a basement serves as a trope of suffering, a ritual sacrifice, and bears a horrifying burden for the sake of its fellow citizens’ joy. The child, held captive under unspeakable circumstances in an ambiguously public/private space, functions as a scapegoat for the town. Le Guin has noted, that she noticed a sign reading Omelas, in her rear-view mirror, as she drove away from Salem, Oregon. Through this linguistic reversal, she evokes the notorious colonial New England town where 14 women deemed “witches” were executed to preserve the “public good” between 1692-1693.

Neither choice, to stay or to leave, is without serious consequences, for even those who leave have not escaped responsibility for what goes on in the basement. To refuse to participate in this outrage by partaking in the happiness it engenders does not solve the material situation of the suffering child. It ensures neither its comfort nor release. To leave is ironically, to not vote, to not act. In fact, several critics have pointed out the Omalasian’s bad faith suggested by the weak defense of the child’s incarceration, such as, “It is too degraded and imbecile to know any real joy.”

A tortured justification

The citizens attempt to justify their collective, callous torture of the child by stating that it is damaged beyond redemption, despite the fact that has memories of an alternate existence and assumes it is being punished for misbehavior. Granted, more than one individual has left Omelas, so a new community could conceivably establish itself elsewhere. Le Guin refers to the Ones, stressing their plurality and individuality at once. Yet, why should this uncharted realm that may not exist be any better at all?  One can simply insist on the negative space of not-Omelas (the anti-anti-utopia) as symbolic of the community’s betrayal.

Utopias of any stripe exist as fictions, and can only seem, not be. Yet, they can reflect or express phenomena parallel to real-world situations and potentialities. Le Guin’s anti-utopia seems, by its very imperfection, to approach our world more closely. The highly aestheticized nature of her story, its overt constructedness, should alert the reader to the deceptive enticements of art, the seduction of beauty, the distance between fiction and reality.

The temptation to locate the story’s treachery in the fiction itself rather than in the real world to which it corresponds parallels the mistaken characters’ urge to leave Omelas altogether. While the impulse to flee this tainted paradise, this fictive realm may be revolutionary in itself, the act of going, when read against James’ Pragmatic philosophy, the traces of Le Guin’s creative act, and their common belief in communal ethics, cannot be considered the morally sound choice.

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

Works Cited

James, William, “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life.” The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy. New York: Dover, 1957.

Le Guin, Ursula. “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.” (1973) The Wind’s Twelve Quarters. New York: Harpers, 1975: 275-84.

A longer version of this article appeared as “Reading Through Fictions in Ursula Le Guin’s The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.” ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes, and Reviews, vol. 24, no. 5 (2012): 228-232.

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May Sarton

May Sarton (May 3, 1912 – July 16, 1995) born Eleanore Marie Sarton, was an American poet, novelist, and memoirist. Born in Belgium, her family moved to Boston, Massachusetts in 1915 after briefly living in England. Her mother was the English artist Mable Elwes Sarton, and her father, George Sarton, was a science historian.

Sarton began writing poetry when she was in her teens. After graduating from high school, she moved to New York City with notions of becoming an actress. She joined the New York’s Civic Repertory Theater and even tried her hand at starting and running such a venture, launching Associated Actor’s Theater in 1933. After the company folded, she continued to write and frequently traveled to Europe , where she became acquainted with many literary figures, including Virginia Woolf and Elizabeth Bowen.

Early works of poetry and fiction

May Sarton’s writing began to take off in the 1930’s. Encounter in April, Sarton’s first published poetry collection (1937), contained vivid erotic female imagery. Her first novel, The Single Hound, was published soon after, in 1938. To support her art, she wrote book reviews and taught creative writing.

In 1945, Sarton met Judy Matlack in Santa Fe. The two women developed a deep connection and fell in love, though it wasn’t until 1965 that she revealed her relationship with Matlack in one of her best-known works, Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing. She said of this work:

“The fear of homosexuality is so great that it took courage to write Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing,; to write a novel about a woman homosexual who is not a sex maniac, a drunkard, a drug-taker, or in any way repulsive, to portray a homosexual who is neither pitiable nor disgusting, without sentimentality …”

Despite coming out as a lesbian during a time when very few others did, the popularity of her work wasn’t affected. In fact, it brought high recognition and respect, later to become staples in women’s studies classes. She preferred, however, for her work to be appreciated for its exploration of what is universal in love, rather than as lesbian literature.

