Pamela D. Toler's Blog, page 19

From the Archives: Blood Sisters

I have started and abandoned three blog post topics this morning. Two of them were based on pieces of information that turned out to be not quite correct when I looked at them more closely. And the third was a little known moment within a well-known story: the moment was too small to support a post by itself and the well-known story was too well known to re-tell here. *Sigh*

Luckily I had reason to rummage on my bookshelves recently in response to a request for books about historical women prior to 1700. I now have a list of books that I’ve reviewed here on the Margins that I would be happy to recommend to anyone. I will fall back on them when and as needed in the coming weeks. (Thanks, Linnie.)

First up, Blood Sisters by Sarah Gristwood, which I reviewed in 2013.  (The news referred to in the first sentence is no longer new, though it was the subject of a film, The Lost King, which was released in March, 2023. Apparently Richard III is able to generate endless controversy.)

With the discovery of Richard III’s bones under a Leister parking lot, the Wars of the Roses are in the news again. Historians and hobbyists alike are arguing the relative claims of Lancaster and York across the media. In Blood Sisters: The Women Behind the Wars of the Roses, Sarah Gristwood tells the familiar story of the so-called “Cousins’ War” from a new perspective.

As Gristwood points out, most histories of the period echo the “patriarchial assumptions” of the time and focus on its male protagonists. In Blood Sisters, kings and kingmakers take a back seat to their mothers, wives, sisters and daughters.  Some, like heiress Anne Neville, were passed from one royal family to another like pieces of property.  Others were actively involved in the politics of the time, using husbands and sons as their path to power.  Whether pawns or players, all were caught up in the web of changing alliances, family loyalties and political machinations that defined the war.  Gristwood pieces together their stories from their household accounts, their occasional letters, and their appearances in the accounts of others.

At its heart, Blood Sisters is about relationships.  Gristwood describes the events surrounding the Wars of the Roses and the resultant rise of the Tudor dynasty as a family saga whose protagonists were tied together in numerous ways.  By focusing on the lives of the Plantagenet women, she illustrates the complexities of those ties–creating a larger picture of the Wars of the Roses in the process.

Josephine Baker–a Graphic Biography

It took me several months to work my way through Catel Muller and José-Louis Bocquet’s graphic biography of Josephine Baker. Not because it wasn’t interesting or well done, but because it is the graphic equivalent of a Big Fat History Book, with 460 pages of densely packed graphic story and another 100 pages of supporting material, notably a useful timeline and a series of biographical essays about other characters who appear in the book, sometimes for only a single panel. The essays are arranged in the order in which they appear in the main story, beginning with Baker’s mother and ending with The Rainbow Tribe, Baker’s multi-ethnic family of twelve adopted children.

Josephine Baker is a cradle-to-grave biography of a complex personality who led a long and action-packed life. The visual language of the work is sophisticated. Physical settings are rendered in meticulous, carefully researched detail. By contrast, action scenes are starkly black and white, with the background and characters alike rendered in a abstracted, almost comic book style. Baker seems to vibrate with energy, dominating every panel she appears in. Against all odds, Catel gives the reader an almost tangible feeling for Baker as a dancer.

The biographical essays are a critical element of the book: both its strength and an illustration (hah) of the form’s limits. Once I discovered them, I read the essays in conjunction with the related chapter, but it was inherently awkward—a break in the narrative flow of the story. In interviews, Catel and Bocquet make it clear that the essays are not an afterthought. They were intended to flesh out the story in a way that was impossible to do within limits of a graphic work. At its best, graphic non-fiction uses visual elements to tell a story in a new and powerful way. In Josephine Baker, Catel and Bocquet have attempted to straddle the divide.

****

And speaking of complex personalities who lived a long and action packed life:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hitlerland

My first step when I begin a new book is what I think of as a self-directed masters’ program. Since I am inevitably writing about something outside my academic field, I read deep and wide.* It is a wonderful part of the process—one I share with you as I wrap my head around the big picture, stumble across great stories, and read fascinating books.

For some reason, I never told you about Andrew Nagorski’s Hitlerland: American Eyewitnesses to the Nazi Rise to Power, which was one of the first books I read as background material for writing The Dragon in Chicago. Actually, now that I think about it, Hitlerland was one of the first books I read as background material for writing my book proposal. I may not have shared it because I didn’t want to spill the beans about the book idea. Luckily it is never too late for a book review.

Nagorski, himself a foreign correspondent, opens Hitlerland with a two page synopsis of Sigrid Schultz’s life and career as the head of the Chicago Tribune’s Berlin bureau. He returns to Schultz on occasion as a touchstone, but he focuses on Americans whose experience of Nazi Germany was shorter and less informed that Schultz’s. He looks at accounts by Americans who worked or traveled in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s: diplomats, journalists, entertainers, scholars, students, and Olympic athletes. Not to mention Charles Lindbergh, whose visits in Germany between 1936 and 1939 at the invitation of the Nazi government were in some ways sui generis.

The final result is a startling picture of just how much Americans actually knew about what was happening in Germany, and how little many of them understood. It was relatively easy for Americans to travel to and in Germany in the years between the two world wars, and there was plenty of reason for them to do so. Berlin was a cultural hub that rivaled Paris in the 1920s, known as the “Golden Years.” But Nagorski makes it clear that many of them lived in relative isolation, spending time with other Americans. The result was a rosy view of Germany that led tourists and political junketeers to question the reality of the news reported by Sigrid Schultz and her colleagues.

