Virago Remembrance Celebrations 2011, Part 2

The Lady Ottoline Violet Anne Morrell (16 June 1873 – 21 April 1938) was an English aristocrat and society hostess.

Her patronage was influential in artistic and intellectual circles, where she befriended writers such as Aldous Huxley, Siegfried Sassoon, T. S. Eliot and D. H. Lawrence, and artists such as Mark Gertler, Dora Carrington and Gilbert Spencer.

Want. Hat.

I love Ottoline!

Elizabeth de Beauchamp Goudge (24 April 1900 – 1 April 1984) was an English author of novels, short stories and children's books.



Goudge was born in the cathedral city of Wells, where her father, Henry Leighton Goudge, was vice-principal of the Theological College. The family moved to Ely when he became principal of the Theological College there. There was a further move to Christ Church, Oxford when he was appointed Regius Professor of Divinity at the University. Elizabeth was educated at Grassendale School, Southbourne (1914–18), and at the art school at University College Reading, then an extension college of Christ Church. She went on to teach design and handicrafts in Ely and Oxford.

Goudge's first book, The Fairies' Baby and Other Stories (1919), was a failure and it was several years before she authored her first novel, Island Magic (1934), which was an immediate success. It was based on Channel Island stories, many of which she had learned from her mother, a native of Guernsey.

The Little White Horse (1946) was Goudge's own favourite among her works, and also the book which J. K. Rowling, author of the Harry Potter stories, has said was her favorite as a child.

The television mini-series Moonacre and the 2009 film The Secret of Moonacre were based on The Little White Horse. Her Green Dolphin Country (1944) was made into a film (under its American title, Green Dolphin Street) which won the Academy Award for Special Effects in 1948.

After her father's death in 1939, Goudge moved to a bungalow in Devon, where she nursed her ailing mother. After her mother's death in 1951, she moved to Oxfordshire, spending the last 30 years of her life living at a cottage on Peppard Common, just outside Henley-on-Thames, where a blue plaque was unveiled in 2008.

She died on 1 April 1984.

Bibliography

I've posted about Penelope and Sylvia previously; however, today I noticed that their birth dates and death dates are identical though different years!

Penelope Fitzgerald 17 December 1916 – 28 April 2000



Sylvia Constance Ashton-Warner 17 December 1908 - 28 April 1984

Marjorie Faith Barnard, AO (16 August 1897 – 8 May 1987) was an Australian novelist and short story writer, critic, historian - and librarian. She went to school and university in Sydney, and then trained as a librarian. She was employed as a librarian for two periods in her life (1923–1935 and 1942–1950), but her main passion was writing.

Barnard met her collaborator, Flora Eldershaw (1897–1956), at the University of Sydney, and they published their first novel, A House is Built in 1929. Their collaboration spanned the next two decades, and covered the full range of their writing: fiction, history and literary criticism. They published under the pseudonym M. Barnard Eldershaw.

Marjorie Barnard was a significant part of the literary scene in Australia between the wars and, for both her work as M. Barnard Eldershaw and in her own right, is recognised as a major figure in Australian letters.



Bibliography - Fiction

As Marjorie Barnard
The Persimmon Tree, and Other Stories (1943)

As M. Barnard Eldershaw
A House is Built (1929)
Green Memory (1931)
The Glasshouse (1936)
Plaque with Laurel (1937)
Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow (1945)

Sarah Grand (10 June 1854 – 12 May 1943) was a British feminist writer active from 1873 to 1922. Her work revolved around the New Woman ideal.



Madame Sarah Grand was born Frances Elizabeth Bellenden Clarke in Rosebank House, Donaghadee, County Down, Ireland of English parents. Her father was Edward John Bellenden Clarke (1813–1862) and her mother was Margaret Bell Sherwood (1813–1874). When her father died, her mother took her and her siblings back to Bridlington, England to be near her family who lived at Rysome Garth near Holmpton in East Yorkshire.

In 1868 Frances was sent to the Royal Naval School, Twickenham, but after a year she was asked to leave and went on to a finishing school in Kensington, London. In August 1870, at the age of sixteen, she married (some say eloped with) widowed Army surgeon David Chambers McFall, who was 21 years her senior and had two sons from his previous marriage. Frances and Chambers McFall's only child, David Archibald Edward "Archie" McFall, was born in Sandgate, Kent, on 7 October 1871. (Her son became an actor and took the name Archie Carlow Grand.)

From 1873 to 1878 the family travelled in the Far East. In 1879 they moved to Norwich, and in 1881 to Warrington, Lancashire where her husband retired.