Writing across genres

In 1952, Sarton’s book A Shower of Summer Days was published, inspired by Elizabeth Bowen’s house. Sarton’s love for Elizabeth is a highlight of her 1976 nonfiction piece, A World of Light.

When asked in a 1983 Paris Review interview about her ability to shift among different forms of writing, from journals to poetry to novels, Sarton responded:

“Sometimes the demon of self-doubt comes to tell me that I’ve been fatally divided between two crafts, that of the novel and that of poetry, but I’ve always believed that in the end it was the total work which would communicate a vision of life and it really needs different modes to do that. The novels have been written in order to find something out about what I was thinking, questions I was asking myself that I needed to answer.

Take a very simple example, A Shower of Summer Days. The great house that dominates the novel was Bowen’s Court. What interested me was the collision between a rich nature, a young girl in revolt against everything at home in America, and ceremony, tradition, and beauty as represented by the house in Ireland.”

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Self-Searching Quotes from Journal of a Solitude

Journals and memoirs

Sarton’s journals, particularly Plant Dreaming Deep and Journal of a Solitude, are considered among her best works. Published in 1973, Journal of Solitude would later become a key text in women’s studies courses. The books deal honestly with isolation, solitude, love, relationships, sexual orientation, success, failure, gratitude, love of nature, the seasons, and the struggles of a creative life. She deals with aging and illness in her memoirs Recovering, At Seventy, At Eighty Two, and After the Stroke.

Through her various journals, Sarton inspired readers to recognize the sweetness in purposeful solitude and its role in healing and reflection. She wrote: “Loneliness is the poverty of self; solitude is richness of self.” She encapsulates the experience pleasure as well as pain of solitude in this line from Journal of a Solitude:

“There is no doubt that solitude is a challenge and to maintain balance within it a precarious business. But I must not forget that, for me, being with people or even with one beloved person for any length of time without solitude is even worse. I lose my center. I feel dispersed, scattered, in pieces. I must have time alone in which to mull over my encounter, and to extract its juice, its essence, to understand what has really happened to me as a consequence of it.”

Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing was reissued in 1974 with an introduction by Carolyn Heilbrun that reconsidered Sarton’s work and contribution to feminist literature. A few years later, A Reckoning (1978) was published, foreshadowing Sarton’s battle with breast cancer.

After Judy Matlack passed away in 1982, Sarton wrote Honey in the Hive (1988), reflecting on their loving relationship. The piece consisted of poems and writings by Matlack, with Sarton’s comments peppered throughout.

Now I Become Myself is one of Sarton’s most beloved poems

Teaching and reflecting

Ms. Sarton taught at both Harvard and Wellesley; her books have been taught in college courses throughout the country. In 1990, while living in Maine, Sarton suffered a stroke that made concentrating and writing a great challenge. She dictated her remaining journals and gained some comfort in being able to reflect on her life.

Death and legacy

May Sarton died of breast cancer on July 16, 1995, at the age of 83. She said of her work: “It is my hope that all the novels, the poems, and the autobiographical books may come to be seen as a whole, the communication of a vision of life.” She has an extensive and impressive legacy’, with over 50 published works.

May Sarton page on Amazon

More about May Sarton on this site

Now I Become Myself (poem)
Introspective Quotes by May Sarton
Self-Searching Quotes from Journal of a Solitude

Major Works

Below is a modest sampling of May Sarton’s novels. In addition to the list of memoirs that follow, for which she is arguably even better know, Sarton was also a prolific poet. Her poetry is collected is nearly twenty volumes.

The Single Hound  (1938)
A Shower of Summer Days  (1952)
The Fur Person  (1957)
The Small Room  (1961)
Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing  (1965)
As We Are Now  (1973)
Crucial Conversations  (1975)
A Reckoning  (1978)
Anger  (1982)
The Magnificent Spinster  (1985)
The Education of Harriet Hatfield    (1989)

Memoirs and journals

Plant Dreaming Deep  (1968)
Journal of a Solitude  (1978)
The House by the Sea: A Journal  (1977)
Recovering: A Journal  (1980)
At Seventy: A Journal  (1984)
Endgame: A Journal of the Seventy-Ninth Year  (1992)
Encore: A Journal of the Eightieth Year  (1993)
At Eighty-Two: A Journal  (1996)
I Knew a Phoenix: Sketches for an Autobiography  (1959)
After the Stroke: A Journal  (1988)

Biographies about May Sarton

May Sarton: Biography   by Margot Peters
Conversations with May Sarton   by Earl G. Ingersoll

More Information

Wikipedia
The Poetry Foundation
May Sarton: Poetry.com
Reader discussion of May Sarton’s books on Goodreads

Articles, News, Etc.

