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Insightful Quotes by Lydia Maria Child

Lydia Maria Francis Child (1802 –1880) was an American author, social reformer, journalist, and abolitionist. A native of Medford, Massachusetts, she was educated despite her father’s disapproval. Child’s passion for learning led to her writing many works of fiction and nonfiction, as well as her dedicated advocacy of the rights of women and Native Americans.

Later in life, her views became a bit muddled, but as a mid-19th-century author, she’s still considered influential. Here’s a compilation of honest and insightful quotes by Lydia Maria Child. 

“The eye of genius has always a plaintive expression, and its natural language is pathos.”

“You find yourself refreshed in the presence of cheerful people. Why not make an honest effort to confer that pleasure on others? Half the battle is gained if you never allow yourself to say anything gloomy.”

“Belief in oneself is one of the most important bricks in building any successful venture.”

“I was gravely warned by some of my female acquaintances that no woman could expect to be regarded as a lady after she had written a book.”

“That a majority of women do not wish for any important change in their social and civil condition, merely proves that they are the unreflecting slaves of custom.”

“That a majority of women do not wish for any important change in their social and civil condition, merely proves that they are the unreflecting slaves of custom.”

Child is the author of the famous Thanksgiving poem,

Over the River and Through the Wood

“Every human being has, like Socrates, an attendant spirit; and wise are they who obey its signals. If it does not always tell us what to do, it always cautions us what not to do.”

“It is right noble to fight with wickedness and wrong; the mistake is in supposing that spiritual evil can be overcome by physical means.”

“Home – that blessed word, which opens to the human heart the most perfect glimpse of Heaven, and helps to carry it thither, as on an angel’s wings.”

“Childhood itself is scarcely more lovely than a cheerful, kindly, sunshiny old age.”

“Misfortune is never mournful to the soul that accepts it; for such do always see that every cloud is an angel’s face.”

“None speak of the bravery, the might, or the intellect of Jesus; but the devil is always imagined as a being of acute intellect, political cunning, and the fiercest courage. These universal and instinctive tendencies of the human mind reveal much. ”

“Belief in oneself is one of the most important bricks in building any successful venture.”

“Economy, like grammar, is a very hard and tiresome study, after we are twenty years old.”

“Young ladies should be taught that usefulness is happiness, and that all other things are but incidental.”

“A mind full of piety and knowledge is always rich; it is a bank that never fails; it yields a perpetual dividend of happiness.”

The Frugal Housewife by Lydia Maria Child on Amazon

“In early childhood, you lay the foundation of poverty or riches, in the habits you give your children. Teach them to save everything,—not for their own use, for that would make them selfish—but for some use. Teach them to share everything with their playmates; but never allow them to destroy anything.”

“One great cause of the vanity, extravagance and idleness that are so fast growing upon our young ladies, is the absence of domestic education.”

“If young men and young women are brought up to consider frugality contemptible, and industry degrading, it is vain to expect they will at once become prudent and useful, when the cares of life press heavily upon them.”

“Law is not law, if it violates the principles of eternal justice.”

“In politeness, as in many other things connected with the formation of character, people in general begin outside, when they should begin inside; instead of beginning with the heart, and trusting that to form the manners, they begin with the manners, and trust the heart to chance influences. The golden rule contains the very life and soul of politeness.”

“Flowers have spoken to me more than I can tell in written words. They are the hieroglyphics of angels, loved by all men for the beauty of the character, though few can decypher even fragments of their meaning.”

“The cure for all the ills and wrongs, the cares, the sorrows, and the crimes of humanity, all lie in that one word ”Love.” It is the divine vitality that everywhere produces and restores life.”

“Every human being has… an attendant spirit…. If it does not always tell us what to do, it always cautions us what not to do.” 

“I will work in my own way, according to the light that is in me.”

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Lola Ridge

Lola Ridge (born Rose Emily Ridge (December 12, 1873 – May 19, 1941) was an Irish-American radical poet and editor. “Anything that burns you” was the advice she gave English critic Alice Hunt Bartlett when she asked what poets should be writing in 1925.

“I write about something that I feel intensely. How can you help writing about something you feel intensely?” The New York Times declared her “one of America’s our best poets” when she died but her interest in radicalism, feminism, and experimental poetry wrote her out of literary history. 

“An early, great chronicler of New York life,” wrote Robert Pinsky in a Slate column about Ridge in 2011. This year is the 100th anniversary of her first and most important book, The Ghetto and Other Poems, celebrating the Jewish immigrants of the Lower East Side:

They are covering up the pushcarts…

Now all have gone save an old man with mirrors–

Little oval mirrors like tiny pools.

He shuffles up a darkened street

And the moon burnishes his mirrors till they shine like phosphorus…

The moon like a skull,

Staring out of eyeless sockets at the old men trundling home the pushcarts.

Irish-born Ridge grew up in New Zealand, gave parties in the Village for William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, Jean Toomer, and Hart Crane, edited two of the most important modernist magazines, Broom and Others, and wrote ground-breaking poetry.

A year after the publication of The Ghetto and Other Poems, Ridge gave a speech in Chicago called “Woman and the Creative Will,” about how sexually constructed gender roles hinder female development – ten years before Virginia Woolf wrote “A Room of One’s Own.”

Ridge worked on an expanded version of her speech for years until Viking, her publisher, told her it wouldn’t sell. The title poem of her second book, Sun-up and Other Poems, is told in the voice of a bad girl who beats her doll, bites her nurse, wonders “if God has spoiled Jimmy” after he exposes himself, and intimates that her imaginary friend is her bisexual half.

A bigamist as well as an anarchist, Ridge left her son in an orphanage in L.A. soon after her arrival in the U.S., when she went to work for Emma Goldman and Margaret Sanger in New York. Ten years later, she protested Sacco and Vanzetti’s execution in Massachusetts, and faced down a rearing police horse.

Solo and broke in the next decade, she traveled to Baghdad and Mexico – and took a lover at sixty-one. Her five books of poetry contain poems about lynching, execution, race riots, and imprisonment. They also contained imagist poems of great power:

Brooklyn Bridge

Pythoness body — arching

Over the night like an ecstasy —

I feel your coils tightening …

And the world’s lessening breath. 

