Nancy Hale (1908–1988)

The author is a great niece of Harriet Beecher Stowe, and her short stories appeared regularly in the New Yorker in the 40's-50's. This first novel became a best-seller. Perhaps not only for the able writing, but for the bell rung, or wrung out, in connection with the "psychological cost" of BEING a woman. Example: "I have been sick with being somebody else." [554] "I only love alone." [556]

Nancy Hale's (b.1908) parents were both painters, living in or near Boston in the years that Nancy was growing up. She was their only child. Her father was Philip Leslie Hale; her mother, Lilian Westcott Hale. This memoir is about creative people, in this case artists, and how they make their way in the world. For one thing, they must have time alone to do their work. "To the day of her death she [her mother] groaned when the telephone or the doorbell rang," wrote Hale. "The B's have come, show more and all they want to do is talk."

Hale's memoir is also about coming to terms with the memory of her parents and their loss. Hale was descended from a distinguished New England family: her grandfather was the Unitarian clergyman Edward Everett Hale; her great-aunt was Harriet Beecher Stowe. show less

Always extremely hard-working, Hale published a collection of stories, the first of two much-loved volumes of "autobiographical fiction," A New England Girlhood (1958), and three novels in the 1950s. Hale singled out a favorite among these, Heaven and Hardpan Farm (1957). A humorous and humane novel about a group of "neurotic" women and their Jungian doctor at a small country sanitarium, Hale felt it was her most successful effort at writing about the experience of psychoanalysis.

This is show more from the 2003 Smith College/archive and manuscript collection website.

I didn't like the book - what little I read of it. I never like stories that feature fictional characters discussing fictional dreams. show less

.5 extra for craft.

This is the biggest bucket of crap I've read since American psycho. The characters lived around the time my mom and dad were born: late 1920s. I got all the way to page 407 and just couldn't take it anymore. This woman author let's the men characters fuck around all they want, but these same men characters find out that their girlfriends have been to bed with other men, and oh boy! they let them have it: verbal, physical, mental abuse..... and the stupid women characters show more just take it.

I could have sworn this was a man writing as a woman, but noooooo.

Okay this was written in the early 1940s, but it is no excuse to be writing this enabling crap. Grrrr, I am so angry I wasted all this time trying to see if these asshole characters were going to get theirs. show less