An excellent introduction to a difficult subject.

 

*Actually, I do this when I write a researched-based article as well, though I try not to go quite as deep or as wide. Whenever I find myself slipping over the edge, I remind myself of what I think of as the Grange incident. (My apologies if you have heard this story before.) Early in my writing career, when I was pitching history-adjacent stories everywhere I could think of, I got an assignment to write an article on the history of the Grange** for Hobby Farms magazine. Newly out of my doctoral program, I plunged into a literature search. I soon began to panic at the amount of work I needed to do. Then I realized I had accumulated a list of 25 (very academic) books and articles as background pieces for a 250 word article.

**A national farming association founding in the mid-nineteenth century, the Grange was (and is) both a national lobby for the interests of small farmers and a community-based organization for farm families. In the past, Grange Halls were often the community centers in small rural towns. In short, the Grange was a Big Deal.

****

Just a reminder, The Dragon for Chicago is now available for preorder wherever you buy your books. If you want a signed copy, you can order it through my local independent bookstore here: https://www.semcoop.com/dragon-chicag... Use the special instructions block at the bottom on the order page to request a signed copy and tell me how you want it signed.

Thanks to those of you who have already pre-ordered from any purveyor of books.  It makes a difference.

 

 

 

From the Archives: City of Fortune

I am deep in reviewing the index for The Dragon from Chicago, which has turned out to be a much harder and more fiddly task than I anticipated.* Nonetheless, I full intended to give you a new blog post today.  I really tried, but after an hour I was forced to admit that the idea just didn’t work.  Instead, I offer you this post from April, 2012.  Reading this twelve years later made me want to pull City of Fortune off the shelves for a re-read on this snowy April day.  But I must remain strong.  Index, here I come.

***

I thought I knew something about Venice. A floating city carved out of a malaria-ridden lagoon.  Merchant city-state turned maritime empire, with one foot in the Muslim world.  The European end of the desert caravan trade, with merchant entrepôts throughout the Levantine coast.  Canals, gondoliers,  masked balls, gold ducats. Glamor, wealth, decadence, decay.  Or perhaps, in the words of Lerner and Lowe, “just a town without a sewer.”

Then I got a chance to review  Roger Crowley’s City of Fortune: How Venice Ruled the Seas for Shelf Awareness for Readers and discovered I knew nothing about Venice.

Roger Crowley  returns to the medieval and early modern Mediterranean in City of Fortune, using three defining moments to tell the story of Venice’s development from a “smattering of low-lying muddy islets set in a malarial lagoon” to the greatest power in the region: the city-state’s pivotal role in the Fourth Crusade and the sacking of Constantinople in 1204; Venice’s bloody rivalry with Genoa for control of the East-West trade; and its desperate defense against the Ottoman Empire’s expansion into the Mediterranean in the fifteenth century.

As in his earlier books, Crowley’s fast-paced narrative style and vivid character sketches strike a nice balance between the big picture and the telling detail. He tells the story using a variety of voices. In addition to accounts by Venetian doges, merchants and city officials, he uses those written by–often hostile–outsiders, including the poet Petrarch, Pope Innocent III, Norman crusaders, and Cretan rebels.

Trade is the theme that ties Crowley’s story together. With no natural resources, no agriculture, and a small population, Venice depended entirely on trade for its survival. Its relationships first with Byzantium and later with the Islamic world were both the foundation of its prosperity and a source of contention with the rest of Christendom. Control of the western end of the overland trade caravans was the key to Venice’s success as “Europe’s first full-blown colonial adventure.” Crowley ends with the event that would bring Venetian maritime dominance to a close: the news that Portugal had found a sea route to India, rendering the Venetian empire suddenly obsolete.

*Writing the book is just the first of many steps that take you a published book.  And all of them are time-consuming.

Women’s History Month is Over. What Next?

 

I always greet the end of Women’s History month with mixed feelings.

On the one hand, I am sorry for the fun to end. All through March, everywhere I go on the internet someone is posting something interesting about women whose stories need to be told or sharing their own introduction to women’s history, whether it happened in grade school,* in college, or yesterday. Or some combination of all three.** I learn about women I’ve never heard of, add books to my already overwhelming To-Be-Read list, and meet fellow travelers. Then April 1st comes and it is time to put away my party hat and noisemakers for another year. Though April Fool’s Day is consolation of its own sort: I am very fond of foolishness.***

On the other hand, I am ready for the fun to end. Putting together the interview series is a labor of love for me, and an act of generosity for the historians, novelists, poet and podcast hosts who take the time to answer questions about their work. It is also a lot is a lot of work. No matter how far ahead I start, I am always scrambling in the final week to get the last few posts up. Writing this wrap-up post is my last job for the month.

But that doesn’t mean that I’m setting aside women’s history. I’ve already started a list of people I’m excited to invite for next year’s interviews. I have books to review and authors to interview. I have a whole series of posts about women’s journalists to run in the months leading up to the release of The Dragon from Chicago.**** In short, to misquote Ebenezer Scrooge, “I will honor Women’s History Month in my heart and try to keep it all the year.” That is, after all, the goal: to reach the point where we don’t need Women’s History Month, or Black History Month, or any of the other heritage months that now fill our calendars because we have already integrated those stories into history as we teach and learn it.

We’re not there yet.  We’re not even close. Getting there will take hard work on many fronts. And an occasional month of celebration.

