Nava Atlas's Blog, page 9

65 Witty, Bawdy Mae West Quotes

Mae West (1893 – 1980) earned international fame as an actress and singer, but she was also a talented playwright and screenwriter. In fact, it was she who wrote all the clever and sometimes bawdy quips that were her stock in trade. This collection of Mae West quotes gathers some of her wittiest and best known.

At one point in the 1930s, Mae was the highest-earning women in the U.S. Constantly doing battles with censors, she famously said, “I believe in censorship. I made a fortune out of it.” Mae created her iconic persona, and behind it was her desire to poke holes in stodgy convention and hypocrisy

The American Film Institute named  her the 15th greatest female screen legend, an honor she richly deserved. When her film career wound down, she continued to write books and plays.

“You only live once, but if you do it right, once is enough.”

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“There are no good girls gone wrong — just bad girls found out.”

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“I generally avoid temptation unless I can’t resist it.”

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“Every man I meet wants to protect me. I can’t figure out what from.”

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“I wrote the story myself. It’s about a girl who lost her reputation and never missed it.”

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“Between two evils, I always pick the one I never tried before.”

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“Sex is like good bridge. If you don’t have a good partner, you’d better have a good hand.”

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“When I’m good, I’m very good, but when I’m bad, I’m better. ”

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Mae West: The Surprisingly Literary Star of Stage & Screen

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“I’ll try anything once, twice if I like it, three times to make sure.”

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“I’m single because I was born that way.”

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“Good girls go to heaven, bad girls go everywhere.”

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“I’m no model lady. A model’s just an imitation of the real thing.”

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“Ladies who play with fire must remember that smoke gets in their eyes.”

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“A dame that knows the ropes isn’t likely to get tied up.”

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“Marriage is a fine institution, but I’m not ready for an institution.”

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“It’s not the men in your life that matters, it’s the life in your men.”

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“Discarded lovers should be given a second chance, but with somebody else.”

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“Sex is an emotion in motion.”

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“I never said it would be easy, I only said it would be worth it.”

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“Cultivate your curves — they may be dangerous but they won’t be avoided.”

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“Those who are easily shocked should be shocked more often.”

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“Too much of a good thing can be wonderful!”

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“I never worry about diets. The only carrots that interest me are the number you get in a diamond.”

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“It is better to be looked over than overlooked.”

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“I used to be Snow White, but I drifted.”

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“Anything worth doing is worth doing slowly.”

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“Don’t keep a man guessing too long — he’s sure to find the answer somewhere else”

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“You are never too old to become younger!”

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“Love thy neighbor — and if he happens to be tall, debonair and devastating, it will be that much easier.”

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“Women like a man with a past, but they prefer a man with a present.”

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“Look your best — who said love is blind? ”

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“His mother should have thrown him away and kept the stork.”

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“A woman in love can’t be reasonable — or she probably wouldn’t be in love.”

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“To err is human — but it feels divine.”

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“I have found men who didn’t know how to kiss. I’ve always found time to teach them.”

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“If a little is great, and a lot is better, then way too much is just about right!”

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“Men are my hobby, if I ever got married I’d have to give it up.”

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“Getting married is like trading in the adoration of many for the sarcasm of one.”

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“When women go wrong, men go right after them.”

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“Good women are no fun … The only good woman I can recall in history was Betsy Ross. And all she ever made was a flag.”

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“I’ve no time for broads who want to rule the world alone. Without men, who’d do up the zipper on the back of your dress? ”

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“Love conquers all things except poverty and toothache.”

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“I never loved another person the way I loved myself.”

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“She’s the kind of girl who climbed the ladder of success wrong by wrong.”

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“JUDGE: Are you trying to show contempt for this court?
MAE WEST: I was doin’ my best to hide it.”

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“Women with pasts interest men because they hope history will repeat itself.”

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“I only read biographies, metaphysics and psychology. I can dream up my own fiction.”

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“I’m a woman of very few words, but lots of action.”

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“An ounce of performance is worth pounds of promises.”

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“A man’s kiss is his signature.”

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“Everyone has the right to run his own life — even if you’re heading for a crash. What I’m against is blind flying.”

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“Love isn’t an emotion or an instinct — it’s an art.”

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“I’ve been in more laps than a napkin.”

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“I see you’re a man with ideals. I better be going before you’ve still got them.”

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“It isn’t what I do, but how I do it. It isn’t what I say, but how I say it, and how I look when I do it and say it.”

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“I saw what a mess a lot of people could make of their lives when they’re smitten. Some of them go temporarily insane. They find a person who they think holds the key to their happiness — the only key to their happiness … My work has always been my greatest happiness.”

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“A hard man is good to find.”

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“Goodness, what beautiful diamonds!” “Goodness had nothing to do with it.”

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“Ten men waiting for me at the door? Send one of them home, I’m tired.”

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“If I had known I was going to live this long, I would have taken better care of myself.”

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“Men are all alike — except the one you’ve met who’s different.”

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“I’ve been rich and I’ve been poor, and rich is better.”

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“I only like two kinds of men, domestic and imported.”

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“What’s the good of resisting temptation? There’ll always be more.”

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“Sex with love is the greatest thing in life. But sex without love — that’s not so bad either.”

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“Gentlemen prefer blondes, but who says blondes prefer gentlemen?”

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“You only live once, but if you do it right, once is enough”

More about Mae West

Mae West biography Mae West: Dirty Blonde (American Masters, PBS)The Best of Mae West (film clip compilation)

The post 65 Witty, Bawdy Mae West Quotes appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.

“Fifteen Bucolic Poems” by Edith Sitwell (1920

Dame Edith Sitwell (1887 – 1964), the British poet, literary critic, and famous eccentric, began publishing her poetry in 1913. With a modernist edge, some of it inscrutably abstract, some even set to music and sound.

Because of her dramatic self-presentation and manner of dress, she was sometimes criticized as a dilettante, but overall, her literary legacy remained intact and has grown over the years. Her poetry is praised for its craftsmanship and attention to technique.

Mother and Other Poems (1915) was her first published collection, followed by Clown’s Houses (1915). The following poems comprise the section titled “Fifteen Bucolic Poems”  from her third collection, The Wooden Pegasus (1920). This book and its poems are  in the public domain.

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I
WHAT THE GOOSEGIRL SAID ABOUT THE DEAN
TURN again, turn again,
Goose Clothilda, Goosie Jane!

The wooden waves of people creak
From houses built with coloured straws
Of heat; Dean Pappus’ long nose snores—
Harsh as a hautbois, marshy-weak.

The wooden waves of people creak
Through the fields all water-sleek;

And in among the straws of light
Those bumpkin hautbois-sounds take flight,

Whence he lies snoring like the moon,
Clownish-white all afternoon,

Beneath the trees’ arsenical
Harsh wood-wind tunes. Heretical—

(Blown like the wind’s mane
Creaking woodenly again)

His wandering thoughts escape like geese,
Till he, their gooseherd, sets up chase,
And clouds of wool join the bright race
For scattered old simplicities.

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Learn more about Edith Sitwell

 

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II
NOAH
NOAH, through green waters slipping sliding like a long sleek eel,
Slithered up Mount Ararat and climbed into the Ark,—
Slipping with his long dank hair; and sliding slyly in his barque,
Pushed it slowly in a wholly glassy creek until we feel
Pink crags tremble under us and wondrous clear waters run
Over Shem and Ham and Japhet, moving with their long sleek daughters,
Swift as fishes rainbow-coloured darting under morning waters….
Burning seraph beasts sing clearly to the young flamingo Sun.

Note.—Thanks due to Helen Rootham for her earnest collaboration in this poem.

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III
THE GIRL WITH THE LINT-WHITE LOCKS
THE bright-striped wooden fields are edged
With noisy cock’s crow trees, scarce fledged—

The trees that spin like tops, all weathers,
Like strange birds ruffling glassy feathers.

My hair is white as flocks of geese,
And water hisses out of this;

And when the late sun burns my cheek
Till it is pink as apples sleek,

I wander in the fields and know
Why kings do squander pennies so—

Lest they at last should weight their eyes!
But beggars’ ragged minds, more wise,

Know without flesh we cannot see—
And so they hoard stupidity

(The dull ancestral memory
That is the only property).

They laugh to see the spring fields edged
With noisy cock’s crow trees scarce fledged,

And flowers that grunt to feel their eyes
Made clear with sight’s finalities.

 

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IV
THE LADY WITH THE SEWING MACHINE
ACROSS the fields as green as spinach,
Cropped as close as Time to Greenwich,

Stands a high house; if at all,
Spring comes like a Paisley shawl—

Patternings meticulous
And youthfully ridiculous.

In each room the yellow sun
Shakes like a canary, run

On run, roulade, and watery trill—
Yellow, meaningless, and shrill.

Face as white as any clock’s,
Cased in parsley-dark curled locks,

All day long you sit and sew,
Stitch life down for fear it grow,

Stitch life down for fear we guess
At the hidden ugliness.

Dusty voice that throbs with heat,
Hoping with its steel-thin beat

To put stitches in my mind,
Make it tidy, make it kind;

You shall not! I’ll keep it free
Though you turn earth sky and sea

To a patchwork quilt to keep
Your mind snug and warm in sleep.

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V
BY CANDLELIGHT
HOUSES red as flower of bean,
Flickering leaves and shadows lean!
Pantalone, like a parrot,
Sat and grumbled in the garret,
Sat and growled and grumbled till
Moon upon the window-sill,
Like a red geranium,
Scented his bald cranium.
Said Brighella, meaning well—
“Pack your box and—go to Hell!
Heat will cure your rheumatism.”
Silence crowned this optimism.
Not a sound and not a wail—
But the fire (lush leafy vale)
Watched the angry feathers fly.
Pantalone ’gan to cry
Could not, would not, pack his box.
Shadows (curtseying hens and cocks)
Pecking in the attic gloom,
Tried to smother his tail-plume….
Till a cock’s comb candle-flame,
Crowing loudly, died: Dawn came.