“Nice is the one adjective in the world that is laughable applied to any single thing I have ever written,” Ridge announced in 1932. The Rumpus wrote that she is “a model for poets today inspired by contemporary social movements addressing racial justice, economic inequality, and an array of sexual freedom issues.” 

Lola Ridge died in Brooklyn, NY in 1941.

Anything That Burns You: A Portrait of Lola Ridge, Radical Poet on Amazon

Contributed by Guggenheim-winner Terese Svoboda, the author of 18 books of poetry, fiction, memoir and translation. She has most recently published Anything That Burns You: A Portrait of Lola Ridge, Radical Poet (Schaffner Press, 2018). “Terese Svoboda is one of those writers you would be tempted to read regardless of the setting or the period or the plot or even the genre.” — Bloomsbury Review

Terese Svoboda’s biography of Lola Ridge, Anything That Burns You: A Portrait of Lola Ridge, Radical Poet  is now available in paperback, with an introduction by radical artist/author Molly Crabapple. “No one who cares about American culture will want to miss this book.” –– Cary Nelson, editor of Anthology of Modern American Poetry.

Major Works

The Ghetto, and Other Poems (1918)
Sun-Up, and Other Poems (1920)
Red Flag (1927)
Firehead (1929)
Dance of Fire (1935)
Collected Early Work of Lola Ridge (2018)

Biographies

Anything That Burns You: A Portrait of Lola Ridge, Radical Poet

by Terese Svoboda (2016, 2018)

More information

Wikipedia
Lola Ridge at Poetry Foundation
Lola Ridge on Poem Hunter

Articles, news, etc.

Lola Ridge, a Great Irish Writer and Why You’ve Never Heard of Her
Lola Ridge, the Radical Modernist We Won’t Forget Twice
“Anything That Burns You”: Lola Ridge

Archives

Lola Ridge Papers at Smith College

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17 Feminist Quotes from The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir

Simone de Beauvoir (1908 – 1986) was a French author, existential philosopher, political activist, feminist, and social theorist. Her most enduring work, The Second Sex (1949) is still read and studied as an essential manifesto on women’s oppression and liberation.

Filled with ideas considered radical at the time it was published, the book made her an intellectual force to be reckoned with, and inspired a generation of women to shake up the status quo. Here are quotes from The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir that will make you question how far we’ve come, and how far we still have to go.

“It is perfectly natural for the future woman to feel indignant at the limitations posed upon her by her sex. The real question is not why she should reject them: the problem is rather to understand why she accepts them.” 

“Representation of the world, like the world itself, is the work of men; they describe it from their own point of view, which they confuse with absolute truth.”

“Few tasks are more like the torture of Sisyphus than housework, with its endless repetition: the clean becomes soiled, the soiled is made clean, over and over, day after day.”

“The whole of feminine history has been man-made. Just as in America there is no Negro problem, but rather a white problem; just as anti-Semitism is not a Jewish problem, it is our problem; so the woman problem has always been a man problem.”

“Her wings are cut and then she is blamed for not knowing how to fly.” 

“One’s life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others, by means of love, friendship, indignation, compassion.”

“In itself, homosexuality is as limiting as heterosexuality: the ideal should be to be capable of loving a woman or a man; either, a human being, without feeling fear, restraint, or obligation.”

The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir on Amazon

“When we abolish the slavery of half of humanity, together with the whole system of hypocrisy that it implies, then the ‘division’ of humanity will reveal its genuine significance and the human couple will find its true form.”

“All oppression creates a state of war. And this is no exception.”

“Men do not like tomboys, nor bluestockings, nor thinking women; too much audacity, culture, intelligence, or character frightens them.”

“One is not born a genius, one becomes a genius; and the feminine situation has up to the present rendered this becoming practically impossible.”

“On the day when it will be possible for woman to love not in her weakness but in strength, not to escape herself but to find herself, not to abase herself but to assert herself — on that day love will become for her, as for man, a source of life and not of mortal danger.”

You might also like: Philosophical Quotes by Simone de Beavuoir

“No one is more arrogant toward women, more aggressive or scornful, than the man who is anxious about his virility.”

“Man is defined as a human being and woman as a female – whenever she behaves as a human being she is said to imitate the male.”

“Without a doubt it is more comfortable to endure blind bondage than to work for one’s liberation; the dead, too, are better suited to the earth than the living.” 

“The curse which lies upon marriage is that too often the individuals are joined in their weakness rather than in their strength, each asking from the other instead of finding pleasure in giving.”

“To catch a husband is an art; to hold him is a job.”

*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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Lydia Maria Child

Lydia Maria Francis Child (February 11, 1802 – October 20, 1880) was a prolific American author, social reformer, journalist, and abolitionist. Born in Medford, Massachusetts. She was educated despite the disapproval of her father, a baker, who thought she ought not to read at all. But Lydia’s appetite for learning was voracious, and the books she devoured were supplied primarily by her brother Convers Francis, who later became a Unitarian minister and professor at Harvard Divinity School.

When Lydia was twelve, her mother died and she was sent to live with an older married sister in Norridgewock, Maine. There she had contact with native Americans of the Penobscot and Abenaki tribes and visited them in their wigwams.

According to Elaine Showalter, author of A Jury of Her Peers, as a child, Lydia “saw a Penobscot woman who had borne a child and then walked four miles through the snow. She also met the Penobscot chief Captain Neptune.” These early encounters and friendships informed her lifelong passion to advocate on behalf of Native Americans.

First novels and a challenging marriage

Her first novel, Hobomok (1824) was published under the pseudonym “An American,” because she was warned that “no woman could expect to be regarded as a lady after she had written a book.” Set during the colonial period, the story concerns the marriage of a white woman, Mary Conant, to Hobomok, the titled Native American, and how she raised her son in white society after the death of her husband. The mixed marriage theme was quite taboo, and at first, the novel fared poorly. 

The North American Review wrote that the novel was “unnatural” and “revolting to every feeling of delicacy.” Lydia was a good self-promoter, though, and through her efforts among the Boston literati, the novel was read and became successful.