* It turns out I wasn’t the only little girl eagerly reading what I now know are books in the Bobbs-Merrill Childhood of Famous Americans series.

**I love this essay by historical novelist Joan Fernandez: You’re Not Crazy

***Though I strongly dislike pranks, which I find inherently mean-spirited.

****August 6. Mark your calendars. (Not that I’m going to let you forget.)

Talking About Women’s History Month: Three Questions and an Answer with Rowena Kennedy-Epstein

Rowena Kennedy-Epstein is Associate Professor of Gender Studies and 20th/21st-Century Women’s Writing at the University of Bristol. She is the author of Unfinished Spirit: Muriel Rukeyser’s Twentieth Century (Cornell UP, 2022), which won the Modern Language Association Matei Calinescu Prize, and she has published three editions of Rukeyser’s witting: The Muriel Rukeyser Era: Selected Prose (Cornell UP, 2023), her novel Savage Coast (Feminist Press, 2013), and Barcelona, 1936 (Lost&Found 2011). A visiting scholar at the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing, she’s currently writing the first biography of Rukeyser (Bloomsbury USA), for which she was awarded a 2022-23 National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholars Fellowship.

Take it away, Rowena!

What path led you to Muriel Rukeyser, and why do you think it’s important to explore her story today?

I think the “Rukeyser Era” had been percolating, because in my first weeks of graduate school in 2006 at the CUNY Graduate Center two different professors included her work on their reading lists. Ammiel Alcalay included the Life of Poetry (1949) in his seminar on American poetry and the Cold War—that course was the start of his extraordinary Lost & Found publishing project, which I think has really transformed the ways students engage with archives. At the same time, I was in Jane Marcus’s seminar on the Spanish Civil War (1936-39), and Rukeyser’s poem “Mediterranean” was on the syllabus. I think I ended up reading both works around the same week, and they are clearly connected, each beginning on the boat evacuating Barcelona at the start of the Civil War in July 1936. It was clear how vital that moment in Barcelona was to Rukeyser, and I began looking for more writing and scholarship about her time in Spain. But there was very little written about her that I knew how to access at the time—Adrienne Rich’s introduction to a selection, a collection of essays, some chapters in book, and a monograph from 1980.[1] Her Collected Poems had only just been republished that year, in 2006. When I went to speak to Jane about Rukeyser, she asked me what I thought about the poem. Without much understanding of why I would think this, I said I thought the poem “might be bad and I wasn’t sure I liked her writing at all.” I had just come out of an MFA program in poetry, and looking back I can see that we were still caught in the long backlash to second wave feminism, and to the writers that articulated the political realities of women’s lives, many of whom would cite Rukeyser as a major influence—the “mother of us all.”

Jane Marcus, whose ideas and criticism were forged in the second wave, responded with a howl of impatience when I used the word “bad” to describe Mediterranean. She said, in words more brilliant than I can recall now, that in order to do feminist and radical scholarship I had to evaluate texts not on the aesthetic, disciplinary and political terms defined by patriarchy to exclude women from public space but by looking at how women writers disrupt and defy those very orthodoxies. Better yet, she said, go to the archives and find those texts; teach them not just as a corrective or counter-canon, but as exemplary—as the very subject itself.[2] And so I went up the street to Rukeyser’s archive at the Berg collection of the New York Public Library. I began to find there a subject whose work demanded a new kind of narrative, whose writing—much of it unfinished or out of print—would make me understand how inculcated in patriarchy my thinking still was, our texts still were. It wasn’t long after that I followed Rukeyser’s trail to her other archive at the Library of Congress, where I discovered her lost novel about the Spanish Civil War, Savage Coast. I’ve written about the experience of encountering Savage Coast in the Library of Congress a few times—it was in a miscellany folder, filed away from her other Spanish Civil War writing—and it was unfinished, with the rejection letter (written by her mentor Horace Gregory) just siting on top, so it was the first thing I read. But what is poignant, now that I think about it, is how the language used in the rejection of the novel in 1936—that it was “BAD”—prefigured so strongly my own cursory assessment of Mediterranean in Jane’s office in 2006. As I began to read the novel right there in the archive I must have started to course-correct myself, to retrain the aesthetic judgments I held, seeking to understand how gender bias had formed responses to her writing but to also see how the forms she chose in her writing were already responding to the very same gendered assumptions. I could also see what critical sexism had done to this extraordinary novel, leaving it fragmented and unpublished, and forcing Rukeyser to work relentlessly, in every genre, to move her ideas into the world. Following this work—published and unpublished—through the archive has changed those narratives and it has changed me. Rukeyser’s politically engaged and formally experimental writing teaches us how to read and write against institutionalised power, and to imagine “some nameless way of living/of almost unimagined values.”

Writing about a historical figure like Muriel Rukeyser requires living with her over a period of years.  What was it like to have her as constant companion?

I never thought I would be working on one writer for over a decade! I’m still surprised that I am writing her biography now. There’s a great passage the Introduction to Andrea Dworkin’s Letters from a War Zone (1988),  in which she talks about about being Rukeyser’s assistant in 1972. I think it underscores why living with Rukeyser has been so rewarding and feels important. Dwrokin recalls:

Muriel gave me my first book party, to celebrate the publication of Woman Hating; and I thought that was it—I was a writer (sort of like being an archangel) forever. Everything she had tried to tell me was lost on me. She had tried to make me understand that, for a writer, endurance mattered more than anything—not talent, not luck; endurance. One had to keep writing, not to make a brilliant or distinguished or gorgeous first try, but to keep going, to last over hard time. Endurance, she would say, was the difference between writers who mattered and writers who didn’t. She had had rough years. I hope someday her story will be told. It is a heroic story. She knew the cost of keeping at writing in the face of poverty, ostracism, and especially trivialization. She knew how much worse it was to be a woman. She knew that one had to survive many desolations and injuries—one would be both bloodied and bowed; but one had to keep writing anyway—through it, despite it, because of it, around it, in it, under it goddam.