 

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VI
SERENADE
THE tremulous gold of stars within your hair
Are yellow bees flown from the hive of night,
Finding the blossom of your eyes more fair
Than all the pale flowers folded from the light.
Then, Sweet, awake, and ope your dreaming eyes
Ere those bright bees have flown and darkness dies.

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VII
CLOWNS’ HOUSES
BENEATH the flat and paper sky
The sun, a demon’s eye,
Glowed through the air, that mask of glass;
All wand’ring sounds that pass

Seemed out of tune, as if the light
Were fiddle-strings pulled tight.
The market square with spire and bell
Clanged out the hour in Hell.

The busy chatter of the heat
Shrilled like a parokeet;
And shuddering at the noonday light
The dust lay dead and white

As powder on a mummy’s face,
Or fawned with simian grace
Round booths with many a hard bright toy
And wooden brittle joy:

The cap and bells of Time the Clown
That, jangling, whistled down
Young cherubs hidden in the guise
Of every bird that flies;

And star-bright masks for youth to wear,
Lest any dream that fare
—Bright pilgrim—past our ken, should see
Hints of Reality.

Upon the sharp-set grass, shrill-green,
Tall trees like rattles lean,
And jangle sharp and dizzily;
But when night falls they sigh

Till Pierrot moon steals slyly in,
His face more white than sin,
Black-masked, and with cool touch lays bare
Each cherry, plum, and pear.

Then underneath the veilèd eyes
Of houses, darkness lies,—
Tall houses; like a hopeless prayer
They cleave the sly dumb air.

Blind are those houses, paper-thin;
Old shadows hid therein,
With sly and crazy movements creep
Like marionettes, and weep.

Tall windows show Infinity;
And, hard reality,
The candles weep and pry and dance
Like lives mocked at by Chance.

The rooms are vast as Sleep within:
When once I ventured in,
Chill Silence, like a surging sea,
Slowly enveloped me.

 

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VIII
THE SATYR IN THE PERIWIG
THE Satyr Scarabombadon
Pulled periwig and breeches on:
“Grown old and stiff, this modern dress
Adds monstrously to my distress;
The gout within a hoofen heel
Is very hard to bear; I feel
When crushed into a buckled shoe
The twinge will be redoubled, too.
And when I walk in gardens green
And, weeping, think on what has been,
Then wipe one eye,—the other sees
The plums and cherries on the trees.
Small bird-quick women pass me by
With sleeves that flutter airily,
And baskets blazing like a fire
With laughing fruits of my desire;
Plums sunburnt as the King of Spain,

Gold-cheeked as any Nubian,
With strawberries all goldy-freckled,
Pears fat as thrushes and as speckled …
Pursue them?… Yes, and squeeze a tear:
‘Please spare poor Satyr one, my dear.’
‘Be off, sir; go and steal your own!’
—Alas, poor Scarabombadon,
They’d rend his ruffles, stretch a twig,
Tear off a satyr’s periwig!”

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IX
THE MUSLIN GOWN
WITH spectacles that flash,
Striped foolscap hung with gold
And silver bells that clash,
(Bright rhetoric and cold),
In owl-dark garments goes the Rain,
Dull pedagogue, again.
And in my orchard wood
Small song-birds flock and fly,
Like cherubs brown and good,
When through the trees go I
Knee-deep within the dark-leaved sorrel.
Cherries red as bells of coral
Ring to see me come—
I, with my fruit-dark hair
As dark as any plum,
My summer gown as white as air
And frilled as any quick bird’s there.
But oh, what shall I do?
Old Owl-wing’s back from town—
He’s skipping through dark trees: I know
He hates my summer gown!

 

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X
MISS NETTYBUN AND THE SATYR’S CHILD
AS underneath the trees I pass
Through emerald shade on hot soft grass,
Petunia faces, glowing-hued
With heat, cast shadows hard and crude—
Green-velvety as leaves, and small
Fine hairs like grass pierce through them all.
But these are all asleep—asleep,
As through the schoolroom door I creep
In search of you, for you evade
All the advances I have made.
Come, Horace, you must take my hand.
This sulking state I will not stand!
But you shall feed on strawberry jam
At tea-time, if you cease to slam
The doors that open from our sense—
Through which I slipped to drag you hence!

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XI
QUEEN VENUS AND THE CHOIR-BOY
(To Naomi Royde Smith)
THE apples grow like silver trumps
That red-cheeked fair-haired angels blow—
So clear their juice; on trees in clumps,
Feathered as any bird, they grow.

A lady stood amid those crops—
Her voice was like a blue or pink
Glass window full of lollipops;
Her words were very strange, I think:

“Prince Paris, too, a fair-haired boy
Plucked me an apple from dark trees;
Since when their smoothness makes my joy;
If you will pluck me one of these

I’ll kiss you like a golden wind
As clear as any apples be.”
And now she haunts my singing mind—
And oh, she will not set me free.

 

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XII
THE APE SEES THE FAT WOMAN
AMONG the dark and brilliant leaves,
Where flowers seem tinsel firework-sheaves,

Blond barley-sugar children stare
Through shining apple-trees, and there

A lady like a golden wind
Whose hair like apples tumbles kind,

And whose bright name, so I believe,
Is sometimes Venus, sometimes Eve,

Stands, her face furrowed like my own
With thoughts wherefrom strange seeds are sown,

Whence, long since, stars for bright flowers grew
Like periwinkles pink and blue,

(Queer impulses of bestial kind,
Flesh indivisible from mind.)

I, painted like the wooden sun,
Must hand-in-hand with angels run—

The tinsel angels of the booth
That lead poor yokels to the truth

Through raucous jokes, till we can see
That narrow long Eternity

Is but the whip’s lash o’er our eyes—
Spurring to new vitalities.

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XIII
THE APE WATCHES “AUNT SALLY”
THE apples are an angel’s meat,
The shining dark leaves make clear-sweet

The juice; green wooden fruits alway
Drop on these flowers as white as day—

Clear angel-face on hairy stalk;
(Soul grown from flesh, an ape’s young talk.)

And in this green and lovely ground
The Fair, world-like, turns round and round,

And bumpkins throw their pence to shed
Aunt Sally’s crude-striped wooden head.

I do not care if men should throw
Round sun and moon to make me go,

(As bright as gold and silver pence) …
They cannot drive their own blood hence!

 

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XIV
SPRINGING JACK
GREEN wooden leaves clap light away,
Severely practical, as they

Shelter the children, candy-pale.
The chestnut-candles flicker, fail….

The showman’s face is cubed clear as
The shapes reflected in a glass

Of water—(glog, glut, a ghost’s speech
Fumbling for space from each to each).

The fusty showman fumbles, must
Fit in a particle of dust

The universe, for fear it gain
Its freedom from my box of brain.

Yet dust bears seeds that grow to grace
Behind my crude-striped wooden face

As I, a puppet tinsel-pink,
Leap on my springs, learn how to think,

Then like the trembling golden stalk
Of some long-petalled star, I walk

Through the dark heavens until dew
Falls on my eyes and sense thrills through.

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XV
“TOURNEZ, TOURNEZ, BONS CHEVAUX DE BOIS”
TURN, turn again,
Ape’s blood in each vein.
The people that pass
Seem castles of glass,
The old and the good,
Giraffes of blue wood;
The soldier, the nurse,
Wooden face and a curse,
Are shadowed with plumage
Like birds by the gloomage.
Blond hair like a clown’s,
The music floats, drowns
The creaking of ropes
The breaking of hopes.
The wheezing, the old,
Like harmoniums scold:
Go to Babylon, Rome,
The brain-cells called home,
The grave, New Jerusalem,
Wrinkled Methusalem:
From our floating hair
Derived the first fair
And queer inspiration
Of music (the nation
Of bright-plumed trees
And harpy-shrill breeze).
. . .
Turn, turn again,
Ape’s blood in each vein.

. . . . . . . . . .See more poetry by Dame Edith Sitwell Edith Sitwell archive at the Harry Ransome Center

The post “Fifteen Bucolic Poems” by Edith Sitwell (1920 appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.

Mae West, the Surprisingly Literary Star of Stage & Screen

The notorious stage and screen actress and playwright Mae West of “come up and see me some time” fame, was surprisingly literary minded. West was famous as an actress, but it’s far less known that she wrote all her own stage and screen roles, creating the wickedly witty vamp character she became identified with.

Despite her bad girl reputation, despite having been sentenced to ten days in prison for obscenity in her 1926 play Sex, and despite the equally provocative title of her 1927 play The Drag: A Homosexual Play in Three Acts, Mae West wasn’t as much a modern woman as she seemed. Of her 1928 play Diamond Lil West said:

“People have said that I must be bad myself because I played bad parts so well. They fail to credit me with intelligence and love for my art … Particularly now, with such things as ‘companionate marriage’ ideas floating around, is Diamond Lil timely. I don’t believe in it. I think it is nothing more than contracted prostitution. Marriage, love, and home should be kept sacred … I believe in the single standard for men and women.”

 

A self-created persona

In an interview in the July 4, 1928 issue of Variety, West emphasized her unique ability to maintain multiple current love affairs, if only in a fictional setting. People tend to forget that practically all the quotes for which she became (in) are all from fictional works that she wrote for her self-created persona to play.

“Diamond Lil has all my stuff in it … I only go into a play where I can be myself and strut my stuff. I know how I want to walk and talk, show off my figure and looks. I can bring one man after another into a play to revolve around me and no one else can. I have five men in love with me in ‘Diamond Lil’ and most authors can’t keep up one love interest,” said the star of the season’s $17,000 weekly freak riot at the Royale, New York.

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Mae in 1936

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An early example of her many wisecracks seeming to contradict the quote above comes from the play Sex, where the prostitute Margy is talking about a friend. “She had a guy she thought she was in love with and thought she needed and then she got wise. Now she’s married to an old guy, and she’s got a mansion up near Boston and a limousine and diamonds and everything she wants.”