From 1826 to 1834, Lydia edited The Juvenile Miscellany, the first American children’s monthly periodical.

Her second novel, The Rebels, or Boston Before the Revolution (1825) was even less favorably reviewed than Homobok had at first been. One critic who was kind to the book was David Lee Child, a brilliant but erratic Boston lawyer and journalist, who was so fast and loose with his writing that he earned the nickname David Libel Child. Reader, she married him. 

From the time Lydia hitched her fortunes to David’s in 1928, her life was one of work and worry. She continually had to earn money to pay his legal costs and debts. Like Louisa May Alcott who came slightly after her, she considered writing as a way to make a living, rather than as a means of artistic expression. Lydia desperately needed money, and in addition to writing, she also took in boarders and taught school.

The Frugal Housewife

In 1829, Lydia published The Frugal Housewife, which was “dedicated to those who are not ashamed of economy.” Aside from basic recipes, she also provided advice on basic matters of housekeeping and home repairs. It wasn’t a rarified view of home life, and Lydia was critiqued for her “indelicacy.”

Still the book was wildly successful. Emphasizing frugality in the kitchen and self-reliance in the household, it went through dozens of printings, and was the first domestic cookbook to rival Amelia Simmons’s American Cookery (1796). The Frugal Housewife is still in print.

The Frugal Housewife by Lydia Maria Child on Amazon

The cause of abolition

In the early 1830s, Lydia and David child began to devote themselves to the anti-slavery cause, and in 1833 she published An Appeal for that Class of Americans called Africans, a stirring portrayal of the evils of slavery, and an argument for immediate abolition. This book was influential in winning recruits to the anti-slavery cause.

Lydia remained devoted to the cause of abolition. From 1840 to 1844, Lydia and David edited the Anti-Slavery Standard in New York City. After the Civil War, she worked on behalf of the rights of freed slaves. She also returned to her early interest in the rights of Native Americans.

A strangely tainted legacy

However, her views had become tainted with conservatism and bias. In her 1868 book An Appeal for the Indians she wrote, “How ought we to view the peoples who are less advanced than ourselves?” and professed “considerable repugnance” toward them. It’s unclear why such a passionate social reformer, whose pen flowed so freely, should have ended up in this manner. Elaine Showalter observed:

“It is ironic that Child, who started out as one of the most passionate, defiant, and iconoclastic writers of her generation, especially in her hatred of Calvinism, her resistance to patriarchal tyranny, and her opposition to American oppression of its ‘less advanced’ peoples, should end by repeating the psychological patterns she had so brilliantly analyzed and condemned. 

Child’s literary career was marked by debate and duality; in her fiction she structured plots around people with complex choices between two radically different ways of life … but toward the end of her life, Child found herself  ‘too old to write imaginative things.'”(from A Jury of Her Peers, 2009)

Despite her creeping conservatism, she was a founding member of the Massachusetts Women’s Suffrage Association and wrote The History of the Conditions of Women in Various Ages and Nations, which influenced the generation of suffragists that came after her.

The messy and contradictory end to her reputation as a reformer notwithstanding,Lydia Maria Child is considered a highly influential 19th-century author and reformer. She died in Wayland, Massachusetts, on October 20, 1880, at age 78.

Child is the author of the famous Thanksgiving poem,

Over the River and Through the Wood

Major works

This is but a partial list of Lydia Maria Child’s profuse output:

Hobomok (1824)
The Rebels (1825)
The (American) Frugal Housewife (1829), one of the earliest American books on domestic economy
The Mother’s Book (1831), a pioneer cookbook republished in England and Germany
The Girls’ Own Book (1831)
History of Women (2 vols., 1832), Good Wives (1833)
The Anti-Slavery Catechism (1836)
Philothea (1836), a romance of the age of Pericles
Letters from New York (2 vols., 1843-1845)
Fact and Fiction (1847)
The Power of Kindness (1851)
Isaac T. Hopper: a True Life (1853)
The Progress of Religious Ideas through Successive Ages (3 vols., 1855)
Autumnal Leaves (1857)
Looking Toward Sunset (1864)
The Freedman’s Book (1865)
A Romance of the Republic (1867)
Aspirations of the World (1878)

More information

Wikipedia
Reader discussion of Child’s books on Goodreads
Poetry Foundation
History of American Women

Read and listen online

Project Gutenberg
Librivox
Internet Archive

Articles, News, etc.

Lydia Maria Child’s ‘Frugal Housewife’ the Must-Read Book of its Day

Research

Lydia Maria Child papers, Columbia University

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Harriet Beecher Stowe

Harriet Beecher Stowe (June 14, 1811 – July 1, 1896), American author and abolitionist, is best known for the anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin.  She grew up in a large, socially progressive family of ministers, authors, reformers, and educators who were well known in their time.

Among her siblings were the prominent minister Henry Ward Beecher, and educator Catharine Beecher. Harriet showed an early talent for writing and in her early twenties had a steadily paying profession, contributing articles to numerous publications.

Her husband, Calvin Ellis Stowe was a biblical scholar and educator. The two were married in 1836. He was a firm supporter of her talents, but was no help in the household, and not much of a provider. Struggling with divided loyalties, her assertion to her husband in this letter, “If I am to write, I must have a room to myself” neatly presages Virginia Woolf’s declaration that “a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.” 

A working mother and writer desires to do more

Harriet Beecher Stowe sold anything and everything (sketches, poems, religious tracts, etc.) she could to support her growing family, since her husband was a poor clergyman. Though she bore seven children and struggled in genteel poverty, she found a way to write for profit and purpose. Still, there were always conflicting feelings. In 1841 she wrote to her husband:

“Our children are just coming to the age when everything depends on my efforts. They are delicate in health, and nervous and excitable and need a mother’s whole attention. Can I lawfully divide my attention by literary efforts?”

The book Stowe longed to write “to make this whole nation feel what an accursed thing slavery is” was put off from one year to the next:

“As long as the baby sleeps with me nights I can’t do much at anything, but I will do it at last.”