I did not know about her relationship with Dworkin until the writer Sophie Ward mentioned it—that I could know her work and still not know her yet felt fruitful; it also affirmed for me her centrality to American feminism and women’s writing. But Dworkin’s two simple sentences, “I hope someday her story will be told. It is a heroic story,” are poignant. The fact that Rukeyser’s biography has not yet been written, 44 years after her death, that so much of her story is still untold—not just her story but the stories of her innovative and radical milieu of women writers in the 30s and 40s and 50s that shaped the 20th-Century—compels me to keep working with her, to bring her writing into print, to tell those narratives, mainly because those are the stories I want to read. As Rukeyser wrote, you go to the “houses of the papers themselves” and write the book that you so badly need to read. Rukeyser made incredibly interesting choices in response to both personal circumstances and to the crises of her times—how she thought about gender and race, imperialism and anti-facism, motherhood and sexuality—and to have the chance to follow her thinking, decipher the work that she created in response to it, has been surprising and rewarding.

Unfinished Spirit is such an evocative title. Can you tell us how you came to it?

The title of the book comes from a line in one of Rukeyser’s Elegies, which she wrote throughout the 1940s, in a period of both personal and public crisis:

When you have left the river you are a little way
near the lake; but I leave many times.
Parents parried my past; the present was poverty,
the future depended on my unfinished spirit.
There were no misgivings because there was no choice, only regret for waste, and
the wild knowledge: growth and sorrow and discovery.
Muriel Rukeyser, “First Elegy: Rotten Lake” (1949)

As I wrote the book, I came to understand that the “unfinished” was not only representative of the state of a manuscript encountered in the archive, but an essential part of Rukeyser’s process—a process that remains “open” in the way the poet Lyn Hejinian has described a work that resists totality, a “rejection of closure,” which might be especially important for women writers who want to resist confining orthodoxies.  Rukeyser understood the gender politics of the unfinished—she often wrote about the disruptions of motherhood, the censure of critics and the sexism and homophobia of editors. But she also recognised something deeply promising in the kind of work that never ends—“where the process never stops,” she writes in the synopsis of an unfinished biography, “we are offered the continual opening of the spirit.”

I end Unfinished Spirit thinking about the process that we have to undertake to do this kind of feminist recovery work:

The unfinished work—messy, fragmented, diffuse, and hard to read, found in miscellany folders, in a folder in someone else’s archive—is, I think, the condition of women’s writing, and women’s lives, to a large extent. It should never be assumed that at anytime the fraction of work that women have had published is at all representative of what they have actually produced. We need continue to move away from the assumption that publication confirms authorship. For what happens between the moment of creation and the moment of publication is a series of negotiations with power structures that shapes not only the culture in any given period, but the forms of the works themselves, and then our responses to them (167).

[1] Louise Kertesz’s The Poetic Vision of Muriel Rukeyser (1980); a collection of essays, How Shall we Tell Each other of the Poet: The Life and Writing of Muriel Rukeyser (1999), edited by Anne Herzog and Janet Kaufman; Jan Heller Levi’s A Muriel Rukeyser Reader (1995),  and Adrienne Rich’s Introduction to the Selected Poems (2005).
[2] Jane  introduces her essay collection Art and Anger: Reading Like a Woman (1988) with the title “Changing the Subject.”

A question from Rowena: How do you deal with archival gaps when writing women’s lives?

I go into each project with the assumption that there will always be archival gaps. In fact, in some ways my last book, Women Warriors, was nothing but archival gaps. Which you could argue was the point.

My experience in the current book, The Dragon From Chicago, was much different. I had a great deal of archival material to work with as well as the articles Sigrid Schultz wrote for the Chicago Tribune. (Echoing a point Elaine Hayes  made several days ago, I am deeply grateful for the fact that the historical Tribune has been digitized, so I didn’t have to scroll through more than twenty years of microfilmed newspapers and suffer the inevitable migraines related thereto. I am even more grateful that I had access to the digitized files on-line through the Chicago Public Library during the pandemic.)

Even with a wealth of material, there were holes. I took different paths, depending on what was missing. In some cases, I discussed what sources are available and what questions they leave unanswered. Occasionally I speculated on possible answers to unanswered questions, based on the archival information we do have and information about the lives of others at the time. I read as many memoirs by people who had been in the period as I could get my hands on. In the case of the missing second half of a very interesting letter, I spent a lot of time trying, without success, to find where the recipient’s papers were held. And in one case the gap seemed so egregious that after I turned in my draft I went back to the first archives I had visited to see if there was something I’d missed in my previous visits. (There was. A single sentence that told me how she felt about something I knew was important to her. Which was both wonderful and worrying.)

And yet, holes remain.

***

Interested in learning more about Rowena Kennedy-Epstein and her work?

Visit her faculty page: https://research-information.bris.ac.uk/en/persons/rowena-kennedy-epstein

***

Alas, this is the last interview for Women’s History Month this year. Thanks to all of you who contributed, and all of you who read. Come back next week for life as usual here on the Margins.