West was famous for her limousine; another quote is, “If you’re trig and trim and straight and wiry you’ll travel in a slam-bang sports roadster, but if you’re curved and soft and elegant and grand, you’ll travel in a limousine.”

West’s “blonde bombshell” persona was just that: a front for a first-class stage and screen playwright, seriously underestimated as a writer, then and now.

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A revival of Mae West’s play, Sex, originally staged in 1926
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Provocative, prosecuted plays

She had two plays in production in New York in 1928: Diamond Lil and Pleasure Man, which was prosecuted for a performance at the Biltmore Theater on October 1, 1928, for “unlawfully advertising, giving, presenting and participating in an obscene, indecent, immoral and impure drama, play, exhibition, show and entertainment.”

The prosecution claimed that the play dealt with “sex, degeneracy, and sex perversion” arguing that West and her collaborators “did unlawfully, wickedly and scandalously, for lucre and gain, produce, present and exhibit and display the said exhibition show and entertainment to the site and view of divers and many people, all to the great offense of public decency.”

The 1928 prosecution was especially incensed by the presence of openly gay actors and “the speeches, manners and obscene jokes of a large number of male degenerates.”

West’s empathy with and encouragement of gay actors made her an early icon of the gay scene. Much later West said, “They were all crazy about me and my costumes. They were the first ones to imitate me in my presence.”

West even brought the gay actors from The Drag home to meet her mother. “They’d do her hair and nails and she’d have a great time.”

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Mae in 1940
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The power of provocation

At the time of the apotheosis of the flat-chested, bobbed-haired, flat-heeled flapper, West was the anti-flapper personified, famous as much for her bust and figure-accentuating dresses as for her wisecracks – “I look pretty buxom and blonde, don’t I? Well, believe me, I’m the kind gentlemen prefer.”

West is referring to Gentlemen Prefer Blondes by Anita Loos, which had been published in 1925 to great acclaim. But despite her love for her gay friends, West blamed gay designers for the flat-chested flapper look she so disapproved of. “God gave women their curves – effeminate dressmakers took them away by designing garments which could be worn only by women shaped like scarecrows.”

It’s important to remember just how outrageous the association with gay men, who could be jailed for homosexual activities, was considered in 1928, the year Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness was banned in England.

Mae West was presumably not surprised and probably not upset by the publicity her plays gained from being prosecuted – she was clearly courting prosecution and controversy with her outrageous titles.

Being “Banned in Boston” could be lucrative; being banned in New York was probably even better in terms of revenue for a book, film or play. In naming her works so provocatively, West was only taking to the limit a piece of advice on finding a title for a film given by silent movie actress Agnes Smith in the April 1928 issue of the movie magazine Photoplay.

“Maybe it is an Art; maybe it is a superstition. Anyway, whatever it is, motion picture magnates piously believe that by observing the following rules in the main title, almost any picture will lure the public to the box-office:

All box-office titles should hint at a sex situation, a sex struggle, or a sex indiscretion.The word “love” in a title is guaranteed to make men, women, and children part with their quarters. Next in importance to the word “love” are such luscious words as passion, heart, kisses, woman, scandal, devil, marriage, flesh, and sin.”

More about Mae West

Mae West biography Mae West: Dirty Blonde (American Masters, PBS)The Best of Mae West (film clip compilation)

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

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

Images in this article courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

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Dame Edith Sitwell, Writer, Poet, and Eccentric Extraordinaire

Dame Edith Sitwell (September 7, 1887 – December 9, 1964) was a British poet considered one of the first of the avant-garde movement. She had an enormous influence on literature and was also known for her eccentric demeanor, bon mots, and rather pronounced, if sarcastic, opinions. 

As Elizabeth Bowen once said, she was “a high altar on the move.” Photo at right by Cecil Beaton.

 

An unhappy childhood

In many ways Edith was the quintessential poor little rich girl. Born in Scarborough, England, her aristocratic parents, Sir George Sitwell and his wife, Lady Ida Denison, lived in the family home in Derbyshire, Renishaw. The family fortune came from land and ironmaking. 

Unhappily for their young daughter, the Sitwells were cold and distant parents; some even guessed that Lady Ida, a volatile woman, may not have wanted her. It didn’t help that the pale and gangly child had a beaked nose and crooked back, her parents therefore keeping her in braces for most of her early years.

Edith must have been a precocious and bright child: At four years of age, she told her parents she wanted to be a genius when she grew up. She never did forgive her mother for her terrible childhood, and later, didn’t bother to attend her funeral.    

She was very close to her two brothers, Osbert Sitwell and Sacheverell Sitwell, both of whom also became famous writers. For many years her closest companion, with whom she later lived in London and Paris, was her governess Helen Rootham, herself a poet.

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A portrait of Edith by Bloomsbury artist Roger Fry, 1918
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First publications

In 1915 Edith published her first poetry collection Mother and Other Poems. A year later she and her brothers were putting together the poetry anthology Wheels, a showcase for fellow modernist poets, which had six issues and was a reaction to the sentimentality of the Georgian movement.  The Sitwell siblings were now known as “the alternative Bloomsbury” and running in the same circles as William Butler Yeats and T. S. Eliot.

What made Edith’s poetry most interesting was that she took everyday topics and gave them a modern slant; she was a matador of words. One critic said she “tilted Romanticism on its head.”Her themes were life, death, and the human condition.

Her work can be divided into two periods, the early pieces were often nonsensical and playful, the later  more serious. The poet Charles Baudelaire was a great influence Her poems had a certain rhythm, and many were set to music by composers such as William Walton and Benjamin Britten for performances.   

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Thoughts on poetry and major achievements

Edith Sitwell explained her attitude towards sound in poetry in her autobiography, Taken Care Of (1965):

“Rhythm is one of the principal translators between dream and reality.  Rhythm might be described as, to the world of sound, what light is to the world of sight. It shapes and gives new meaning. Rhythm was described by Schopenhauer as melody deprived of its pitch.”

Her masterpiece is considered the poem Still Falls the Rain which was written during the London Blitz of World War II. It intertwines the suffering of the people with the suffering of Christ and ends on an element of hope. (.)

The body of work Edith left behind was considerable: Twenty-one poetry collections; books on Queen Victoria, Elizabeth I, and Alexander Pope; a novel; an autobiography; and a book on English eccentrics, among others. She was made a Dame of the British Empire in 1954.  

Richard Greene, well-known poet, biographer, and a professor of literature and creative writing wrote at the University of Toronto wrote two books on Edith Sitwell which are highly respected: Edith Sitwell: Avant Garde Poet, English Genius and Selected Letters of Edith Sitwell (editor).

When I spoke to him, he mentioned he believes that Edith Sitwell’s work was often criticized because she was a “soft target” and was writing in the days you could “dismiss a woman poet.” After all, no one was going to take on titans like William Butler Yeats or T.S. Eliot.   

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Eccentricities and idiosyncrasies

It’s impossible to write about Dame Edith without mentioning her idiosyncrasies. Her dress was flamboyant and somewhat Elizabethan: brocaded gowns; clunky jewelry (now displayed in The Victoria and Albert Museum); velvet turbans; and capes. With her chalky face, hawk nose, and thinly lined eyebrows, she cut quite a figure and proudly so. 

In her words, “I am not eccentric. It’s just that I am more alive than most people. I am an unpopular electric eel set in a pond of goldfish.”

She never married and seemed to have a penchant for unavailable men who were mostly homosexual, including the poet Siegfried Sassoon, and the painter Pavel Tchelitchew.

To her credit, she championed Dylan Thomas and Denton Welch when they were young writers

With her flair for drama, she was also infamous for the feuds she had with luminaries like Robert Graves, D.H. Lawrence, and Wyndham Lewis. 

Noel Coward once wrote a sketch called The Swiss Family Whittlebot which made fun of the Sitwell siblings and caused hostilities for years. Perhaps this was why she developed such a rapier wit: It was to protect herself, or as Prof. Greene once explained, “a way of keeping human suffering at bay.”

After Dame Edith’s death in 1964, times and literary tastes changed, and she began to slip into oblivion. Thankfully, Professor Greene said her reputation is starting to recover: her work is showing up in more anthologies and she is “spoken of more seriously” these days.    

Perhaps Katherine Anne Porter said it best when describing Dame Edith’s work as “the true flowering branch springing fresh from the old, unkillable roots of English poetry, with the range, variety, depth, fearlessness, the passion and elegance of great art.”

“The Innocent Spring” (1924) is one of Dame Edith’s loveliest poems:

The Innocent Spring 

In the great gardens, after bright spring rain,
We find sweet innocence come once again,
White periwinkles, little pensionnaires
With muslin gowns and shy and candid airs,

That under saint-blue skies, with gold stars sown,
Hide their sweet innocence by spring winds blown,
From zephyr libertines that like Richelieu
And d’Orsay their gold-spangled kisses blew;
And lilies of the valley whose buds blonde and tight
Seem curls of little school-children that light
The priests’ procession, when on some saint’s day
Along the country paths they make their way;

Forget-me-nots, whose eyes of childish blue,
Gold-starred like heaven, speak of love still true;
And all the flowers that we call ‘dear heart’,
Who say their prayers, like children, then depart

Into the dark. Amid the dew’s bright beams
The summers airs, like Weber waltzes, fall
Round the first rose, who, flushed with her youth, seems
Like a young Princess dressed for her first ball.  

Who knows what beauty ripens from dark mould
After the sad wind and winter’s cold?
But a small wind sighed, colder than the rose,
Blooming in desolation, ‘No one knows.’

 

Further reading and sourcesGreene, Richard, author of Edith Sitwell: Avant Garde Poet, English Genius. Great Britain: Virago, 2011.
Personal interview, June 25, 2024. Greene, Richard, ed. Selected Letters of Edith Sitwell. Great Britain: Virago, 1997.Poetry Foundation, Edith Sitwell .Edith Sitwell, British Poet, Encyclopedia Britannica, 1998-2024 (updates).Cooke, Rachel. Edith Sitwell: Avant Garde Poet, English Genius by Richard Greene – review. The Guardian. 2011.Staff, Harriet. After 30 Years, a new Edith Sitwell Biography– review of Richard Greene’s
Edith Sitwell: Avant Garde Poet, English Genius. Poetry Foundation website, 2011.Meyers, Jeffrey. Review of Edith Sitwell: Avant-Garde Poet, English Genius by Richard Green,
The Globe and Mail, May. 2011.