May Sarton, The Art of Poetry No. 32 (an interview)
Lesbian Poetry Retrospective 

Visit

May Sarton’s Grave – Nelson Cemetery, New Hampshire

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Harper Lee

Harper Lee (April 28, 1926 –February 19, 2016) was an American author best known for the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel To Kill a Mockingbird (1960). Born in Monroeville, Alabama, she was originally named Nelle Harper Lee.

Few novels have had the cultural impact of To Kill a Mockingbird, which has sold tens of millions of copies, and has been translated into more than 40 languages. Lee drew from her upbringing in a small southern town to tell an indelible American story.

Early years and education

Lee was the youngest of four children — two sisters and a brother. Her father, Amasa Coleman Lee, was a lawyer and member of the Alabama state legislature. Her mother, Frances Finch, rarely left the house; it’s now believed that she suffered from untreated bipolar disorder.

Truman Capote (then named Truman Persons) was a childhood friend and the inspiration for Dill, the eccentric neighbor boy in Mockingbird. Truman lived with his mother’s relatives in Monroeville after being virtually abandoned by his own parents.

Lee enjoyed writing throughout her childhood and developed an interest in English literature in high school. Her college studies began in 1944 at the all-female Huntingdon College in Montgomery, Alabama. Ever the tomboy, Lee didn’t share her classmates’ interest in dating and fashion, and stayed focused on her studies.

After transferring to the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa, Lee began writing for the college newspaper as well as its humor publication, the Rammer Jammer. She eventually became the editor of the latter.

Lee was accepted into the university’s law school in her junior year, which gave students the opportunity to begin studies toward a law degree while still undergraduates. But following her first year in the program, she announced to her family that she felt that writing, not law, was her true calling.

Becoming a New Yorker

In 1949, 23-year-old Lee moved to New York City. She worked as a ticket agent for Eastern Airlines and for British Overseas Air Corp (BOAC). She reconnected with her old pal Truman Capote, who was finding his place in the literary world, and became friends with Michael Martin Brown, a Broadway composer and lyricist, and his wife Joy.

Michael and Joy Brown became Lee’s angels: For Christmas 1956, they offered to support her for an entire year so that she could quit her day jobs and write full time. The Browns also helped her get a literary agent, who got an editor at J.B. Lippincott Company to acquire her manuscript. The story, set in a small Alabama town, would slowly and painstakingly take shape to become To Kill a Mockingbird. Jean Louise “Scout” Finch, the story’s main character, was a tomboyish yet sensitive girl who had much in common with the young Nelle Harper Lee.

Work With Truman Capote

Once her manuscript was finally completed, Lee worked as a research assistant for Truman Capote for an article he was writing for The New Yorker. The sensational murder of four members of the Clutter family in a small Kansas farming community would eventually become the groundbreaking “nonfiction novel” In Cold Blood. 

Lee was disappointed by the lack of acknowledgment she received from Capote for her role in researching and assistance on In Cold Blood, and it caused a rift between them. Their estrangement deepened as Capote drifted deeper into drug culture.

Harper Lee page on Amazon

To Kill a Mockingbird

To Kill a Mockingbird was published in June of 1960 to instant acclaim and success. A coming-of-age story set in Maycomb, small Southern town, it’s told from the perspective of Jean Louise “Scout” Finch Scout’s father, Atticus Finch, is an attorney with integrity and wisdom to spare.

Scout and her older brother Jem are being raised by Atticus, a widower, and Calpurnia, their African-American housekeeper. Dill (the character inspired by Truman Capote) comes to town during the summers to stay with his aunt. He, Scout, and Jem plot ways to lure their mysterious neighbor, Arthur “Boo” Radley, out of his house so they can get a look at him.