 

 

 

Talking About Women’s History: A Whole Bunch of Questions with Vanessa Riley

Honored as the 2023 Georgia Literary Fiction Author of the Year, Vanessa Riley is an acclaimed author known for captivating novels like Island Queen, which is based on the true story of Dorothy Kirwan Thomas, who rose from slavery to become one of the wealthiest and most powerful landowners in the colonial West Indies, and Queen of Exiles, which tells the story of Marie-Louise Christophe, Haiti’s first and only queen.. Riley’s works spotlight hidden narratives of Black women and women of color, emphasizing strong sisterhoods, diverse communities, and power across historical fiction, romance, and mystery genres. With a doctorate in mechanical engineering from Stanford University, Vanessa brings a research-oriented approach to highlight inclusivity in her storytelling about Caribbean, Georgian, and Regency eras, resulting in over twenty-five published titles. As a member of various literary organizations, she advocates for diverse voices and storytelling.

Take it away, Vanessa!

 

Photo Credit: Gallium by Ellis Riley

You have written several historical novels based on the lives of real-life Caribbean women during the Georgian period.  What path led you to their stories?

The path to discovering the stories of real-life Caribbean women during the Georgian period is part of my heritage. I was told as a child in smaller tales of these exploits. As an adult who loves history, I think I am more attuned to finding these treasures. My passion is to rediscover real Black women and women of color who have impacted history. Their stories are often hidden or purposefully obscured. My desire is to shed light on hidden histories and showcase the resilience and strength of women who’ve been overlooked in traditional historical narratives, our written history books, our conscientiousness.

You have written books based on real historical figures and others that place a fictional woman in a historical setting.  How does your writing process differ when you are writing about a real person as opposed to a completely fictional character?

When writing about real historical figures, my process involves extensive research to ensure accuracy while delving into the emotions and motivations. I try to understand the global politics of their situation, as none of history exists in a vacuum. For fictional characters in historical settings, I have more creative freedom to craft their journeys while staying true to the historical context. These fictional characters often represent themes that support the narrative or explain what is happening in the world.

How do you walk the line between historical fact and fiction in a novel?

Balancing historical fact and fiction requires meticulous attention to detail, especially as this may be a reader’s first introduction to this history. I want to provide as many details as possible, including the art of the time period, to immerse readers. If I send you Googling to learn more, I’ve done my job.

What types of sources do you rely on to create rich fictional characters who are historically accurate? 

To create rich, historically accurate characters, I rely on a variety of sources such as primary documents, historical accounts, and scholarly research. The art of the time period is also important as it adds depth and authenticity to the storytelling.

You include detailed author’s notes in your novels that provide historical documentation for the stories you tell.  What inspired you to include those notes?

Including detailed author’s notes is inspired by my commitment to transparency and providing readers with behind-the-scenes insights into the historical context of my novels. Readers love these glimpses into how the stories come together.

What do you find most challenging or most exciting about researching historical women?

Researching historical women is both challenging and essential due to misogyny, the infantilization of women’s roles, and the intersection of feminism and racism. Many would rather believe that Black women and women of color are limited to enslavement, that they played no part in women seeking the right to vote, etc. It’s crucial to amplify marginalized voices and reclaim their rightful place in history.

What was the most surprising thing you’ve found doing historical research for your work?

One surprising discovery during historical research was the depth of resilience, strength, and elegance in the history of these powerful women. We need these stories to strengthen and inspire women everywhere, showing that obstacles can be overcome with grace and determination.

Are there special challenges to researching women of color, who in some ways have been doubly erased from history?

Researching women of color presents unique challenges due to historical erasure and lack of documentation. However, nothing is more rewarding than restoring these women for modern readers to know and become familiar with.

What work of women’s history have you read lately that you loved?  (Or for that matter, what work of women’s history have you loved in any format? )

I’m currently enjoying works like The Four Winds by Kristin Hannah and The Other Princess by Denny S. Bryce, which explore women’s experiences in different historical contexts.

Do you think Women’s History Month is important and why?

Women’s History Month is important as it honors those who came before us, paving the way and holding lanterns to show us how to be resilient and succeed. It’s a time to reflect on the contributions of women throughout history and celebrate their achievements.

Interesting in learning more about Vanessa Riley and her novels?

Check out her website: www.VanessaRiley.com

Follow her Facebook page: Vanessa Riley Author

Follow her on Instagram: vanessarileyauthor

Follow her on the site previously known as Twitter: @VanessaRiley

***

Come back tomorrow for three questions and an answer with Rowena Kennedy-Epstein Author of Unfinished Spirit: Muriel Rukeyser’s Twentieth Century 

 

 

 

Talking About Women’s History: Three Questions and an Answer with Elaine Hayes

Elaine Hayes is the author of the critically acclaimed biography Queen of Bebop: The Musical Lives of Sarah Vaughan (Ecco, 2017). Recognized as a best book of the year by Amazon, Publishers Weekly, Booklist, and the Washington Post, Queen of Bebop tells the story of this iconic vocalist’s rise from a choir girl in Newark, New Jersey, to an innovator at the forefront of modern jazz, a pop star, and ultimately a vocal legend, whose voice transcended boundaries of genre, race, and class. Elaine received her doctorate in musicology from the University of Pennsylvania and currently lives in Seattle with her husband, son, and Archie the miniature poodle.