Contributed by Tyler Scott, who has been writing essays and articles since the early 1980s for various magazines and newspapers.  In 2014 she published her novel The Excellent Advice of a Few Famous Painters. She lives in Blackstone, Virginia where she and her husband renovated a Queen Anne Revival house and enjoy small town life. Visit her at Pour the Coffee, Time to Write.

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10 Lost Ladies of Literary Translation: A Tribute

Presented here are ten trailblazing women translators whose work proved groundbreaking, from the 16th to 20th centuries.

After being entirely forgotten or reduced to half a line in their husbands’ entries in many encyclopedias, women translators are now starting to be recognized in their own right. Shown at right, translator Matilda Mary Hays (standing) and a love interest, actress Charlotte Cushman, 1858.

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Margaret Tyler:
From Religious Text to Fiction

After being anonymous or hidden behind a male pseudonym, women translators began to sign their translations with their real names in the 16th century. It was a time when women were only supposed to translate religious texts to promote piety among other women.

Margaret Tyler (1540-1590) instead chose to translate a Spanish romance by Diego Ortúñez de Calahorra into English under the title The Mirrour of Princely Deeds and Knighthood (printed in 1578).

In her Letter to the reader, Tyler protested against the fact that profane content was deemed inappropriate for a woman, insisted on the seriousness and importance of literary work for women, and expressed the wish for women and men to be treated as equal rational beings.

While little is known about her, the letter of dedication introducing her translation was addressed to Lord Thomas Howard, so she might have been a servant in his aristocratic Catholic family.

The source of her knowledge of Spanish is unknown. We only know that to speak Spanish was valued by English merchants because of their economic ties to Spain, and that some merchants’ daughters and servants learned the language for this purpose.

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 Giuseppa Barbapiccola:
Advocate for Women’s Education

Giuseppa Eleanora Barbapiccola (1702 – 1740) was an Italian philosopher who translated Principles of Philosophy by French philosopher René Descartes. Her goal was not only to convey Descartes’ philosophy to an Italian audience but also to show that Descartes praised the female intellect and, in doing so, to inspire women to educate and empower themselves.

In the preface to her translation (1722), she also expressed her own ideas, writing that “Women should not be excluded from the study of the sciences, since their spirits are more elevated and they are not inferior to men in terms of the greatest virtues.”

Giuseppa defended the right to education for all women and also tried to persuade women to take the matter into their own hands and to educate themselves.

She asserted that the inherent nature of women – and the perception of them as the weaker sex – was not the cause of their ignorance. The cause of their ignorance was the lack of education or poor education because women have always had the capacity to learn. To this end, her translation included a history of women’s education and a history of philosophy.

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Anne Dacier:
Translating the Ancient Greeks

A French scholar, Anne le Fever Dacier (1654 – 1720) was taught Latin and Greek at a young age by her father Tanneguy Le Fèvre when they lived in Saumur, a town in central France. After her father’s death in 1672, she moved to Paris and worked with Pierre-Daniel Huet, a friend of her father who was in charge of a comprehensive edition of Latin classics named the Delphin Classics.

She produced new Latin editions of poets Publius Annius Florus, and historians Dictys Cretensis, Sextus Aurelius Victor and Eutropius. She also translated into French several works by Greek poets Anacreon and Sappho, and by Roman playwrights Plautus, Aristophanes and Terence.

Her major work was the prose translation of Greek epic poet Homer’s Iliad (completed in 1699) and Odyssey (completed in 1708). Her translations were praised by her contemporaries, including English poet Alexander Pope, who then translated Homer’s epic poems from French into English, with the English editions published in 1715-20 for Iliad and in 1725-26 for Odyssey. (To translate works from an existing translation instead of the original work was common at the time.)

Anne Dacier wrote an essay on Pope’s translation of Odyssey, which gained her some fame in England as well. 

 

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Elizabeth Ashurst & Matilda Hays:
Translating George Sand

In the mid-19th century, Elizabeth Ann Ashurst (1813 – 1850, also known as Eliza Ann Bardonneu) an English radical activist, and Matilda Mary Hays (1820 – 1850), an English feminist novelist, immersed themselves in the novels of famed French novelist George Sand.

Fascinated by Sand’s independent lifestyle, her vision of free love and the political and social issues addressed in her books, they translated some of her novels into English for them to reach a wider audience.

Ashurst belonged to a family of radical activists who supported causes ranging from women’s suffrage to Risorgimento (Italian unification). She attended the World Anti-Slavery Convention in 1840 in London, with her father William Ashurst and her sister Matilda Ashurst, but was not allowed to speak since women were not considered full delegates.

Hays had already translated The Last Aldini by George Sand. She then met and befriended Ashurst. Together they translated Spiridion, Letters of a Traveller, The Master Mosaic-Workers and André.

Hays translated Fadette alone after the death of Elizabeth Ashurst in childbirth. The translations were mainly published in 1847, except for the translation of Spiridion, published in 1842, and the translation of Fadette, published in 1851.

Like George Sand, Matilda Hays was determined to use her writings to improve the condition of women. In her novel Helen Stanley (1846), she wrote that women couldn’t secure their financial and social future until “They teach their daughters to respect themselves to work for their daily bread, rather than prostitute their persons and hearts” by getting married.

She also co-founded the monthly English Woman’s Journal and was its editor from 1858 to 1864.

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Louise Swanton Belloc:
English literary classics into French

Louise Swanton Belloc (1796 – 1881), a French writer, translated English-language literary works into French. Born in La Rochelle, a seaport in western France, she received an education with a focus on English language and culture.

She advocated for women’s education, and contributed to the creation of the first circulating libraries. Her writings and translations introduced English literary works to a French audience. She wrote articles for the French journal Revue encyclopédique under the supervision of its founder and editor Marc-Antoine Jullien.

She befriended French writers Victor Hugo, Emile Souvestre and Alphonse de Lamartine. She also befriended English writer Charles Dickens, Anglo-Irish writer Maria Edgeworth, and American writer Harriet Beecher Stowe. She translated some of their works into French, including Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

She also translated Lord Byron’s memoirs, as well as books by Scottish writers Elizabeth Gaskell and Walter Scott, and Irish writers Oliver Goldsmith and Thomas Moore.

 

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Mary Howitt:
German, Swedish, and Danish to English

Mary Howitt (1799 – 1888), an English poet and writer, translated German, Swedish, and Danish literary works into English. Born in a Quaker family living in Gloucestershire, a county in southwestern England, she began writing verses at an early age, long before writing her famous poem The Spider and The Fly (1828).

She married fellow Quaker writer William Howitt in 1821, and began a lifelong career of joint authorship and travels with him, except during his Australian journey in 1851-54 when he tried to make a fortune there. They befriended many English literary figures such as novelists Charles Dickens and Elizabeth Gaskell, and poets Elizabeth Barrett Browning, William Wordsworth, and Dorothy Wordsworth. 

When living in Heidelberg, Germany, in 1840, Howitt became acquainted with Scandinavian literature, and learned Swedish and Danish. She translated Swedish writer Fredrika Bremer’s novels, and her 18-volume translation (1842 – 63) helped introduce Bremer to English readers, including her ideas as a feminist reformer.

She translated Danish writer Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales from 1845 to 1847. She received a Silver Medal from the Literary Academy of Stockholm for conveying Scandinavian literature through translation.

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Anna Swanwick:
Translating Goethe, Schiller & more

Anna Swanwick (1813 – 1899), an English feminist writer, translated German and Greek literary works into English. Born in Liverpool, England, she moved to Berlin, Germany, in 1839 to study German, Greek and Hebrew.

Back in England in 1843, she translated some works by German luminaries Goethe and Schiller, and published them as Selections from the Dramas of Goethe and Schiller (1843). She produced blank-verse translations of other works by Goethe in 1850, with a second edition in 1878. Her translation of Goethe’s Faust was highly praised, and republished several times.

Anna Swanwick also produced a blank-verse translation of Greek tragedian Aeschylus’ Trilogy (1865), followed by a translation of all his plays (1873). She was interested in many social issues of her day, especially the education of women and the working classes.

 

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Therese Albertine Luise Robinson:
Multi-Lingual Translator

Therese Albertine Luise Robinson (1797 – 1870), a German-American writer and linguist, translated English and Serbian poetry and folk songs into German. Born in Germany, she first translated two novels by Scottish writer Walter Scott (Old Mortality and The Black Dwarf) in 1822 under the pseudonym Ernst Berthold.

She published a series of literary criticisms without signing them. She was reluctant to use her own name to publish her poetry and short stories, so she invented the pen name Talvj, formed with the initials of her birth name (Therese Albertine Louise von Jacob), to sign her collection of short stories Psyche (1825) and other works.

Her poems were later included in The Poets and Poetry of Europe (1845), a famous anthology of translated poems edited by American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

She learned Serbian after reading German philologist Jacob Grimm’s translations and comments on Serbian folk songs. She translated Serbian folk songs herself with the support and encouragement of the famous Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

Published in 1826, her translation Volkslieder der Serben (Folk Songs of the Serbs) was praised by Goethe and the German literary world. After marrying American theologian Edward Robinson in 1828, she moved with him to Massachusetts in 1830.

She studied Native American languages, wrote a handbook, and translated into German the seminal article On Indian languages of North America written by American linguist John Pickering and published in Encyclopedia Americana in 1830-31. She also wrote a history of Slavic languages with her husband, published in 1834, with a second edition in 1850. 

 

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Zenobia Camprubí:
Translator of Rabindranath Tagore 

Zenobia Camprubí (1887– 1956), a Spanish feminist writer, translated English-language literary works into Spanish. Born in Malgrat de Mar, Spain, she met Spanish poet Juan Ramón Jiménez in 1913, and married him in 1916.