One of the central aspects of the story is Atticus’s legal representation of a black man, Tom Robinson, who is accused of raping Mayella Ewell, a white woman. She and her father Bob Ewell, are considered the town’s “white trash.” The children learn that even plenty of proof that Tom is innocent isn’t enough for the all-white jury. Scout’s eyes are opened to the complexity of human nature, and its capacity for good and evil.

To Kill a Mockingbird was a popular as well as a critical success, lauded for capturing the complex social fabric of Southern life and examining unsettling issues of race and class in America. In addition to the Pulitzer Prize, the book won numerous other awards and was a selection of a number of book clubs.

The book made Harper Lee famous and also quite wealthy, though it didn’t change much about her frugal lifestyle. She shared a modest home with her oldest sister Alice, an attorney who oversaw many of Lee’s legal and financial affairs. She spent little on herself and generously donated to various charities and to the local Methodist church.

No one was more surprised by the incredible success of To Kill a Mockingbird than the author herself. In a 1964 interview, she said:

“I never expected any sort of success with Mockingbird. I didn’t expect the book to sell in the first place. I was hoping for a quick and merciful death at the hands of reviewers, but at the same time I sort of hoped that maybe someone would like it enough to give me encouragement. Public encouragement. I hoped for a little, as I said, but I got rather a whole lot, and in some ways this was just about as frightening as the quick, merciful death I’d expected.”

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Quotes from to Kill a Mockingbird

Film version

The 1962 film version of To Kill a Mockingbird cemented the novel’s reputation and success.  With Gregory Peck as Atticus and two children from Alabama — Mary Badham and Phillip Alford — as Scout and Jem, the film was completely true to the spirit of the novel. Peck won an Academy Award for Best Actor.

Harper Lee originally wanted the role of Atticus Finch to go to Spencer Tracy, even writing him a letter to ask that he star in the film. He was unavailable, but as it turned out, there couldn’t have been a more fitting actor to portray Atticus than Gregory Peck. Lee came to came to adore him, and the two remained friends until Peck’s death in 2003.

Gregory Peck with Harper Lee

Later Years

By the 1970s Harper Lee seemed to have had enough of public life. She retreated from view, gave few interviews, and divided her time between New York City and Monroeville.

In 2007 Harper Lee had a stroke and was dealing with various other health issues including the decline of her hearing, and eyesight, and short-term memory. After the stroke, she moved into an assisted living facility in Monroeville.

Go Set a Watchman

Go Set a Watchman was the original manuscript for what was to become To Kill a Mockingbird. It followed the lives of the characters from To Kill a Mockingbird at a later age. Scout was portrayed as a young woman in her twenties returning from New York City to her hometown in the south. Her editor astutely requested that she review the story so that it’s told from the perspective of Scout as a child. Lee spent the next two years revising the story.



Many years later, Go Set a Watchman was discovered by her lawyer, Tonja Carter, in a safe deposit box. HarperCollins announced its publication in July, 2015. Controversy immediately ensued. Some wondered if the author, then 88, was coerced in any way.  Lee issued this statement through her attorney: “I’m alive and kicking and happy as hell with the reactions to Watchman.”

Go Set a Watchman on Amazon

What was most upsetting to readers was that the saintly Atticus of Mockingbird was portrayed in Watchman as a racist with ties to the Ku Klux Klan.

The novel sparked many debates. It won over many fans hungry for more about the beloved characters of Mockingbird, but also broke the hearts of readers who disliked the revisionist view of Atticus. Another thing the book broke was sales records. It sold 720,000 copies in the first 36 hours of sales. Reviews were far more mixed than they had been for Mockingbird. It gave comfort to some readers but not others that in the end, Go Set a Watchman wasn’t a sequel to To Kill a Mockingbird, but an early draft of the book that it would evolve into.

Legacy

Though Harper Lee spent only a handful of years in the public eye, her contribution to literature and culture can’t be overstated. In addition to the 1961 Pulitzer Prize for To Kill a Mockingbird, she received countless awards, including the Alabama Humanities Award (2002) and the Presidential Medal of Freedom (2007) In 2007, she was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Harper Lee died in her sleep on February 19, 2016, in her hometown of Monroeville and was buried in Hillcrest Cemetery. She was 89.

More about Harper Lee on this site

Quotes from To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
Dear Literary Ladies: What’s scarier, failure or success?