I am thrilled to have Elaine here on History in the Margins on March 27, 2024, just in time to celebrate Sarah Vaughan’s 100th Birthday.

Take it away, Elaine:

When did you first become interested in big band “girl singers” and women in jazz?  What sparked that interest?

Sarah Vaughan was my entry point into girl singers, big bands, and really, jazz more generally. I was a classically trained pianist, who hadn’t thought much about jazz until a college roommate played lots of Sarah Vaughan. I was immediately drawn to her voice, how she used it, and the sheer presence and authority she exuded when she sang.

I didn’t really know that much about Sarah the woman until a couple years later when, as a graduate student, I wrote a research paper about her for a seminar on women in jazz. I learned more about her artistry and creative process. The challenges she faced as a woman working in the male-dominated world of jazz. And how the narratives surrounding both her professional and personal life shaped her legacy. I realized that there was a bigger story to tell—one that would provide insights not only into Sarah Vaughan but also vocalist and women in jazz more generally.

Writing about a historical figure like Sarah Vaughan requires living with her over a period of years.  What was it like to have her as a constant companion?

Yes, Sarah Vaughan really did become my constant companion, first as a graduate student and then a decade later as her biographer. Spending five days a week, for years, thinking about a single person, investing in her life and career, triumphs and challenges, can be very intimate. Even though we never met, and I didn’t have a relationship with her in the traditional sense, I felt a close emotional bond. Vaughan’s power as an artist magnified this connection. She possessed an uncanny ability to capture the full spectrum of human experiences and emotions in her singing. And I, like so many other listeners, felt as if I knew her and she knew me.

I am not a sentimental person, but I cried as I wrote, and even edited, the final chapter and epilogue of Queen of Bebop. The life of a person who I admired and cared deeply about was ending, and so was my journey with her. There was a very real sense of mourning and loss.

As I re-visit the material for Vaughan’s centenary, however, it is speaking to me in a new way. It’s like reconnecting with an old friend that I hadn’t realized I’d missed. I’m enjoying their company again and remembering why we became friends in the first place.

We’re all familiar with the challenges of finding sources for writing about women from the distant past.  What are the challenges of writing about women from the early and middle twentieth century?

In the past 20 years, writing about a public figure like Sarah Vaughan has, in fact, gotten much easier. When I began the project as graduate student, it was hard to find source material. If I wanted to go beyond the clip folders collected by two or three specialized libraries, I needed to read full runs of publications—on microfilm! This was incredibly time consuming (and nausea inducing). So I limited myself to trade publications, how critics, usually white critics, responded to her singing. This really narrowed the story I could tell.

But now, thanks to the emergence of searchable digital newspaper and magazine archives, there is a wealth of source material. With patience, persistence, and perhaps most importantly, good organization, researchers can find amazing things.

This allowed me to reconstruct Vaughan’s career with a level of granularity and precision which had been missing. It also helped me incorporate perspectives that had been underrepresented or overlooked in past scholarship. A survey of the Black press, for example, added complexity to her story by providing insights into how Black communities understood Vaughan and her singing.

And, finally, because of these digital resources, I was able to re-insert Vaughan’s own voice back into her narrative. (Past biographers relied on contemporaries and acquaintances to tell her story.) When I began the project, I couldn’t find many interviews with Vaughan, and I assumed she simply did not give that many. This was not the case. Although she was a reluctant, often hostile interview subject, she regularly spoke to the press. By digging into this newly accessible historical record, I rediscovered many of these interviews, making it possible for Vaughan to tell us, in her own words, about her worldview and approach to making music. This was huge.

A question from Elaine: Now that I’ve told you about the wealth of source material I was lucky to find about Sarah Vaughan, I’m interested in learning more about how a historian like you, who does study women from the distant past, recreates their life stories.

In working on my last book, Women Warriors, I faced a number of challenges as far as sources were concerned.

Because it was a global history, I was dependent on secondary sources and translations of primary sources in languages I could read. (And mightily frustrated by the hints about sources that had not been translated.)

Even when I had access to sources, they were often meager. In the case of Boudica for instance, who led her people in a revolt against the Romans in 61 CE, we are limited to three written sources, with some help from modern archeology. All three written accounts are told from the perspective of her enemies. The Roman historian, Tacitus, who was born five years before the revolt, wrote two separate accounts of Boudica’s revolt. He could at least claim secondhand knowledge of the events on which he reported: his father-in-law served as a member of the Roman governor’s staff during the revolt, and there is evidence that Tacitus interviewed other veterans of the rebellion. Our only source is a fragment of an account written roughly a hundred years later by Dio Cassius, which appears in a a selection of readings compiled by a Greek monk in the eleventh century CE. With primary sources such as these, one must read and write warily.

My current book is a different story. There is a great deal of material by and about its subject, Sigrid Schultz, the Chicago Tribune’s Berlin bureau chief from 1925 to 1940. And even so there are holes I was not able to fill.

***

Interested in learning more about Elaine Hayes’ work on Sarah Vaughan and other women of jazz?

Check out her website: https://elainemhayes.com/

Follow her Facebook page: Sarah Vaughan, Queen of Bebop 

***

Come back tomorrow for a whole lot of questions with novelist Vanessa Riley.