At age 39, still in the midst of tending to her large family, Stowe found a way to disseminate the story she longed to tell, publishing monthly installments of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in an abolitionist newsletter. With each issue, public interest built.

Inspiration for Uncle Tom’s Cabin

However much Stowe longed for money and privacy, it could be argued that being a mother played a pivotal role in creating her magnum opus, Uncle Tom’s Cabin. When she lost her beloved son Samuel Charles to cholera at age 18 months, the grief was crushing. Later she claimed that this loss helped her empathize with slave mothers who whose children were torn from them to be auctioned off.

 She wrote in an 1853 letter:

“I wrote what I did because as a woman, as a mother, I was oppressed and broken-hearted with the sorrows and injustice I saw … It is no merit in the sorrowful that they weep, or to the oppressed and smothering that they gasp and struggle, not to me, that I must speak for the oppressed — who cannot speak for themselves.”

Meeting escaped slaves while living in Cincinnati and hearing about their plights was another impetus for Harriet’s desire to use her talent to give slavery a human face, and expose its injustice. The passing of the Fugitive Slave act of 1853 gave her the final push to write the story she so long to tell. Later she would say that she did not actually write it on her own, but merely took dictation from God.

First international bestseller

Stowe became the first American author whose book could claim the distinction of being an international best seller. After the publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in 1852, no book sold faster out of the gate; 1.5 million copies were sold worldwide by the end of its first year, and in the entire nineteenth century, only the Bible sold more copies. The book not only helped change the course of history, but changed the business of publishing as it was known.

It may be overstating the case to claim that the book helped to ignite the Civil War, though some historians do believe that this book laid the groundwork. President Abraham Lincoln was quoted as saying when he met Stowe in 1862, “So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war!”

This incident, or at least what the president said to the author, may be a legend. But what is considered true is that the book helped create a shift in pubic opinion about slavery. There was also a swift and serious backlash from slavery apologists as well as theatrical adaptations. Though the public — both in the U.S. and England — bought the book in droves, critics weren’t always kind to the book.

How Harriet Beecher Stowe was inspired to write Uncle Tom’s Cabin

Financial rewards

Having struggled financially in all her married life, Stowe was amazed by the income she received from the sale of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, telling a friend and fellow abolitionist in an 1853 letter:

“You ask with regard to the remuneration which I have received for my work here in America. Having been poor all my life and expecting to be poor the rest of it, the idea of making money by a book which I wrote just because I couldn’t help it, never occurred to me. It was therefore an agreeable surprise to receive ten thousand dollars as the first-fruits of three month’s sale. I presume as much more is now due.”

More novels and legacy

Stowe suffered devastating losses as a mother. Aside from the aforementioned Samuel Charles, another son drowned while attending college at age 19. A third son, having returned whole from serving for the Union in the Civil War, moved to San Francisco and went missing, never to be heard from again. Stowe was solely in charge of the domestic duties and children, as were all women of her time. Writing was done in the midst of vast responsibilities and intermittent grief. It was a wonder that she was able to be so productive.

Stowe continued to write novels (Dred, The Minister’s Wooing, Oldtown Folks, and The Pearl of Orr’s Island) as well as essays and articles. Though the literary merits of her work have long been debated, there is little dispute that Uncle Tom’s Cabin caused a major shift in public perception of slavery.

Harriet Beecher Stowe died in 1896 in Hartford, CT, at age 85.

Harriet Beecher Stowe page on Amazon

More about Harriet Beecher Stowe on this site

How Harriet Beecher Stowe was inspired to write Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Harriet Beecher Stowe, Motherhood, and Writing
8 Feminist Quotes by Harriet Beecher Stowe
Perceptive and Personal Quotes by Harriet Beecher Stowe
Quotes from the Novels of Harriet Beecher Stowe

Major Works

Uncle Tom’s Cabin   (1852)
Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp   (1856)
The Minister’s Wooing   (1859)
The Pearl of Orr’s Island   (1862)
Oldtown Folks   (1869)
Lady Byron Vindicated   (1870)
My Wife and I  (1871)

Biographies about Harriet Beecher Stowe

Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life  by Joan D. Hedrick
Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe  by Harriet Beecher Stowe

More Information

Wikipedia
The Stowe Society
Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Life
Harriet Beecher Stowe on Biography.com
Harriet Beecher Stowe page on Amazon.com
Reader discussion of Stowe’s books on Goodreads

Read and listen online

Harriet Beecher Stowe’s works on Project Gutenberg
Audio versions of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s books on Librivox

Articles & News

Harriet Beecher Stowe, Spiritual Adventurer
Abolition Film Shoots at Stowe House
College Denies Local’s Claim About Where Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”


James Holly vs. Harriet Beecher Stowe
The National and International Impact of Uncle Tom’s Cabin  

Visit 

The Stowe House – Cincinnati, OH
The Harriet Beecher Stowe Center – Hartford, CT
Uncle Tom’s Cabin – Dresden, Ontario, Canada

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She Came to Stay by Simone de Beauvoir

She Came to Stay by Simone de Beauvoir was originally published in France in 1943 as L’Invitee. The autobiographical, philosophical novel was based on de Beauvoir’s open relationship with Jean-Paul Sartre, and takes place just before and during World War II.

The novel’s main character, Françoise, is based on de Beauvoir herself, and Pierre is a thinly veiled Sartre. A younger woman, Xaviere, enters their lives as they form a ménage a trois. Xaviere is a mash-up of sisters Olga and Wanda Kosakiewicz.

The novels themes are freedom, dependence, sexuality, and the other. And in addition to the trials and tribulations of love and complex relationships, the story incorporates elements of existentialism, the philosophy that embraced by de Beauvoir and Sartre. Central to this philosophy is finding the meaning of life and self through free will, choice, and personal responsibility.

She Came to Stay wasn’t published in the U.S. until 1954 in its English translation. At that point, de Beauvoir had become known for the book that would come to define her — The Second Sex — considered a feminist classic since it first saw print. Here’s an American review of She Came to Stay that recognizes its multifaceted layers as a work of fiction and as a roman a clef:

From the original review of She Came to Stay by Simone de Beauvoir (1954) in the Albany Democrat-Herald, March, 1954. Translated from the French.

When Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex was published, it blew up a storm among reviewers — male reviewers mostly … This attention to Simone de Beauvoir had its value — it has resulted in the publication of her novel, She Came to Stay, titled L’Invitee in the original 1943 Paris edition, one of the best of the French war era and still the most original Existential novel, rivaling Sartre’s Nausea.

A line from Hegel introducing the novel, “Each conscience seeks the death of the other,” is the philosophical key to the physical problem. That problem is the oldest of all — the triangle, Pierre and Françoise, people of the theatre, and Xaviere from Rouen.

The three live in love as one, suffering. Gerbert, an actor, comes in as an intermission for both Françoise and Xaviere. It’s Françoise’s story. Intelligent and beautiful, honest with herself and others, she accepts Pierre’s relationship with Xaviere, accepts the shallow Xaviere into her liaison. She has esteem for Pierre, he has respect for her.

She Came to Stay by Simone de Beauvoir on Amazon

The needs of love

“You don’t realize it,” she said, “and that’s not surprising. You’ve so set your mind on this love of ours, that you’ve put it in safekeeping, beyond time, beyond life, beyond reach. From time to time, you think about it with satisfaction, but what has actually become of it, you never look to see.” She burst into sobs. “But I — I want to look.”

Xaviere, enamored with Parisian ways, can be nothing but unpredictable, capricious. She has “red peasant’s fingers,” beautiful wrists. Pierre is male, competent, a master in the theater and encompasses both women. With psychological sharpness, the author displays the conflict, the three pitted against each other yet unable to split up.

Simone de Beauvoir’s scalpel never hesitates as it cuts through layer after layer. Her lines are dramatic, though never overwrought; her people breathe and talk as in life they must. No philosophical asides are thrust in, although the theme is straight from philosophy — and transferring philosophy to living people and scenes is the most difficult problem a writer may try. the vociferous male reviewers now may take a second look, this time at Simone de Beauvoir, novelist.

You might also like:

Philosophical Quotes by Simone de Beauvoir

Quotes from She Came to Stay



“All she had to do was make the simplest of gestures — open her hands and let go her hold. She lifted one hand and moved the fingers of it; they responded, in surprise and obedience, and this obedience of a thousand little unsuspected muscles was in itself a miracle. Why ask for more?”

“At that moment, there were thousands of women all over the world listening breathlessly to the beating of their own hearts; each woman to her own heart, each woman for herself. How could she believe that she was the center of the world?”




“Day after day, minute after minute, Françoise had fled the danger; but the worst had happened, and she had at last come face to face with this insurmountable obstacle, which she had sensed, under vague forms since her earliest childhood. Behind Xavière’s maniacal pleasure, behind her hatred and jealousy, the abomination loomed, as monstrous and definite as death. Before Françoise’s very eyes, yet apart from her, existed something like a condemnation with no appeal: free, absolute, irreducible, an alien consciousness was rising.”

“Alone. She had acted alone. As alone as in death. One day Pierre would know. But even he would only know her act from the outside. No one could condemn or absolve her. Her act was her very own. “I have done it of my own free will. It was her own will which was being fulfilled, now nothing separated her from herself. She had chosen at last. She had chosen herself.”

More about She Came to Stay by Simone de Beauvoir


In-depth 1954 analysis in Commentary Magazine
Reader discussion on Goodreads
Review on Tin House


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Comedy, American Style by Jesse Redmon Fauset (1933)

Comedy, American Style by Jesse Redmon Fauset (1882 – 1961) was the last novel by this influential author, poet, and editor associated with the Harlem Renaissance. Published in 1933, the title is completely ironic; this story is, if anything, more of a tragedy.

In this story, Jessie Fauset explores themes of racial identity, self-hatred, and the concept of “passing” in the deeply biased American culture. The main character, Olivia Cary, is domineering mother who wants her children to pass as white, which leads to to dire consequences for the family.

When it was first published, reviews of Comedy, American Style were mixed. Some critics thought Fauset’s writing style rather prissy. Olivia was compared with tragic heroines like Lady Macbeth and Emma Bovary. There were many positive views, as well. Comedy offered, some thought, a more realistic view of the concept of “passing” than Imitation of Life (a big bestseller that same year, 1933) by Fannie Hurst, a Jewish author. 

Here’s an original review that was published in a leading black newspaper in 1933, the year in which the book came out. It’s a fascinating perspective on the work of an author being rediscovered decades after her virtual disappearance from the literary scene.

A 1933 review of Comedy, American Style

From The Pittsburgh Courier, December 9, 1933: Jessie Fauset, who, without a doubt, has carved for herself a niche in American literature, scores with this absorbing novel about the eternal color question — inter-racial and intra-racial — in America. Being a woman of color herself, and having lived in the “land of the free and the home of the brave” practically all her life, Miss Fauset is thoroughly qualified to handle this question of color prejudice found in a class of [black][ society little known to white America.

When Olivia was deeply hurt in her childhood by two incidents, she definitely decided that after she grew up she would “pass” over into the white world. So intent was she on being white that for a long time she preferred the company of common white mill hands and drug clerks to that of refined, educated, and cultured people of color.

But Olivia was a reasoning person, and thought that if she could not marry a truly white man of good standing, culture, and education, she would marry one who apparently was white and they could lose their identity, and though their children, go on over to the other side.

You might also like: Plum Bun by Jessie Redmon Fauset

With that in mind, Olivia accepts the attentions of Christopher Cary, a promising young doctor, who was as white as she in color, and later married him. She married him without love, only because he was white in color.

Olivia felt absolutely sure that her children would be “white.” Had not her own brother and sister of her mother’s second marriage been white? What had she to fear on this score?

When her first two children were born she rejoiced to know that she had been right. Their whiteness was an assured fact. “Olivia had been positive that all of her Negro blood had been wrought by her white blood to a consistency as pure  … as limpid as that which flowed through the heart of the whitest woman she knew.”

She thought that she had lost through her children the sum total of that black blood she so hated. But she rejoiced too soon, reckoning without Mother Nature, who figuratively laughed in glee when Olivia’s third baby was born.