Major Works

To Kill a Mockingbird
Go Set a Watchman

More information

Wikipedia
Encyclopedia of Alabama
biography.com
19 Things You Never Knew About Harper Lee and To Kill a Mockingbird
Reader discussion of Harper Lee’s books on Goodreads

Biographies

Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee by Charles J. Shields

Film adaptation

To Kill a Mockingbird (1962)

Research and visit

Monroe County Museum
Harper Lee letters, Emory University

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Betty Smith

Betty Smith (December 15, 1896 – January 17, 1972), an American novelist and playwright, is best remembered for her evocative coming-of-age story, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Born Elizabeth Wehner, she shared a birthdate — December 15 — with the heroine of that beloved novel, Francie Nolan, though the author’s birth year was five years earlier than Francie’s.

Betty herself had a rough childhood, growing up in the tenements of Brooklyn at the dawn of the 1900s. The family moved several times before settling in a top-floor tenement on Grand Street that served as the model for the Nolan family’s flat in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.

Her immigrant parents struggled in their impoverished new environment. Katie, her mother was tough as nails, yet passed on to Betty (who in her youth called Lizzie ) a love of storytelling. Her father, about whom little is known other than his alcoholism, died when she was nineteen. Betty borrowed from her own life to put to good use in her novels, drawing from the various jobs she held, her personal life, and her family ties.

A young mother and an education

In The Heroine’s Bookshelf, Erin Blakemore encapsulates Betty’s formative years:

Faced with a painful home life, Lizzie was eager to create her own family. Her parents forced her to leave school and start working at age fourteen, and insecure, resentful Lizzie quickly moved to associate herself with education and upward mobility. Brooklyn’s settlement houses were her social center: there, she danced, debated, studied, and met George Smith, a driven young man who wanted to get out of Brooklyn as much as she did.

When he moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan to study law, she followed. But life as a young wife was no easier than it was during the lean years of her childhood … The intervening years had brought two daughters, Nancy and Mary. Now a young mother, Lizzie felt even more pressure to educate herself. She petitioned to attend the local high school, an unusual request for a married woman. But though she worked hard, life constantly interrupted her studies. 

Worse still, the man she had followed to this far-off place became more distant with each passing year. It seemed that George’s burgeoning legal practice and rising political career had no place for a naïve, heavily accented wife. But Lizzie had aspirations of her own. She turned a  blind eye to George’s affairs and focused instead on her new plan: to become a writer.

Betty Smith page on Amazon

 

Now, Lizzie became Betty Smith the aspiring writer. When her two daughters entered grade school, she began her studies she the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. As a student she excelled, winning the prestigious Avery Hopwood Award in dramatic writing, and enjoying an education in journalism, literature, and drama.

Betty’s marriage unraveled as the couple’s lives continued to diverge. Their attempts to reconcile proved futile, and they separated for good in 1933. George Smith would go on to serve in the U.S. Senate and had a successful legal career.

Immersed in theater

Betty followed her studies at the University of Michigan with three years at the Yale Drama School in New Haven. While there, she wrote and published seven one-act plays. Overwhelmed with the cost of tuition and the care of her children (it’s unclear why her successful ex-husband wasn’t doing more to support them), Betty returned to New York City with them and moved in with her mother.

It was in the depths of the Depression that Betty fortuitously found a position in the Works Projects Administration. She was assigned to the Federal Theatre Project as a play reader, and in May of 1936, she was transferred to Chapel Hill, North Carolina. By then, she had become an accomplished playwright, and by the end of her career, had written some seventy plays. More awards would come her way, including the Rockefeller Fellowship in drama and a Dramatists Guild-Rockefeller Fellowship in playwriting.

Betty Smith’s lasting legacy is A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

It was during her Chapel Hill years that began working on her first novel. At first titled They Lived in Brooklyn, it was rejected by a number of publishers before Harper and Brothers accepted it. It was released in 1943 released with the title A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Even before its 1943 publication, Twentieth Century Fox snapped up film rights. What followed was nothing short of astounding success, quickly selling millions of copies and was translated into multiple languages. Betty Smith became a public figure. 

Francie Nolan was a modern heroine for the times. Somewhat plain and awkward, growing by dint of sheer determination and hard work rather than genius or dazzling personality. Francie endures loss and hardship, yet savors the small joys and triumphs of her world in a corner of Brooklyn. Comparing Betty’s life with that of Francie’s, it’s easy to see the parallels.