 

Talking About Women’s History: Two, or Possibly Five, Questions and an Answer with Natalie Dykstra

Natalie Dykstra grew up in the Midwest, first near the shores of Lake Michigan, then in a suburb west of Chicago. She received her undergraduate degree in Classics followed by graduate degrees in American Studies at the University of Wyoming and the University of Kansas.  She won a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for her work on Clover Adams: A Gilded and Heartbreaking Life as well as grants from the Schlesinger Library and the Massachusetts Historical Society, where she was elected an honorary fellow in 2011.  She received a 2018 Public Scholar Award from the National Endowment for the Humanities to support her newest book,  Chasing Beauty: The Life of Isabella Stewart Gardner by Mariner Books, an imprint of HarperCollins.  This work also has been supported by the inaugural 2018 Robert and Ina Caro Fellowship sponsored by the Biographers International Organization (BIO).  She has served as a board member of BIO since 2020.

She is emerita professor of English and senior research professor at Hope College, where she taught writing, literature, and the arts for twenty years.  She lives with her husband in Waltham, Massachusetts.

Chasing Beauty launches today and I am delighted to welcome Natalie Dykstra back to History on the Margins. She participated in Three Questions and an Answer several years ago, when she was in the process of writing the book. I strongly urge you to go back to that post, in which she had interesting things to say about Isabella Stewart Gardner and writing biography. Then come back and see what she has to add to the discussion today.

Take it away, Natalie!

Thank you for having me back, Pamela, for the launch of Chasing Beauty: The Life of Isabella Stewart Gardner.  I’m so glad to continue the conversation….

How did you decide there was room for another book on Gardner?  (Which, of course, there is.) 

It took me awhile to make the decision.  She lived to 84, a long life in her era, filled to the brim with travel and collecting and houses, to say nothing of her husband’s large family and many friends and correspondents.  I felt an enormous responsibility because of the extraordinary eponymous museum.  But I also suspected there were more archival materials to discover related to her and her story.  And that’s what happened – I found letter collections and diaries in a range of repositories that unveiled key aspects of her life: her education in Paris, her relationship to her husband Jack Gardner and his family; her relationship to her father; and her religious faith and philanthropy.  The museum has published excellent accounts of its founder.  But I felt there was room for a longer biography that could include more about her early years as well as the two decades after the opening of the museum in 1903.  I wanted her life story to stay in tune with how her art collection, housed in a four-story Venetian-style palace, combined both a hushed intimacy and a remarkable sweep of time.

Chasing Beauty is such an evocative title for the biography of a woman who is best known for creating a wonderful art museum.  Can you tell us how you came to it? 
I had always wanted the Anders Zorn portrait to be the book cover, where she’s pictured in motion on the balcony of the Palazzo Barbaro on the Grand Canal in Venice.  She’s at her most vital in that image, with her long arms wide open and the point of her fashionable shoe stepping into the palace.  Last spring, my publishing team began with a long list of title options, and I knew early on I wanted her name to be the subtitle.  I had filled small notebooks while on my research travels in France and Italy, where I’d jot down first impressions and phrases.  And in reviewing a notebook from a trip to Florence, where I traced Isabella’s steps, I’d written: “It’s as if she is chasing beauty throughout the city.”  I liked the combination of beauty, a word I found often in her papers, and chasing, which conveyed her love of speed and movement, her enormous energy.  I liked, too, that there was something both modern and slightly melancholy about it.  She’s on a chase; we’re all on a chase.

A question from Natalie:  Your biography of the World War II reporter Sigrid Schultz, The Dragon From Chicago, will be published by Beacon Press in August – many congratulations!   How did you decide to tell her story and what were some key challenges?

I stumbled on her story entirely by accident. Several years ago an interesting item appeared in my news feed:  an architectural salvage vendor had discovered seventy-five glass plate photographic negatives in the attic of an old house in what is now the Chicago neighborhood of Ravenswood. The images dated from the end of the nineteenth century. Most of them were informal pictures of a woman, a child, and a large dog, taken in the house where they were found.

It was exactly the sort of historical puzzle I love, so I kept reading. It turned out that the little girl in the pictures was named Sigrid Schultz.  The pictures were taken by Sigrid’s father, who was a successful portrait painter who had emigrated from Norway in 1892.  It was an interesting enough story to read with my morning tea, but then I hit the punch line: Sigrid grew up to be a groundbreaking foreign correspondent.

At that point, I was deep in the process of writing a proposal for a totally different book about another woman whose story deserves to be told. Sigrid elbowed her neatly off my desk. She was the Chicago Tribune’s foreign bureau chief in Berlin from 1925 to 1940, during the rise of the Nazis and the early days of World War II. Her story was just too timely to ignore.

The biggest challenge in telling her story—other than difficulties in accessing archives due to the pandemic—was deciding how much historical context to provide. (This is a recurring challenge for me.) As I got into her story, I realized how little I knew about German politics in the years between the two world wars. I had to assume most of my future readers didn’t know any more than I had. So I wrote big chunks of German history, and then decided what pieces of it were essential to understanding Sigrid’s story. Hard choices.