She moved to the United States, studied English literature at Columbia University, and lived in Cuba during the Spanish Civil War. She became a professor of Spanish literature at the University of Maryland, and spent her later years in Puerto Rico. She is considered a pioneer of Spanish feminism for actively promoting women in society.

Camprubí became the first translator of famed Bengali writer Rabindranath Tagore into Spanish, and translated 22 works (collections of poems, essays and plays) over the years. Tagore’s play The Post Office (translated by her) was performed in Spain in 1920, and his play The Elder Sister was performed the following year.

In addition to early works, Camprubí wrote several books, including the couple’s biography Juan Ramón y yo (1954), and Diario, her three-volume diary about her life in Cuba (1937-39), in the United States (1939-50) and in Puerto Rico (1951-56).

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Charlotte H. Bruner:
Translator of Francophone African Women 

Charlotte H. Bruner (1917 – 1999), an American scholar, translated French-language literary works into English. Born in Urbana, Illinois, she received a Bachelor of Art from the University of Illinois in 1938, and a Master of Art from Colombia University in 1939. She was a professor of French at Iowa State College for three decades (1954-87).

She wrote extensively about African French-language women writers, and translated their works from French to English. She was a pioneer in both African studies and world literature at a time when American universities mainly taught European classics.

In the early 1970s, Bruner and her husband David Kincaid Bruner, spent one year in Africa interviewing these writers. Back home they aired their interviews in the series Talking Sticks. Charlotte Bruner then co-hosted First Person Feminine (1980-86), a weekly series in which she read and discussed world literature authored by women.

Charlotte Bruner was one of the editors of The Feminist Companion to Literature in English (1990). She edited two volumes of short stories by African women writers, The Heinemann Book of African Women’s Writings (1993) and Unwinding Threads (1994). She was inducted into the Iowa Women’s Hall of Fame in 1997.

Source: A history of translation in 150 portraits

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

 

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See also
Imagining Helen:  The Life of Translator Helen Tracy Lowe-Porter

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Jan Morris, “A Writer Who Travels”

Jan Morris (October 2, 1926 – November 2, 2020) was a Welsh author and historian, whose work spanned the genres of journalism, memoir, history, essays, articles, and novels.

As a writer, she is best known for her Pax Britannia trilogy (a social history of the British Empire) and her written portraits of cities including Trieste, Venice, Oxford, Hong Kong, and New York City. She is also famous for her transition from male to female in 1972, making her one of the first transgender public figures.

 

Early life and education

Jan Morris was born James Humphrey Morris in Clevedon, Somerset, and was the youngest of three sons. As is customary for persons who have transitioned (notwithstanding when the transition took place) Jan will be referred to with the pronouns she/her from here on.

Her mother Enid was a church organist, and her Welsh father Walter was an engineer. Both brothers went on to have careers in music – Gareth as a flautist and Christopher as an organist.

At the age of nine she attended Christ Church Cathedral School in Oxford as a chorister and went to Lancing College in Sussex. Color blindness prevented her from joining the navy during the war, and she enrolled in the 9th Queen’s Royal Lancers instead. For much of the 1940s she served as an intelligence officer in Palestine.  

After the war, she studied English at Christ College, Oxford, then went on to work at a news agency in Cairo.

 

Journalism and first books

Morris covered the ascent of Everest in 1953, traveling with Edmund Hillary as far as Base Camp as a correspondent for The Times, and broke the news of the successful ascent just in time for it to reach London on Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation day.

It was one of many lucrative and ground-breaking assignments, though she left The Times after disagreeing with the editorial support of the Suez Crisis and joined the Manchester Guardian instead. There she alternated six months of working on the paper with six months of book research.

Morris’s first book, Coast to Coast (1956) was an account of a cross-U.S. journey funded by a twelve-month Commonwealth fellowship at the University of Chicago. Reviews were excellent, with the Guardian calling it “deeply evocative,” and contracts for the further books followed.

The first of Morris’s best-known books, a biography of Venice, was published in 1960. By her own admission, her approach to researching it was to “run about the city like a mad dog … [first] the law court … Then the market. And then the railway station.”

The book was successful enough for Morris to give up journalism and move towards writing books full-time. It was well-received both by the public and critics: Harold Nicolson called it “a highly intelligent portrait of an eccentric city … never soppy or sentimental … a very virile book.”

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Personal life and “Conundrum”

Morris had married Elizabeth Tuckniss, a former Wren and tea planter’s daughter, in 1949. The couple had four children, Twm Morus, Henry Morris, Mark Morris and Suki Morus. Another daughter died in infancy.

Since she was a toddler, Morris had always been at odds with her male body. She recalled sitting at her mother’s piano at age three or four, realizing that “I had been born into the wrong body, and should really be a girl.”

At first she “cherished it as a secret” but for years felt a yearning “for I knew not what, as though there were a piece missing from my pattern…” By the 1960s she was effectively living a double life. “I was a member of two clubs in London,” she recalled, “one as a man and one as a woman, and I would sometimes change my identity in a taxi between the two.”

Elizabeth was supportive of Morris’s decision to undergo courses of hormone therapy, and then to have reassignment surgery in a Casablanca clinic in 1972. The surgery could have been performed in the U.K., but the law would have required that she and Elizabeth divorce, since two women could not be married at that time.

“I should have been terrified, but I wasn’t,” Jan Morris later said. “It was inevitable — I’d been heading there mentally all my life.”

Conundrum, published in 1974, was her account of the journey from male to female. In it, she detailed the clinic in Casablanca, the emotional journey and adjustment to life as a woman with a female partner, and the public reaction, which ranged from hostility to “kindly incomprehension” to acceptance.

She also expressed gratitude for Elizabeth’s support, saying that their marriage was a “living testimony…of love in its purest sense over everything else.” However, Morris’s daughter Suki would later claim that the transition brought a high cost to the rest of the family, in particular Elizabeth who “did not have a voice.”

Critics struggled with the book. A.N. Wilson admitted that he found it easy “to let a little bitchiness creep into one’s comments on Miss Morris’s most interesting book,” while fellow writer Rebecca West wrote that “now we are both women he mystifies me…[as a man] he had all the pleasures he wanted … she sounds not like a woman, but a man’s idea of a woman, and curiously enough, the idea of a man not nearly so intelligent as James Morris used to be…”

However, Morris’s most famous work, a trilogy on the social history of the British Empire, was also partly inspired by her exploration of gender identity.

“I thought how wonderful it would be if some Roman centurion in the last days of the empire had written not only a description of it, but also something about his own feelings. Then I thought, ‘here I am, on the collapsing frontiers of the British empire, why don’t I do it?’”

The result was the trio of books Pax Britannica (1968), Heaven’s Command (1973), and Farewell the Trumpets (1978). Later, Morris called the trilogy the “intellectual and artistic centre-piece of my life.”

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“A writer who travels”

Morris identified as Welsh, having always had an affinity with her father’s land, and became an ardent Welsh nationalist. She admitted being “emotionally in thrall to Welshness,” and after her reassignment surgery, the family moved to Plas Trepan in Llanystumdwy, Gwynedd, in northwest Wales.

By this point, she and Elizabeth had formally divorced, but they continued to live together as “sisters-in-law.” In 2008, when the law allowed them to do so, they registered a civil partnership at the Pwllheli registry office.

Morris continued to work and to travel. Writing had become a daily habit, and she often wrote upwards of 3000 words a day, more if a deadline was looming. Her single novel, Last Letters from Hav, was published in 1985 and shortlisted for the Booker Prize, while other later books included Fifty Years of Europe (1997), Lincoln: A Foreigner’s Quest (1999), and Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere (2001).

Perhaps her most famous and well-read books were her biographies of cities, written in the same vein as her 1960 book on Venice. Places as diverse as Oxford, Trieste, Manhattan, and Hong Kong captured her attention, while in articles she wrote of Las Vegas (“the acrid smell of fun”), Aberdeen (“the brio of capitalism in the raw”) and the cathedral town of Wells (“the cathedral’s chief function was its own repair”). She also wrote about her beloved Wales in the book Wales: Epic Views of a Small Country.

She always rejected the term “travel writer,” insisting that she wrote books about place, “which are nothing to do with movement, but many more about people and about history.” She was, she insisted, a “writer who travels, not a travel writer.” That didn’t not stop her winning the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award for Outstanding Contribution to Travel Writing.

Her biographer, Derek Johns, wrote that “She involves the reader, while she remains unobtrusively present herself; who uses the particular to illustrate the general, and scatters grace notes here and there like benefactions. She is a watcher, usually alone, seldom lonely, alert to everything around her.”

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Last books and legacy of Jan Morris

In My Mind’s Eye (2018), a diary of memories written when Morris was ninety-one, was a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week. Think Again, a collection of her diaries, was published just before her death in March 2020. Her final collection of essays, Allegorizings, was published posthumously in 2021.

Morris was elected to the Gorsedd of Bards in 1992 and made a CBE in 1999. She also received an honorary doctorate from the University of Glamorgan, was an Honorary Fellow of Christ Church College, Oxford, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. In 2005 she won the Golden Pen Award for outstanding contribution to literature.

Before her death, she and Elizabeth had a joint memorial stone made, intended for an islet in the river near Trefan Morys, which reads in both Welsh and English, “Here are two friends … At the end of one life.”

Jan Morris died on November 20, 2020, at the Ysbyty Bryn Beryl on the Llŷn Peninsula, Wales, and was survived by Elizabeth.

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Contributed by Elodie Barnes. Elodie is a writer and editor with a serious case of wanderlust. Her short fiction has been widely published online and is included in the Best Small Fictions 2022 Anthology published by Sonder Press. She is Books & Creative Writing Editor at Lucy Writers Platform, she is also co-facilitating What the Water Gave Us, an Arts Council England-funded anthology of emerging women writers from migrant backgrounds. She is currently working on a collection of short stories, and when not writing can usually be found planning the next trip abroad, or daydreaming her way back to 1920s Paris. Find her online at  Elodie Rose Barnes. 