Just days before the book that made her famous was published, Betty married Joseph Piper Jones, a columnist for the Chapel Hill Weekly. 

Betty Smith helped write the film adaptation of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

Screenwriting, and another change in partners

In 1945, Smith helped write the screenplay for the film version of  A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, though it was somewhat altered and compressed compared with the timeline of the book. She also assisted in the screen adaptation for Joy in the Morning. In 1951, she helped write and put together the musical version of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.

It was that same year that Betty and Joseph Piper Jones divorced. Not long after, she married Robert Voris Finch, whom she had met during her studies at Yale. He died in 1959, after which Betty remained unmarried.

Legacy

Though known as a novelist and playwright, Betty was also as a cultural historian. Her novels and plays are richly detailed records of life in the early twentieth century. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is considered one of the great American novels of the twentieth century. Though she left Brooklyn as a young woman, it never left her. She said of her place of origin:

“Brooklyn is not a city. It is a faith. You cannot become a Brooklynite. You have to be born one. I was born in Brooklyn. For a long time I wanted to write about it the way I knew it. One day I bought a ream of paper and started to write.”

She died of pneumonia in 1972 at the age of 75, in Shelton, Connecticut.

You might also like: Memorable Quotes from A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

More about Betty Smith on this site

Betty Smith’s “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn” on the Screen
Memorable Quotes from A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
Books by Betty Smith: A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and More

Major Works

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn  (1943)
Joy in the Morning  (1947)
Maggie-Now  (1958)
Tomorrow Will Be Better  (1963)

Biographies about Betty Smith

Betty Smith: Life of the Author of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

by Valerie Raleigh Yow

More Information

Wikipedia
Reader discussion of Betty Smith’s books on Goodreads

Film adaptations

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1945)
Joy in the Morning  (1965)

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Quotes From To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee

Harper Lee (1926 – 2016) was an American author, best known for the Pulitzer Prize-winning book To Kill A Mockingbird (1960). Her second novel, Go Set A Watchman (2015), was initially considered to be a sequel, as it follows the continuing story of the Finch family, but was later revealed to be an early draft of To Kill A Mockingbird.

As one of the nation’s most celebrated writers, she remained unpublished and largely out of the public eye during the fifty five-year period between To Kill A Mockingbird and Go Set a Watchman. A book once described by Oprah Winfrey as “our national novel,” To Kill A Mockingbird has remained celebrated and highly regarded through the years. Here are some outstanding quotes from To Kill A Mockingbird, truly a Great American Novel.

“You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view … Until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it.”

“Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.”

“People generally see what they look for, and hear what they listen for.”

“The one thing that doesn’t abide by majority rule is a person’s conscience.”

“Atticus told me to delete the adjectives and I’d have the facts.”

“I think there’s just one kind of folks. Folks.”

“People in their right minds never take pride in their talents.

“As you grow older, you’ll see white men cheat black men every day of your life, but let me tell you something and don’t you forget it—whenever a white man does that to a black man, no matter who he is, how rich he is, or how fine a family he comes from, that white man is trash.”

“It was times like these when I thought my father, who hated guns and had never been to any wars, was the bravest man who ever lived.”

You may also enjoy: Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee by Charles J. Shields

“Mockingbirds don’t do one thing but make music for us to enjoy. They don’t eat up people’s gardens, don’t nest in corncribs, they don’t do one thing but sing their hearts out for us. That’s why it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.”

“With him, life was routine; without him, life was unbearable.”

“It’s never an insult to be called what somebody thinks is a bad name. It just shows you how poor that person is, it doesn’t hurt you.”

“Simply because we were licked a hundred years before we started is no reason for us not to try to win.”

“You can choose your friends but you sho’ can’t choose your family, an’ they’re still kin to you no matter whether you acknowledge ’em or not, and it makes you look right silly when you don’t.”

“There are just some kind of men who-who’re so busy worrying about the next world they’ve never learned to live in this one, and you can look down the street and see the results.”

“Before I can live with other folks I’ve got to live with myself. The one thing that doesn’t abide by majority rule is a person’s conscience.”

“Are you proud of yourself tonight that you have insulted a total stranger whose circumstances you know nothing about?”