Comedy, American Style by Jessie Redmon Fauset on Amazon

Olivia’s intense hatred of all people of color, her sinister influence over her family, and the resulting tragedy make this book a thoroughly human tale well worth reading. The theme used affords excellent material for the plot, which is developed skillfully and brought to a logical conclusion.

The characterizations are good. There is Olivia Cary with her warped nature, arousing contempt with her passion to be white; Phebe Grant, with her womanly sweetness and understanding; Marise Davies, the beautiful brown girl, whose dancing feet carry her to the heights of acclaim; Oliver Cary, handsome, sensitive, talented brown boy, whose accident of color earns for him his mother’s hatred; Teresa Cary, beautiful, though weak and vacillating, an easy prey for her domineering mother.

Learn more about Jessie Redmon Fauset

More about Comedy, American Style by Jessie Redmon Fauset

Reader discussion on Goodreads
Read for free on Internet Archive
The Forgotten Work of Jessie Redmon Fauset

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Classic African-American Women Authors on Literary Ladies Guide

Here’s an introduction to classic African-American women authors. Fortunately, there are many more women of color writing and being published today who will join the ranks of classic authors. Those listed below are, like all the Literary Ladies on this site, are those who have passed on. You’ll find a listing of the biographies, books, quotes, poetry, and more, presented on this site.

This page will continue to grow as more posts are added about these writers as well as biographies of other classic African-American women authors. In addition to information about the individual authors listed below, you might also enjoy:

Renaissance Women: 12 Female Writers of the Harlem Renaissance
10 Pioneering African-American Women Journalists


Maya Angelou

Maya Angelou (1928 – 2014) was an American author, actress, screenwriter, dancer, poet, and civil rights activist. During her lifetime, she published seven autobiographies, three books of essays, and several books of poetry. She received dozens of awards and more than thirty honorary doctoral degrees.

Books by Maya Angelou on this site

The Heart of a Woman 

More about Maya Angelou on this site

Biography
Maya Angelou Quotes To Live By
10 Fascinating Facts About Maya Angelou


Gwendolyn Brooks

Gwendolyn Brooks (1917 – 2000) was an American poet whose works included sonnets and ballads as well as blues rhythm in free verse. She also created lyrical poems, some of which were book-length.

Books by Gwendolyn Brooks on this site

Annie Allen  (1949)
The Bean Eaters  (1960)
Primer for Blacks  (1980)

More about Gwendolyn Brooks on this site

Biography
Quotes on Writing and Life
5 Things to Love About Gwendolyn Brooks
The Poet as Working Mother
Poetic Quotes from Maud Martha
A Surprised Queenhood in the New Black Sun  (biography)


Octavia Butler

Octavia Estelle 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. Her otherworldly novels and stories grapple with issues of race, class, and gender.

Books by Octavia Butler on this site

Adulthood Rites (1988)
Parable of the Sower  (1993)
Parable of the Talents  (1998)

More about Octavia Butler on this site

Biography
Octavia Butler Quotes on Writing and Human Nature
12 Fast Facts About Octavia Butler


Jessie Redmon Fauset

Jessie Redmon Fauset (1882 – 1961) was an American editor, poet, essayist, and novelist who was deeply involved with the Harlem Renaissance literary movement. In 1919 became the literary editor of the NAACP magazine The Crisis, and in that capacity helped launch the careers of a number of significant writers.

Books by Jessie Redmon Fauset on this site

Plum Bun: A Novel Without a Moral   (1928) 

More about Jessie Redmon Fauset on this site

Biography
6 Poems by Jessie Redmon Fauset
Literary Midwife: Jessie Redmon Fauset
Quotes by Jessie Redmon Fauset


Lorraine Hansberry

Lorraine Hansberry (1930 – 1965) was an American playwright and author. Her play, A Raisin in the Sun, was the first play written by an African-American woman to be brought to broadway. At the age of 29, Hansberry became the youngest American and the first African-American playwright to win the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award for Best Play.

More about Lorraine Hansberry on this site

Biography
Quotes by Lorraine Hansberry, Author of A Raisin in the Sun



 Zora Neale Hurston

Zora Neale Hurston (1891 – 1960) was an African-American novelist, memoirist, and folklorist. With her determined intelligence and bold personality, she quickly became a big name in the Harlem Renaissance movement of the 1920s. She and her work were all but forgotten by the time of her death, though interest in her work has blossomed through the efforts of Alice Walker.

Books by Zora Neale Hurston on this site

Mules and Men  (1935)
Their Eyes Were Watching God  (1937)
Tell My Horse  (1938)
Moses, Man of the Mountain  (1939)
I Love Myself When I Am Laughing  (posthumous anthology, 1979)
Every Tongue Got to Confess  (posthumous anthology, 2001)

More about Zora Neale Hurston on this site

Zora Neale Hurston Quotes and Life Lessons
5 Quotes from “How it Feels to Be Colored Me”
“Crazy for This Democracy”
Quotes from Their Eyes Were Watching God
What White Publishers Won’t Print
1934 Interview with Zora Neale Hurston
Fannie Hurst and Zora Neale Hurston, a Literary Friendship
Zora and Money Matters
Zora Neale Hurston’s “Sweat”: An Ecofeminist Master Class in Dialect and Symbolism
Zora on Books, Publishing, and Publishers


Nella Larsen

Nella Larsen (1891 – 1964) was an American author associated with the Harlem Renaissance movement. Her body of writing was modest, but she was considered a respected voice of her time. Recently, there has been renewed interest in Larsen, the first African-American woman to graduate from library school and to receive the Guggenheim Fellowship for creative writing.

Books by Nella Larsen on this site

Quicksand  (1928)
Passing  (1929)

More about Nella Larsen on this site

Insightful Quotes from Passing by Nella Larsen 
Quotes from Quicksand and Others by Nella Larsen
Passing  (1929): An Introduction
In Search of Nella Larsen by George Hutchinson






Audre Lorde

Audre Geraldine Lorde (1934 – 1992) was a self-identified “black lesbian, mother, warrior, poet” who grew up in New York City. She used her platform as a writer to spread ideas and experiences about the intersecting oppressions faced by many, especially women of color.