Further reading and sources

Jan Morris’s extensive bibliography of travel writing, essays, memoirsJan Morris: Life From Both Sides by Paul Clements, Scribe UK, 2022Conundrum by Jan Morris, Faber & Faber, reissued 2018In My Mind’s Eye: A Thought Diary by Jan Morris, Faber & Faber, 2019Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere by Jan Morris, Faber & Faber, reissued 2022Venice by Jan Morris, Faber & Faber, reissued 1993Wales: Epic Views of a Small Country by Jan Morris, Penguin 2000A Writer’s World: Travels 1950-2000 by Jan Morris, Faber & Faber 2004Allegorizings by Jan Morris, Faber & Faber, 2021

For younger readers: Jan Morrison, Travel Writer and Historian – an introduction.

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Mariama Bâ, Senegalese Feminist Author and Poet

Mariama Bâ (April 17, 1929 – August 17, 1981) was a Senegalese novelist, poet, teacher, and feminist. Her best-known works, So Long a Letter and Scarlet Song, both written from a woman’s perspective, explored themes of multiculturalism, polygamy, oppression, interpersonal relationships, and grief.

These two novels are among the most widely translated and studied African works of the twentieth century, according to Cambridge University Press.

 

Early life

Mariama Bâ was born in Dakar, Senegal to middle-class parents in 1929. Senegal was still controlled by colonial rules and laws. Her father was a civil servant, and later became the Minister of Health (1956). Her mother passed away when Mariama was still young.

Mariama was raised by her extended family, which included her father and grandparents. Her grandmother insisted that she assume a traditional household role; however, her father insisted that she attend school.

Mariama attended a girls’ boarding school, achieving the highest exam score for her area at age fourteen. She graduated from a teaching institution in 1947 and taught at École Normale de Rufisque until the school’s closure in the late fifties.

According to The Paris Review, Mariama first wanted to become a secretary. However, a teacher encouraged her to pursue teaching instead.

She was raised Muslim and studied the Quran extensively during her school holidays, something that is reflected throughout her works,

Mariama was married three times, which was considered unusual for a Muslim woman, and her experiences somewhat helped to shape her views on feminism and freedom.

Later, Mariama worked as a regional educational inspector, where her friends encouraged her writing. She was also part of several rights organizations, according to The Paris Review, which included Soroptimist International.

According to The Paris Review, Mariama critiqued traditional African-Islamic female roles. In an interview, she said:

“I had to know how to cook, do dishes, pound millet, make flour into couscous. I had to know how to wash clothes, iron ceremonial boubous [the colorful wide-sleeved robe worn by both sexes in West Africa], and when the right time came, with or without my consent, fall into another family — that of a husband.”

 

Two Novels by Mariama Bâ

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So Long a Letter: Mariama Bâ published works of fiction that explored a woman’s traditional role, unique challenges, and interpersonal relationships. Her works have been translated into more than twenty languages from their original French, becoming part of worldwide curricula.

Her first work, Une si longue lettre, was translated into English as So Long a Letter in 1979. The work won the inaugural Noma Award (1980), a prize that has also gone to Marlene van Niekerk’s novel Triomf (1995) and Walter and Albertina Sisulu: In Our Lifetime (2003).

Mariama gave a speech at the 1980 Frankfurt Book Fair, approximately one year before her death, when she said: “In all cultures, the woman who makes demands or protests is devalued.”

Une si longue lettre is written as a series of letters from a woman to her best friend. Ramatoulaye writes to her childhood friend, a girl named Aissatou, who now lives in the United States.

The letters unpack Ramatoulaye’s relationship with her husband, and her changing journey after his death. Aissatou relays her own story, which also involved her relationship with her husband.  Polygamy is one of the book’s strongest themes, explored through the characters’ different choices.

Many consider So Long a Letter semi-autobiographical; Mariama was married three times and had nine children. The novel also quotes from the Quran and identifies the narrator as Muslim, traits shared by the real-life author.

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Scarlet Song: Un Chant écarlate (Scarlet Song) was Mariama’s second novel. It was published after her death in 1981, with an English translation appearing in 1986. Like Mariama’s prior novel, Scarlet Song explores interpersonal relationships from an African woman’s eyes.

The story introduces us to Mireille, whose father is a French diplomat: she marries Ousmane, who breaks off the relationship for Ouleymatou. In this story, the narrator struggles with her traditional values that clash against strict Christian, colonial morality.

Scarlet Song is believed to be more of a commentary and less autobiographical than Mariama’s first novel.

 

Other writings

Though Mariama was best known for the two novels above, she also wrote a widely translated essay, short story, and poem.

Her essay “The Political Functions of Written African Literatures, ” described the African author’s role as highly influential, having a position to speak up about injustice and misogyny.

The short story “Rejection” was published in several collections. It speaks out about abusive relationships and gender-based violence, using the story’s narrator.

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Later discovery

Recent studies by UC Davis have unearthed a rare, previously undiscovered poem by Mariama Bâ. The poem is titled “Memories of Lagos” and was originally published in the newspaper L’Ouest Africain (The West African).

The newspaper’s editorial team was run by Mariama’s husband Obèye Diop, a politician, and the father of five children. He also served as the Senegalese Minister of Information.

 Legacy

Mariama’s daughter published a 2007 biography of her mother’s life, entitled Mariama Bâ ou les allées d’un destin (The Alleys of a Destiny) by Mame Coumba Ndiaye.

She was named for the Senegalese water goddess Mame Coumba Bang, who is strongly connected to Saint-Louis area. Mame Coumba Bang is associated with powerful female figures, comparable to Maman Brigitte.

An eponymous boarding school in Gorée was also named after Mariama Bâ. A 10-minute documentary for Women in African History explores her life and influence, and it can be found here.

Further reading and sources

Mariama Bâ is considered one of the most influential female authors from Africa, and certainly one of the most widely translated Senegalese female authors. Here is more information, links, and further reading:

South African History Online Cambridge University Press The Paris Review – Feminize Your Canon: Mariama Bâ – The Paris Review Encylopedia.com

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

More by Alex Coyne on this site

Nadine Gordimer, South African Author and Activist 8 Essential Novels by South African Author Nadine Gordimer Jeanne Goosen, Author of We’re Not All Like That 6 Notable South African Women Poets The Banning of Nadine Gordimer’s Anti-Apartheid Novels Olive Schreiner, Author of The Story of a South African Farm 10 Unforgettable Books by South African Women Writers Ingrid Jonker, South African Poet and Anti-Apartheid Activist

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4 Fascinating Museums that Were Founded by Women

Bob Eckstein’s 2024 book, Footnotes from the Most Fascinating Museums: Stories and Memorable Moments from People Who Love Museums (Princeton Architectural Press) is a fantastic addition to the body of work by this talented writer, illustrator, and cartoonist.

A love letter to museums mainly around the U.S., it’s an eclectic collection that features Bob’s distinctive artwork. It was interesting to discover that several important museums were founded by women, and that’s what we’ll focus on here. 

You’ll find plenty of art museums, of course, but other types of museums are well represented as well. Science, culture, transportation, history, and historic homes are represented. The entries offer basic info, but what really makes them shine are the personal stories from visitors to each venue.

In addition to those highlighted below, I hadn’t realized that the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in NYC was founded by three women collectively known as “the Ladies” — Abby Rockefeller, Lillie P. Bliss, and Mary Quinn Sullivan. 

Footnotes from the Most Fascinating Museums is a book to treasure and dip into. I love it, and I think any art and culture aficionado will, too! Make sure to scroll down to read a Q & A with Bob. 

Footnotes from the Most Fascinating Museums by Bob Eckstein
is available on Bookshop*, Amazon*, and wherever books are sold

From the publisher: We already know and love Bob Eckstein’s New York Times bestselling Footnotes from The World’s Greatest Bookstores. Now, Footnotes from the Most Fascinating Museums looks at the most beloved museums in North America. More than 75 museums are featured here (full list below) including those specializing in art, natural history, academia, science, and more.

Profiles from curators and museum workers appear alongside 155 original pieces of whimsical artwork that illustrate a story about the museum or showcase a particular work of art in its collection. This is a thought-provoking, inspiring reminder of why we go to museums and in the first place why we love them so much.

Artists, art lovers, students, travelers, and adventurers of all ages will delight in this highly giftable book. The following entries on the four museums are adapted from Footnotes from The World’s Greatest Bookstores, by permission of the author.

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Whitney Museum of American Art

New York City, Est. 1930

The Whitney, or officially the Whitney Museum of American Art, was founded by socialite Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney in 1930. The museum is most famous for its Whitney Biennial exhibition which showcase up-and-coming artists.

Its latest location is in the Meatpacking District in Manhattan. Its eight stories and two-hundred-thousand square feet consist of New York City’s largest column-free exhibit spaces. The museum includes an education center, library, theater, a conservation laboratory, and observation decks.

Their famed Independent Study Program, which boasts a list of accomplished artists, curators, and art historians as their alumni, is free and located in Roy Lichtenstein’s Greenwich Village studio. Michelle Obama attended the ceremonial ribbon-cutting of the new Renzo Piano–designed building in 2015 with Mayor Bill de Blasio.

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Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum

Boston, Massachusetts, Est. 1903

Built in 1901, Fenway Court was the former home of Isabella Stewart Gardner. Two years later it became the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, a must-see attraction in Boston filled with excellent examples of European, Asian, and American paintings, sculpture, tapestries, and decorative arts.

“We were a very young country and had very few opportunities of seeing beautiful things, works of art. I decided that the greatest need in our country was art. . . . So, I was determined to make it my life’s work if I could.”

The new wing of the museum, designed by Renzo Piano Building Workshop, opened in 2012 and will help preserve the original historic building by hosting all the museum’s public performances and events. 

The museum highlight is a magnificent fifteenth-century Venetian palace courtyard. The courtyard has a glass roof that illuminates the museum’s galleries by diffusing the natural light. Gardner purchased eight Venetian stone balconies which overlook an exceptional Roman tile mosaic for the parameter of the center sanctuary.