“Shoot all the blue jays you want, if you can hit ’em, but remember it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.”

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee on Amazon

 

“It’s not necessary to tell all you know. It’s not ladylike — in the second place, folks don’t like to have someone around knowin’ more than they do. It aggravates them. Your not gonna change any of them by talkin’ right, they’ve got to want to learn themselves, and when they don’t want to learn there’s nothing you can do but keep your mouth shut or talk their language.”

“There’s a lot of ugly things in this world, son. I wish I could keep ’em all away from you. That’s never possible.”

“Bad language is a stage all children go through, and it dies with time when they learn they’re not attracting attention with it.”

“Courage is not a man with a gun in his hand. It’s knowing you’re licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what. You rarely win, but sometimes you do.”

“Try fighting with your head for a change… it’s a good one, even if it does resist learning.”

“Cry about the simple hell people give other people — without even thinking. Cry about the hell white people give colored folks, without even stopping to think that they’re people too.”

More about Harper Lee:

Review: Harper Lee’s ‘Go Set a Watchman’ Gives Atticus Finch a Dark Side
Harper Lee, Author of ‘To Kill a Mockingbird,’ Dies at 89
Harper Lee’s Will, Unsealed, Only Adds More Mystery to Her Life

The Life, Death and Career of Harper Lee

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E. Nesbit

E. Nesbit (August 15, 1858 – May 4, 1924), born Edith Nesbit, was an English novelist, short story writer, and poet best known for her imaginative books for children. Born in Kennington, Surrey, her father. a chemist, died before she was four. A sister’s poor health compelled the family to move almost continually until she was in her late teens. An imaginative yet nervous child, the family’s peripatetic ways would have an impact on the stories she would later write.

At eighteen, Edith married Hubert Bland. Though the couple had five children, the marriage was an unstable one, marked by Bland’s philandering and inability to make a living. She published under the name E. Nesbit, producing more than 40 books for children, and many more on which she collaborated. She also wrote eleven novels for adults, and many short stories.

She’s often credited with modernizing the classic children’s adventure story, infusing realism even when her tales included imaginary creatures or places. In that sense, she set the stage for the genre of contemporary fantasy. Nesbit was a politically active, ascribing to Marxism. She cofounded the Fabian Society, a socialist group that was later connected with the British Labor Party.

An introduction to E. Nesbit and her work

The following biography, which contains much bibliographic material about E. Nesbit’s best-known books, 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):

The “E” stood for Edith, but she was always called Daisy. From the time she was  seven until she was twelve she had no settled home. She was sent to boarding schools in Brighton and Sussex and in Stamford and Lincolnshire. Then, since the Nesbits were living in France, she was sent to a family in Pau who ha one little girl.

Then, as the family were still in France, to two different schools near Dinan and finally, when she was not het twelve, to a school in Germany. In one way or another all the schools were ill-chosen for the type of child she was. The school in Germany she loathed so violently that she — the most nervous of children — actually tried to run away from it. For a girl of eleven it took courage of a striking order.

Fortunately, though E. Nesbit died in 1924, some of her children lived on long after her and it was from this source that it was possible for her biographers to get an idea of what the young E. Nesbit was like. In her own reminiscences, Long Ago When I Was Young, she describes how  nervous and sensitive a child she was, and also how temperamental.

She was one of those mercurial children — and was to be a mercurial grown-up — who is up in the sky at one moment and groveling as if in the mud the next. How much of herself and her storm-tossed childhood is in her books?

A curious writer

It is on the whole just the opposite side of the picture that comes out in her stories. Perhaps it was as a present to her child-self that E. Nesbit gave her fictional families such strong roots. Usually there is a clearly described permanent home. And, though the wildest adventures take place — some in everyday work and some in the world of magic — they are almost always shown in the context of a normal family life.

E. Nesbit was a curious writer. It was as if she hugged her characters, both children and magic creatures, to herself saying: “That’s all I’m going to tell you about that lot. Now I’ll tell you something new.” She wrote three books, for instance, about the Bastable children —The Treasure Seekers, The Wouldbegoods, and The New Treasure Seekers. When she got to the end of the latter, she had Oswald, who was supposed to have written the book, write: “It is the last story the present author means ever to be the author of.” And it was.