***

Want to know more about Natalie Dykstra and her work?
Check out her website: https://www.nataliedykstra.com/
Read this review in the New York Times: An Exquisite Biography of a Gilded Age Legend
Follow her on the site previously known as Twitter: @NatalieanneDY
Follow her on Instagram: natalieannedy

***

Come back tomorrow for three questions and an answer with Elaine Hayes, author of Queen of Bebop: The Musical Lives of Sarah Vaughan

 

 

Talking About Wwomen’s History: Two, or Possibly Five, Questions and an Answer with Natalie Dykstra

Natalie Dykstra grew up in the Midwest, first near the shores of Lake Michigan, then in a suburb west of Chicago. She received her undergraduate degree in Classics followed by graduate degrees in American Studies at the University of Wyoming and the University of Kansas.  She won a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for her work on Clover Adams: A Gilded and Heartbreaking Life as well as grants from the Schlesinger Library and the Massachusetts Historical Society, where she was elected an honorary fellow in 2011.  She received a 2018 Public Scholar Award from the National Endowment for the Humanities to support her newest book,  Chasing Beauty: The Life of Isabella Stewart Gardner by Mariner Books, an imprint of HarperCollins.  This work also has been supported by the inaugural 2018 Robert and Ina Caro Fellowship sponsored by the Biographers International Organization (BIO).  She has served as a board member of BIO since 2020.

She is emerita professor of English and senior research professor at Hope College, where she taught writing, literature, and the arts for twenty years.  She lives with her husband in Waltham, Massachusetts.

Chasing Beauty launches today and I am delighted to welcome Natalie Dykstra back to History on the Margins. She participated in Three Questions and an Answer several years ago, when she was in the process of writing the book. I strongly urge you to go back to that post, in which she had interesting things to say about Isabella Stewart Gardner and writing biography. Then come back and see what she has to add to the discussion today.

Take it away, Natalie!

Thank you for having me back, Pamela, for the launch of Chasing Beauty: The Life of Isabella Stewart Gardner.  I’m so glad to continue the conversation….

How did you decide there was room for another book on Gardner?  (Which, of course, there is.) 

It took me awhile to make the decision.  She lived to 84, a long life in her era, filled to the brim with travel and collecting and houses, to say nothing of her husband’s large family and many friends and correspondents.  I felt an enormous responsibility because of the extraordinary eponymous museum.  But I also suspected there were more archival materials to discover related to her and her story.  And that’s what happened – I found letter collections and diaries in a range of repositories that unveiled key aspects of her life: her education in Paris, her relationship to her husband Jack Gardner and his family; her relationship to her father; and her religious faith and philanthropy.  The museum has published excellent accounts of its founder.  But I felt there was room for a longer biography that could include more about her early years as well as the two decades after the opening of the museum in 1903.  I wanted her life story to stay in tune with how her art collection, housed in a four-story Venetian-style palace, combined both a hushed intimacy and a remarkable sweep of time.

Chasing Beauty is such an evocative title for the biography of a woman who is best known for creating a wonderful art museum.  Can you tell us how you came to it? 
I had always wanted the Anders Zorn portrait to be the book cover, where she’s pictured in motion on the balcony of the Palazzo Barbaro on the Grand Canal in Venice.  She’s at her most vital in that image, with her long arms wide open and the point of her fashionable shoe stepping into the palace.  Last spring, my publishing team began with a long list of title options, and I knew early on I wanted her name to be the subtitle.  I had filled small notebooks while on my research travels in France and Italy, where I’d jot down first impressions and phrases.  And in reviewing a notebook from a trip to Florence, where I traced Isabella’s steps, I’d written: “It’s as if she is chasing beauty throughout the city.”  I liked the combination of beauty, a word I found often in her papers, and chasing, which conveyed her love of speed and movement, her enormous energy.  I liked, too, that there was something both modern and slightly melancholy about it.  She’s on a chase; we’re all on a chase.

A question from Natalie:  Your biography of the World War II reporter Sigrid Schultz, The Dragon From Chicago, will be published by Beacon Press in August – many congratulations!   How did you decide to tell her story and what were some key challenges?

I stumbled on her story entirely by accident. Several years ago an interesting item appeared in my news feed:  an architectural salvage vendor had discovered seventy-five glass plate photographic negatives in the attic of an old house in what is now the Chicago neighborhood of Ravenswood. The images dated from the end of the nineteenth century. Most of them were informal pictures of a woman, a child, and a large dog, taken in the house where they were found.

It was exactly the sort of historical puzzle I love, so I kept reading. It turned out that the little girl in the pictures was named Sigrid Schultz.  The pictures were taken by Sigrid’s father, who was a successful portrait painter who had emigrated from Norway in 1892.  It was an interesting enough story to read with my morning tea, but then I hit the punch line: Sigrid grew up to be a groundbreaking foreign correspondent.

At that point, I was deep in the process of writing a proposal for a totally different book about another woman whose story deserves to be told. Sigrid elbowed her neatly off my desk. She was the Chicago Tribune’s foreign bureau chief in Berlin from 1925 to 1940, during the rise of the Nazis and the early days of World War II. Her story was just too timely to ignore.

The biggest challenge in telling her story—other than difficulties in accessing archives due to the pandemic—was deciding how much historical context to provide. (This is a recurring challenge for me.) As I got into her story, I realized how little I knew about German politics in the years between the two world wars. I had to assume most of my future readers didn’t know any more than I had. So I wrote big chunks of German history, and then decided what pieces of it were essential to understanding Sigrid’s story. Hard choices.

***

Want to know more about Natalie Dykstra and her work?
Check out her website: https://www.nataliedykstra.com/
Read this review in the New York Times: An Exquisite Biography of a Gilded Age Legend
Follow her on the site previously known as Twitter: @NatalieanneDY
Follow her on Instagram: natalieannedy

***

Come back tomorrow for three questions and an answer with Elaine Hayes, author of Queen of Bebop: The Musical Lives of Sarah Vaughan