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American Visionary Art Museum

Baltimore, Maryland, Est. 1995

Fifi, 2001, Theresa Segreti

One eight-year-old was brought by her grandparents. She loved AVAM so much she sat in our gallery floor and refused to move, declaring, ‘I am going to live here.’ They reasoned, ‘Where are you going to sleep?’ ‘What will you eat?’ She had plausible answers for all. The museum store had snacks, she could bathe in our sinks, and there’s a water fountain in the basement.” (—Rebecca Hoffberger, retired founder, director, and curator)

American Visionary Art Museum (AVAM) specializes in outsider art, also known as “intuitive art” or “raw art.” Baltimore granted the land to the museum under the condition it would remove the pollution from the copper paint factory and whiskey warehouse that was there previously. Congress has designated it America’s national museum for self-taught art.

The one-acre campus contains sixty-seven thousand square feet of exhibits, features three floors of space, the Tall Sculpture Barn, the Wildflower Garden, and the Jim Rouse Visionary Center. The museum uses guest curators for its shows and focuses on themed exhibitions with titles like Wind in Your Hair and High on Life.

The museum’s founder, Rebecca Alban Hoffberger, ran AVAM “pretty un-museumy” and, at the time of its 1995 opening, rejected academic scholarship and museum “tradition,” reportedly upsetting prominent members of the art world. But the museum has since won the support of collectors, critics, and the public.

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Museum of Motherhood

St. Petersburg, Florida, Est. 2002

Museum of Motherhood is the first of its kind—a museum and educational center devoted to mothers, mothering, and motherhood in the world, covering the art, science, and history of mothers.

“By understanding the complex nature of family and women’s place in society, we become more compassionate and inspired in everything we do,” said Martha Joy Rose, the founder.

“I watched a couple of kids from the local high school try on the pregnancy vests and then waddle around groaning. Within five minutes they begged to take them off. One of the kids lamented how much they weighed. ‘Can you imagine doing that for nine months?’ the one asked. Is that how long they take to cook?’ the friend replied.”

The founder’s vision of the new building is that it will be in the shape of a womb with a front entrance symbolizing where motherhood all begins.

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Contributed by Bob Eckstein, a New York Times bestselling author. He has written for the New Yorker, New York Times, Reader’s Digest, Playboy, GQ, Wall St. Journal, and publications worldwide. He is also a Contributing Editor at Writer’s Digest and his newest book is Footnotes from the Most Fascinating Museums.  Visit his website and connect with him on Substack.

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

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Harriet Martineau, Social Theorist and Novelist

Harriet Martineau (June 12, 1802 – June 27, 1876)  was an English social theorist, lecturer and novelist. She was also an ardent supporter of women’s suffrage.

Her writings, which earned enough to support herself (very rare for a woman of her time) were proto-feminist and discusses aspects of culture pertaining to religion, politics, economics, and social institutions.

Harriet lost her senses of taste and smell from an early age and was partially deaf. Other health issues hindered her, yet she persevered in bringing her theories to a receptive audience.

The following biography was adapted From The Encyclopedia Britannica, 1911.

 

Early life

Harriet Martin was born in Norwich, England. where her father, Thomas Martineau, was a textile manufacturer. Her mother, Elizabeth, was the daughter of a sugar refiner. The family was of French Huguenot extraction and held Unitarian views.

The atmosphere of the home was industrious, intellectual, and austere. Harriet was clever, but sickly and unhappy. Her loss of taste and smell, and early deafness made her path to young adulthood challenging. She was, however, very well educated at home and developed early interests in political economy, philosophy, history, and the writings of Shakespeare.

At the age of fifteen, the state of her health and nerves led to a prolonged visit to her father’s sister, Mrs. Kentish, who kept a school in Bristol. Here, in the companionship of amiable and talented people, her life became happier.

She also improved under the influence of the Unitarian minister, Dr Lant Carpenter, from whose instructions, she says, she derived “an abominable spiritual rigidity and a truly respectable force of conscience strangely mingled together.”

In 1819, at age seventeen, she returned to Norwich. Around her twentieth year, her deafness was confirmed.

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A need to earn her way and first writings

In 1821, Harriet began to write anonymously for the Monthly Repository, a Unitarian periodical, and in 1823 she published Devotional Exercises and Addresses, Prayers and Hymns.

When Thomas Martineau died in 1826,  he left scant inheritance to his wife and daughters. His death had been preceded by that of his eldest son (Harriet’s bother). Soon after, Harriet’s fiancé died as well.

Mrs. Martineau and her daughters after lost all their means of support by the failure of the bank where their money had been placed.

Harriet now had to earn her living. Unable to teach due to her deafness, she took up authorship in earnest. In addition to reviewing for the Repository, she wrote stories (afterwards collected as Traditions of Palestine), and in one year (1830) won three essay prizes from the Unitarian Association. She supplemented her income with needlework.

In 1831 she was sought a publisher for a series of tales designed as Illustrations of Political Economy. After many failures, she accepted less than ideal terms from Charles Fox, to whom she was introduced by his brother, the editor of the Repository.

The sale of the first of the series was hugely successful. The demand increased with each new edition; from that time her literary earnings were secured.

 

A move to London and a visit to America

She moved to London, where she made the acquaintance of many literary figures of the time including Hallam, Milman, Malthus, Monckton Milnes, Sydney Smith, Bulwer, and later, Carlyle.

She continued to be occupied with her political economy series and a supplemental series of Illustrations of Taxation. Four stories dealing with the poor law came out about the same time. These tales, direct, lucid, written without any appearance of effort, and yet practically effective, display the characteristics of her style.

In 1834, when the series was complete, Harriet paid a long visit to America. Here, her open support of the Abolitionist party, then small and very unpopular gave great offense, which was deepened by the publication, soon after her return, of Society in America (1837) and a Retrospect of Western Travel (1838).

An article in the Westminster Review, “The Martyr Age of the United States,” introduced English readers to the struggles of the Abolitionists.

The American books were followed by a novel, Deerbrook (1839), a story of middle-class country life. At the same time she produced a few little handbooks, forming parts of a Guide to Service.

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A period of ill health and prolific writings

In 1839, during a visit to the Continent, Harriet’s health broke down. She retired to solitary lodgings in Tynemouth, and remained an invalid for some years.

In that time of relative confinement, she wrote The Hour and the Man (1840), Life in the Sickroom (1844), and the Playfellow (1841). She also published a series of tales for children containing some of her most popular work: Settlers at Home, The Peasant and the Prince, and Feats on the Fiord.

During this period of illness she was offered a pension on the civil list but declined it, fearing to compromise her political independence. Her letter on the subject was published, and some of her friends raised a small annuity for her soon after.

In 1844 Miss Martineau underwent a course of mesmerism, and in a few months was restored to health. She eventually published an account of her case, which had caused much discussion, in sixteen Letters on Mesmerism.

After her recovery she removed to Ambleside, where she built herself “The Knoll,” the house in which she spent a great portion of her remaining years.

 

Mature writings in philosophical and social theory

In 1845 she published three volumes of Forest and Game Law Tales. In 1846 she made a tour with some friends in Egypt, Palestine and Syria, and on her return published Eastern Life, Present and Past (1848).

This work showed that as humanity passed through one after another of the world’s historic religions, the conception of the Deity and of Divine government became at each step more and more abstract and indefinite.

The ultimate goal Harriet believed in was philosophic atheism, but she didn’t expressly this belief openly. She published Household Education, expounding the theory that freedom and rationality, rather than command and obedience, are the most effectual instruments of education.

Her interest in schemes of instruction led her to start a series of lectures, addressed at first to the school children of Ambleside, but afterwards extended, by request, to their parents. The subjects were sanitary principles and practice, the histories of England and North America, and the scenes of her Eastern travels.

At the request of Charles Knight she wrote, in 1849, The History of the Thirty Years’ Peace, 1816–1846 — an excellent popular history written from the point of view of a “philosophical radical.”

In 1851 Harriet edited a volume of Letters on the Laws of Man’s Nature and Development. Its form is that of a correspondence between herself and H. G. Atkinson, and expanded the doctrine of philosophical atheism in which she had depicted the course of human belief in Eastern Life.

Atkinson was a zealous exponent of mesmerism. The prominence given to the topics of mesmerism and clairvoyance heightened the general disapproval of the book, which caused a lasting division between Harriet and some of her friends.

She published a condensed English version of the Philosophie Positive (1853). Her Letters from Ireland, written during a visit to that country in the summer of 1852, appeared in serial form. She was a contributor to the Westminster Review for many years and was one of the band of supporters whose financial assistance prevented its extinction or forced sale.

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Final years

In the early part of 1855, Harriet found herself suffering from heart disease. She now began to write her autobiography, but her life, which she supposed to be so near its close, lasted for another twenty years.

Harriet cultivated a tiny farm at Ambleside with success, and her poorer neighbors owed much to her. Her busy life demonstrated two leading characteristics — industry and sincerity. The verdict she recorded on herself in the autobiographical sketch left to be published by the Daily News has been endorsed by posterity. She wrote, speaking of herself in the third person:

“Her original power was nothing more than was due to earnestness and intellectual clearness within a certain range. With small imaginative and suggestive powers, and therefore nothing approaching to genius, she could see clearly what she did see, and give a clear expression to what she had to say. In short, she could popularize while she could neither discover nor invent.”

Harriet Martineau died at The Knoll on June 27, 1876 at the age of 74.

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Further reading 

Published works (an extensive bibliography) Harriet Martineau’s archive , University of Birmingham, England, at the Cadbury Research Center The Martineau Society , UKAutobiography, with Memorials by Maria Weston Chapman (1877) Public domain works on Project Gutenberg

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Lois Duncan, Author of I Know What You Did Last Summer

Lois Duncan (April 28, 1934 – June 15, 2016) published more than fifty books, beginning with romance novels for adults and ending with picture books for children—but her name is synonymous with the teen thrillers that have remained her best-known works.