More about Audre Lorde on this site

Biography
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



Ann Petry

Ann Petry (1908 – 1997) was the first African-American woman to produce a book whose sales topped one million. Her book, The Street, ended up selling a million and a half copies.

Books by Ann Petry on this site

The Street (1946)
Country Place   (1947)
The Narrows  (1953)

More about Ann Petry on this site

Ann Petry Talks of Race Problems
Ann Petry obituary (1997)
6 Interesting Facts About Ann Petry
Quotes from The Street by Ann Petry
Ann Petry, Author of ‘The Street,’ Dies At 88


Dorothy West

Dorothy West (1907 – 1998) was an American author and editor associated with the Harlem Renaissance. Though her body of work wasn’t large, it was well respected. She was known for her depictions of upper-class African-American families and communities.

Books by Dorothy West on this site

The Wedding 
The Richer, The Poorer

More about Dorothy West on this site

Biography
Dorothy West Quotes on Identity and Experience
The Wedding: A mini-series (1998) 



Phillis Wheatley

Phillis Wheatley (ca 1753 – December 5, 1784) was born in Senegal / Gambia, Africa. She was America’s first African-American poet and one of the first women to be published in colonial America. She was also the first slave in the U.S. to have a book of poetry published.

More about Phillis Wheatley on this site

Biography

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Quicksand by Nella Larsen (1928)

Quicksand by Nella Larsen (1928) was the first novel by this author associated with the Harlem Renaissance. A story with autobiographical elements, it was largely well received, though not a big seller. Helga Crane, the main character, like Nella Larsen, is the mixed-race daughter of a white Danish mother and a black father.

The plot takes her back and forth from Denmark, “Naxos” (a thinly veiled version of the Tuskegee Institute, where Larsen worked briefly), and Harlem. Wherever Helga goes, she fails to find a community in which she can be comfortable with who she is. 

Nella Larsen’s fictional young women of mixed race — in this book and in Passing — grapple for a sense of identity and belonging, mirroring her own life. Larsen never felt quite at home in either the European community of her mother, nor in either the black world or the white in the U.S., at a time when the “color line” was strictly drawn.

Quicksand is an appropriate title for the book. Apart from societal conditions over which she has no control, some of the messes that Helga sinks into are of her own making. 

Following are portions of two reviews from 1928, the year in which Passing was published. It’s fascinating to view the work from the perspective of that time, rather than the long lens of the decades gone by.

1928 review from The New York Age

This review from the New York Age, an important black newspaper, is dated June 23, 1928:

Quicksand by Nella Larsen is a novel of frustration, which presents a peculiar study in the psychology of her heroine, whose life is a failure though no one’s fails but her ow innate perverseness. Helga Crane was the daughter of a Danish mother and a [black] father, and her temperament alternated between the two different strains, with the disastrous result that she could adopt neither permanently nor even find refuge in a middle of the road course.

Repelling the growing interest of the educator who she discovered too late was the man she really loved, she went to Denmark and disappointed her mother’s family by refusing to marry a Danish artist, who became fascinated by her. Her return to New York opened her eyes too late, for the man she loved had married her friend and proved faithful to his choice.

The incident of her accidental attendance at a religions revival meeting, with its cataclysmic effect, and her hasty marriage to the unlettered preacher, inconsistent as they sound, are made to appear as the inevitable outcome of the emotional conflict within her.

Her submersion into the road of the unwilling mother of numerous progeny, whom she had to rear in primitive surroundings, is invested with a sense of human tragedy.

Quicksand & Passing by Nella Larsen on Amazon

Another 1928 review

This review from the Reading (PA) Times, is dated May 14, 1928:

Here again is the old theme of mixed blood, [black] and Scandinavian this time, with the North, South, Chicago, Harlem, and even Denmark for the backgrounds.

The story has to do with Helga Crane, a daughter of a Danish woman and a nameless [black] man. She suffers the discriminations dealt to Negroes in Chicago and her education and the instincts she inherited from her mother make her feel those abuses more acutely.

At the age of 22 — she is a school teacher then — she revolts and flees. Throughout the book she revolts. Even in the last paragraph, after having borne four children as rapidly as the exigencies of nature permits, she revolts at the idea of bringing children into the world to suffer — and goes about preparing to give birth to the fifth.

The real charm of this book lies in Miss Larsen’s delicate achievement in maintaining for a long time an indefinable, wistful feeling — that feeling of longing and at the same time a conscious realization of the impossibility of obtaining — that is contained in the idea of Helga Crane.

… It runs beautifully and artistically through the maze of realities and artificialities; the prim correctness of the school at Naxos; the mad run of Chicago; the intellectual absurdities of Harlem; the cold gentleness of Copenhagen.

Always [there is] a wistful note of longing, of anxiety of futile searching, of an unconscious desire to balance black and white blood into something that is more tangible than a thing than merely is neither black nor white, of a nervous, fretful search for happiness.

Passing, Larsen’s next novel was published just a year later, in 1929. It’s more tightly plotted and paced, showing the growth of an artist who has mastered her craft. Unfortunately, she virtually disappeared from the literary community not long after.

Interest in Nella Larsen’s work has grown since Passing was reissued in 2001. She has been described as “not only the premier novelist of the Harlem Renaissance, but also an important figure in American modernism.” With the growing interest in Passing as a modern classic, Quicksand has also been rediscovered. The two books have been published in one volume in contemporary editions.

RELATED POSTS

Insightful Quotes from Passing by Nella Larsen

Quotes from Quicksand  by Nella Larsen

Passing  (1929): An Introduction

In Search of Nella Larsen by George Hutchinson

*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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Nella Larsen

Nella Larsen (April 13, 1891 – March 30, 1964), born Nellie Walker in Chicago was an American author associated with the Harlem Renaissance movement. Her body of writing was modest, but she was considered a respected voice of her time. She was the first African-American woman to graduate from library school and to receive the Guggenheim Fellowship for creative writing. The theme of her life, and in effect, her work, was a sense of never belonging — not to any community, nor even to an immediate family.