E. Nesbit page on Amazon

Five Children and It

Then there was the magic trilogy, Five Children and It, The Phoenix and the Carpet, and The Story of the Amulet. In these books, readers met Robert, Anthea, Jane, Cyril, and the baby called The Lamb. It was first the Psammead and the Phoenix who Nesbit 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 that 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 miss either the Psammead or the Phoenix.

The Railway Children

There is nothing remotely alike about E. Nesbit’s much-loved holiday home in France and Three Chimneys, the cottage in England in which the children in The Railway Children lived, but there is a connection in the reference to running wild. Until the railway children’s father was sent to prison they had lived a conventional existence — watched and looked after every moment of the day. The author writes:

“They were just ordinary suburban children and they lived with their Father and Mother in an ordinary red-brick-fronted villa, with coloured glass in the front door, a tiled passage that was called a hall, a bathroom with hot and cold water, electric bells, French windows, and a good deal of white paint, and ‘every modern convenience’ as the house agents would say.”

But when the children came to live in Three Chimneys, all these things vanished. There were no modern conveniences at all, not even running water. But what child cares about such things? What was thrilling for the children was that there was no school and no one to look after them. Mother supported her children just as Nesbit had supported hers, by writing, so she had to leave them to their own resources. All of every day was theirs to use exactly as they liked.

They had no raft on a pond on which to travel and explore, as had Nesbit and her brothers during the summer holiday in France, but they had a railway — and oh, what a joy that was.

The House of Arden and Harding’s Luck

It is almost certain that when Nesbit wrote The House of Arden she interned to tell a magic story around the two Arden children, Elfrida and Edred. The magic creatures were the Warps; there were three of them; all moles of Sussex origin, though what they spoke was a dialect of their own.

One year after she had introduced Elfrida and Edred she published Harding’s Luck, but this time Dickie, their cousin was the hero. Harding’s Luck, in spite of Dickie and several other good characters, is not considered one of Nesbit’s best books. But Dickie, both as lame Dickie from Deptford and as Richard Arden in the Past, is one of her best-drawn characters.

Legacy

When an author dies, as E. Nesbit did in 1924, too often their books are forgotten. This did not happen in her case, for the books have gone on, loved by generation after generation of children. Not all her books were great, but enough were for her name to belong forever to children’s literature.  (—Noel Streatfeild, London, 1966)

Nesbit was an influence, directly or indirectly on writers who came after her, especially those who placed ordinary children in magical situations. These included P.L. Travers (author of Mary Poppins), C.S. Lewis, J.K. Rowling, and Diana Wynne Jones. In more contemporary fan fiction, Oswald Bastable, grown up from Nesbit’s The Treasure Seekers was the main character in a series of steampunk novels by Michael Moorcock. Four Children and It (2012) by Jacqueline Wilson is a contemporary sequel to the Five Children and It trilogy.

Some, like Gore Vidal, have argued that E. Nesbit wrote about children rather than for children, in a similar sense as Lewis Carroll did. Certainly, her books have an appeal to children of all ages, and are always ripe for rediscovery.

Major Works

In addition to the novels for children listed below, E. Nesbit produced numbers story collections, novels for adults, nonfiction, and poetry. For a more complete listing of her works, follow this link. 

Bastable series

The Story of the Treasure Seekers (1899)
The Wouldbegoods (1901)
The New Treasure Seekers (1904)
Oswald Bastable and Others (1905)

Psammead series

Five Children and It (1902)
The Phoenix and the Carpet (1904)
The Story of the Amulet (1906)

The House of Arden series

The House of Arden (1908)
Harding’s Luck (1909)

Other novels for children

The Railway Children (1906)
The Enchanted Castle (1907)
The Magic City (1910)
The Wonderful Garden (1911)

Biographies and Autobiographies

Long Ago When I Was Young by E. Nesbit (1966; posthumous)
The Life and Loves of Edith Nesbit by Eleanor Fitzsimons (2018)

Film adaptations

The Railway Children (multiple adaptatio

More information

Wikipedia
Reader discussion of E. Nesbit’s books on Goodreads
The Writing of  E. Nesbit by Gore Vidal
Five Children and a Philandering Husband: E. Nesbit’s Private Life

Read and listen online

E. Nesbit’s books on Project Gutenberg
Audio versions on Librivox

 *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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