Feature films based on her books, like Down a Dark Hall (2018) and I Know What You Did Last Summer (2021), have continued to sustain her readership.

Just as her thrillers took ordinary people and thrust them into dark places, her personal life was profoundly impacted by her teenage daughter’s murder. In 1992, Lois Duncan was back in the headlines some six years after her death, when charges were brought against the man who confessed to the 1989 murder of her youngest daughter.

 

Early life and the beginning of a writing career

Lois Duncan Steinmetz was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on April 28, 1934, where she lived with her mother, also named Lois, and her father, Joseph. Theirs was a “loving, gentle home” as she describes it in Chapters: My Growth as a Writer. (Quotations are from this memoir unless otherwise stated.) 

After her brother Billy was born, the family resettled in Florida—a suitable location for her parents’ careers in photojournalism, where they worked for magazines like Life, Time, and Collier’s.

Lois loved spending time outdoors, playing in the woods or on the beaches, and although she enjoyed tormenting her brother, she enjoyed her own company too.

“I cannot remember a time when I did not consider myself a writer,” she said. By the time she was thirteen, she’d accumulated so many rejection slips that her mother forbade her from saving them. She wrote adventures and fairy tales: “What I couldn’t accomplish in real life, I could do on paper. All of my stories were written from a boy’s viewpoint.”

At her father’s urging, she showed a neighbor (who was a writer) a recent rejection from the Saturday Evening Post, and he advised her to write about what she knew instead. She began to transform her own experiences into fiction. The first story she wrote about an ordinary little girl, with braces on her teeth, earned her a twenty-five dollars. From then on, her own life informed her storytelling.

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Lois Duncan Steinmetz in her teens, photo by Joseph Steinmetz
courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
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Education

Quintessentially bookish, Lois was the high school yearbook editor and the managing editor of the newspaper (the best position available for a girl—only a boy could be the editor-in-chief).

She continued to value her solitude: “I ran with a crowd and enjoyed many people in a surface way, but I have seemed to form those deep all-consuming friendships that most teenage girls make such an important part of their lives.” Even then, she was dedicated to her work.

Lois’s parents supported her creativity. Her father was a Princeton and her mother had attended Smith as one of the first class of exchange students to graduate in Paris. So, there was no question that Lois would continue her studies.

“Education was a tradition in our family, and I moved automatically from high school into the college of my choice,” Duncan writes. That was Duke University, in 1952. Although she enjoyed her English and History classes, dorm life didn’t suit her; there was no opportunity for the solitude that propelled her writing, and she craved something more.

 

Handsome husband, cute house – what’s missing?

Lois married Joseph “Buzz” Cardozo, a pre-law student, just a few days after her nineteenth birthday in 1952 and shortly before his graduation. For the next two years she was an air force wife, until her husband was discharged and continued to law school.

Partly from loneliness and uncertainty. Lois began working on her first novel for the Seventeenth Summer Literary Contest. Married life wasn’t what she had expected. But after she won the contest, she could call herself an author — her romance Debutante Hill was published in 1958.

Lois wasn’t content. “I had a handsome husband, a cute little house to fuss around in, all the trappings that went with the role of an adult woman. Why did I feel so empty and dissatisfied? Something was missing, but what was it? I settled upon the same answer as millions of other young women. I had a baby.”

 

Independent and ambitious

Lois and Buzz were married for nine years before he met someone else. In an interview with Roger Sutton, she describes how unthinkable this was. “I’d never known a divorced person my whole life.” Not only did this disrupt her identity, but the six books she’d published by then weren’t enough to support three children.

Lois moved to New Mexico to be near her brother, along with her three children (Robin, Kerry, and Brett). She found administrative work in an advertising agency. Full-time work and caregiving sapped her energy and she set aside her writing. However, she began to submit photographs to contests, which paid off.

Soon she was able to arrange for childcare, which afforded her time to write. “I taught myself kinds of writing I had never before attempted. I wrote for women’s magazines, confession magazines, newspapers, and religious publications; I wrote verse and advertising copy.’

Lois developed a pattern of beginning a confession story on a Monday and submitting it on a Wednesday. Most were published and Duncan’s confidence—and income—grew.

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I Know What You Did Last Summer (1973)
remains one of Lois Duncan’s best-known works
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Moving into new genres

Lois met her second husband Don Arquette through her brother, and they married in 1965. He urged her to set aside the confession stories and consider submitting work to the top-tier women’s magazines, some of which had rejected her when she was starting out.

Once more, a return to stories based on her personal experiences brought her success. Good Housekeeping accepted her story about having won a photography contest. (Who could resist a story about winning a porpoise?)

Moving into another tier of journalism justified her return to novel writing. Back when Lois submitted her first novel for publication, an editor required that her nineteen-year-old narrator drink a Coca-Cola instead of a beer (anticipating pushback) but now, the YA genre was burgeoning. She studied the market and recognized the opportunity for innovation in realistic and challenging stories for teens.

Her original publisher was unconvinced that her move into suspense writing would suit her existing audience, but Ransom (1966), her story about schoolchildren kidnapped on a school bus, was a finalist for the Edgar Allan Poe Award. So was her next novel, about teen boys who go missing on a hiking trip, They Never Came Home.

Lois’s decision to change publishers demonstrates how fervently she believed in her stories, but she remained flexible when editors warned of a misstep.

With Down a Dark Hall (1974), for instance, she was warned that having male ghosts terrorizing female students at a boarding school would rankle readers in an era when women’s rights were gaining traction; instead, she transformed one of the artist-and-writer specters into Emily Brontë.

 

Inspiration and Endurance

In 1982, the Times Literary Supplement described Lois Duncan’s work as popular “not only with the soft underbelly of the literary world, the children’s book reviewers, but with its most hardened carapace, the teenage library book borrower.”

When asked about her decision to write for teens, Duncan joked that she had been one herself.

It’s a more revealing response than it seems, given the key role that Duncan’s personal experiences played in her fiction. In her freshman year at Duke, in 1952, the ESP study that her class participated in inspired A Gift of Magic (1971), anticipating the popularity of paranormal stories.

Some of her main characters were based on acquaintances and family members, including each of her five children: “The character of Mark in Killing Mr. Griffin is based on Robin’s horrible first boyfriend. Kit, in Down a Dark Hall, is Kerry, and the mischievous Brendon in A Gift of Magic is Brett. Young Don and Kate [the younger children from her second marriage] are Neal and Megan in Stranger with My Face.”

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Who Killed My Daughter? (1992)
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One of her most notable books, written for adults but embraced by younger readers, is the non-fiction volume about her youngest daughter’s murder, Who Killed My Daughter? (1992). It was continued in One to the Wolves (2013).

After her daughter’s murder, Lois began to move away from suspense writing. She returned to a series begun decades earlier with Hotel for Dogs; News for Dogs and Movies for Dogs are light and witty stories for younger readers, in which the main character is “a carbon copy [of herself]… not only a dog lover but an aspiring writer, already submitting stories to magazines at age ten” complete with a little brother like Billy (Andi’s brother, Bruce).

Hotel For Dogs and I Know What You Did Last Summer (about the teens in a vehicle that strikes a cyclist on the road, and who leave the scene of their crime) remain her bestselling novels. Her teen suspense novels were never out of print in her lifetime, and she was active in the process of readying ten of those novels for reissue in 2010.

Speaking about the updates with Valerie O. Patterson, Lois described taking out the polyester pantsuits, updating hairstyles, and adding electronics.

The phones were the most challenging aspect to change because many of the plots turned on characters being unable to call for help: “I dropped them into toilets and rivers, had their batteries run down, had them loaned to friends who didn’t return them.”

Though her stories are renowned for their compelling plot lines, Lois credited their endurance to the energy she invested in character development: styles change more than human nature.

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Recognition and legacy

In 1971, Lois joined the journalism faculty at The University of New Mexico, where she taught for eleven years. At the same time, she took courses herself and in 1977 completed the degree she had begun many years before. Of course, she wrote about it: she submitted the story to Good Housekeeping and her payment covered the cost of her tuition.

Many of her books were recognized differently, having been banned in various schools and libraries. She speaks of Killing Mr. Griffin in particular (about students who kidnap their English teacher as a prank that goes wrong). She hypothesized that the title alone could have been problematic. Some challengers cited a violent scene from I Know What You Did Last Summer, which only appears in the film—not in the book. 

As a young writer, Lois Duncan won Seventeen Magazine’s short story contest three times. Many of her novels were cited as ALA Best Books and claimed readers’ choices awards. She also received the 1992 Margaret Edwards Award from the American Library Association (for a body of young adult literature).

In 2015, she received the Lifetime Achievement (Grand Master) award from the Mystery Writers of America.

Lois died on June 15, 2016 at the age of 82. Her obituaries emphasized her focus on realistic characters struggling to resolve moral dilemmas and taking responsibility for their decisions. “Without being didactic,” The Guardian wrote, her characters “showed readers the necessity of facing up to the consequences of their actions.”

In Publishers’ Weekly, Beverly Horowitz wrote that “Lois Duncan’s thriller suspense novels led the charge for expanding the YA market, not only in terms of the honesty of her portrayals of teen characters, but also in terms of opening up YA.”

Lois Duncan was proud of her literary accomplishments, but her response to her youngest daughter’s murder took her in an entirely different direction. Through her work to uncover the facts of her daughter’s case, she connected with other families who navigated the complex system for seeking justice for lost loved ones. In tandem with her literary accomplishments, she contributed to the creation of a research center to investigate cold cases, which evolved into the non-profit Resource Center for Victims of Violent Deaths.

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Contributed by Marcie McCauley, a graduate of the University of Western Ontario and the Humber College Creative Writing Program. She writes and reads (mostly women writers!) in Toronto, Canada. And she chats about it on Buried In Print and @buriedinprint. 

Further reading

Lois Duncan’s bibliography works in multiple genres is vast;
see her list of works in full here . Film and theatrical adaptations Remembering Lois Duncan, the Queen of Teen Suspense (NPR) Obituary in The Guardian

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