Her mother, Marie Hansen, was a white Danish immigrant; her father, Peter Walker, was likely of mixed race and from the Danish West Indies. He may have died when Nella was quite young. Her mother remarried Peter Larsen, another white Danish immigrant, with whom she had another daughter; Nella took his surname. To be the only non-white member of her family put her in a precarious position at the time. The family moved to a mostly white neighborhood, and thus began a life in which Nella never felt a sense of belonging. 

In his review of In Search of Nella Larsen by George Hutchinson, Darryl Pinckney wrote, “as a member of a white immigrant family, she had no entrée into the world of the blues  or of the black church. If she could never be white like her mother and sister, neither could she ever be black in quite the same way that Langston Hughes and his characters were black. Hers was a netherworld, unrecognizable historically and too painful to dredge up.”

Education and nursing career

Nella attended Fisk University, a historically all-black college in Nashville, Tennessee in 1907. For the first time, she was part of an all-black community. Not having any real connection with the students, who were primarily from the South, she once again felt out of place and dropped out after a year. She then spent four years in Denmark with relatives.

Upon returning to the U.S. in 1914, Nella enrolled in a nursing school program in New York City. After completing the one-year program, she worked as head nurse at the renowned Tuskegee Institute (Alabama). The poor working conditions, coupled with a disappointment with Tuskegee founder Booker T. Washington’s educational philosophy, made this sojourn short-lived. She returned to New York and resumed work as a nurse.

You might also like: Quicksand by Nella Larsen (1928)

Marriage and divorce

Nella Larsen married Elmer Imes, a physicist, in 1919. He was notable as the second African-American to earn a doctorate in physics. The following year, her first short stories were published. The couple moved to Harlem shortly thereafter. A connection with NAACP notables gave her entrée into the world of the Harlem Renaissance. Their peers and colleagues were highly educated blacks, a cultural elite, and with her lack of formal education and mixed ancestry, Nella once again felt a keen sense of being out of place.

During the marriage, Nella sometimes wrote under the name Nella Larsen Imes. The marriage was not a happy one, and the couple divorced in the early 1930s.

Career as a librarian

In the early 20s, Nella volunteered at the legendary Harlem branch of the New York Public Library, which was a hub of cultural activity. She was encouraged by head librarian Ernestine Rose to get training, and received certification from the NYPL’s own school. Pausing her nursing career, she began working as a librarian on the Lower East Side before returning to the Harlem branch.

1925 was a turning point for Nella. Though she had to take a sabbatical from work for health reasons, she used the time to start her first novel, and made an effort to become more engaged in the cultural activities of the Harlem Renaissance.

RELATED POSTS

Insightful Quotes from Passing by Nella Larsen

Quotes from Quicksand  by Nella Larsen

Passing (1929): An Introduction

In Search of Nella Larsen by George Hutchinson

Quicksand and Passing

Quicksand (1928) was her first novel, published in 1928. Though it was well-received critically, its sales were modest. The story was partially autobiographical. Like Larsen, Helga Crane, the main character, is the mixed-race daughter of a white Danish mother and a mixed-race father from the Caribbean. She travels back and forth from Denmark, teaches at “Naxos,” a thinly veiled episode base on Larsen’s Tuskegee experience, and lives in Harlem. Everywhere Helga goes, she never finds a comfortable place for herself.

Passing (1929), her second novel, was also well-received, if not a best-seller. It’s the story of two friends, Irene and Clare, both of mixed race. Both have a mostly white appearance, but Clare has crossed over the color line to live as white, even getting married to a white man who turns out to be a bigot. Irene “passes” when convenient, but lives as black, with her black doctor husband and two sons. The women reunite after an absence of twelve years from their friendship, with dramatic consequences.

Both novels are eminently readable and fascinating snapshots of the stringent racial lines of 1920s America. Though Passing came out just a year after Quicksand, it is a more mature and delicately told story.

Nella Larsen’s stories of young women of mixed race growing up in a prejudiced world, grappling for a sense of identity and belonging, mirrored her own life. Larsen struggled mightily for most of her life, never feeling quite at home in either the European community of her mother, nor back in the United States; neither in the black world or the white at a time when the “color line” was strictly drawn.

Leaving the literary world for good

Nella lived on alimony until her ex-husband’s death in 1942, but subsequently returned to nursing and medical administration. She moved to the Lower East Side, abandoned her literary circles, and never ventured back to Harlem. She struggled with depression, and stopped writing. In the course of her  lifetime, her work had been all but forgotten. She  died at age 72 in Brooklyn in 1964.

Nella Larsen page on Amazon

A revival of interest

Passing was reissued in 2001. Richard Bernstein, a New York Times book critic, wrote: “reading it and knowing that its author wrote very little after it imparts a sense of loss, giving as it does a glimpse of an original and hugely insightful writer whose literary talent developed no further.”

Fortunately, interest in Nella Larsen’s writings, modest though her body of work was, has grown over the years. Academic interest in race, history, and women’s studies has shed a new light on her work, and  has been reconsidered in numerous academic studies. According to The Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Fiction (2011), Nella Larsen is described as “not only the premier novelist of the Harlem Renaissance, but also an important figure in American modernism.”

More about Nella Larsen on this site

Insightful Quotes from Passing by Nella Larsen 
Quotes from Quicksand and Others by Nella Larsen
Passing (1929): An Introduction
In Search of Nella Larsen by George Hutchinson

Major Works

Quicksand  (1928)
Passing  (1929)
The Complete Fiction of Nella Larsen

Biographies about Nella Larsen  

In Search of Nella Larsen: A Biography of the Color Line by George Hutchinson
Nella Larsen, Novelist of the Harlem Renaissance: A Woman’s Life Unveiled by Thadious M. Davis

More Information

Wikipedia
Nella Larson on Black History Now
Reader discussion of Larsen’s works on Goodreads
Nella Larsen page on Amazon.com

Visit

Nella Larsen Letters, 1928 – The New York Public Library, New York, NY
Nella Larsen’s Grave – Cypress Hills Cemetary, Brooklyn, NY

 Listen Online

Quicksand and Passing on Librivox

Nella Larsen photo by Carl Van Vechten

*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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