The marriage was not a happy one, and in 1890 Frances left her husband to pursue her writing career and changed her name to Madame Sarah Grand. She lived in London for a while and then for 20 years in Tunbridge Wells, Kent, during which time she took an active part in the local women's suffrage societies, as well as travelling extensively, particularly to the United States.

In 1920 she moved to Bath and was for several years Lady Mayoress alongside Mayor Cedric Chivers. She died at her home at The Grange in Calne, Wiltshire, on 12 May 1943.

Her work dealt with the New Woman in fiction and in fact, she wrote treatises on the subject of the failure of marriage, and her novels may be considered strongly anti-marriage polemics.

The New Woman novel was a development of the late 19th century. New Woman novelists and characters encouraged and supported many different types of political action in Britain. For some women, the New Woman movement provided support for women who wanted to work and learn for themselves, and who started to question the idea of marriage and the inequality of women. For other women, especially Sarah Grand, the New Woman movement allowed women to speak out not only about the inequality of women, but about middle-class women's responsibilities to the nation.

In The Heavenly Twins Grand demonstrates the dangers of the moral double standard which overlooked men's promiscuity while punishing women for the same acts. More importantly, however, Grand argues in The Heavenly Twins that in order for the British nation to grow stronger, middle-class women have the responsibility of choosing mates with whom they might produce strong, well-educated children.

The Berg Collection of the New York Public Library keeps Mark Twain's copy of The Heavenly Twins. Twain filled the margins of the book with increasingly critical comments, writing after one chapter, "A cat could do better literature than this."

Bibliography

Ideala, 1888
The Heavenly Twins, 1893
Our Manifold Nature, 1894
The Beth Book, 1897
Babs the Impossible,1901
Adnam's Orchard, 1912
The Winged Victory, 1916
Variety, 1922

Caught up! Thanks again, Cate. I do enjoy these so much.

For our own lovely English Rose, Valerie Mary Constable, who passed away on 20 April 2011. We shall miss you dearly.


English Rose with Mourning Cloak Butterfly

That's lovely and very thoughtful, Cate.

Indeed. And very appropriate too.

Very beautiful Cate and very fitting for Valerie. Thank you.

Thank you dear Cate.

Thank you Cate. How appropriate for Valerie and how appropriate she share this thread with other remarkable women who have gone before us.

June Guesdon Braybrooke (born June Guesdon Jolliffe on 9 June 1920 in London, died 30 May 1994 in London), better known by her pen name Isobel English, was an English writer.



Born in London to the Welsh civil servant John Mayne Jolliffe and his Tasmanian wife May Guesdon, June had to go to Brittany when she was two for a salt-water cure for tuberculosis of the spine. Upon her return she was sent in 1928 to La Retraite, a convent school in Burnham-on-Sea, Somerset, which she described in her 1956 novel Every Eye.

After secretarial college in London she was taught literature by Kenneth Allott while working with him. She married Ronald Dundas Orr-Ewing in 1941 and they had a daughter, Victoria, in the following year, but they were divorced in 1951. In 1953, she married a fellow writer, Neville Braybrooke.

Her many literary friends included Beryl Bainbridge, Olivia Manning, and Stevie Smith, who described her tone as "very sagacious and very original - a voice of our times, ironical and involved."

Isobel English published her first book, The Key that Rusts, a year after she was married (having described her occupation as 'writer' on her marriage certificate). Every Eye followed two years later, and in 1961 her final novel Four Voices.

English published numerous short stories and a collection them, Life after All appeared in 1973, winning the Katherine Mansfield Prize. A single unproduced play, Meeting Point, was published in The New Review. She wrote introductions to Virago reissues of several of Olivia Manning's books.

She died of leukaemia and was buried in Hampstead Cemetery, Fortune Green, London.

Bibliography
The Key that Rusts (novel, 1954)
Every Eye (novel, 1956, reprinted by Persephone Books in 2000)
Four Voices (novel, 1961)
Life after All (stories, 1973, winner of the Katherine Mansfield Prize)
Meeting Point (play, 1976, published in The New Review, Vol. 3, No. 29)

Isobel English's Obituary

Isobel English's Every Eye

Sorry to hear about Valerie. I don't think I ever actually talked to her online, quite possibly she was already too ill to be active by the time I started posting on LT, but she was one of the first names I remember for her library.

There is also a biography of Olivia Manning, (a Virago author) by Neville and June Braybrooke. I hadn't realised that JB and Isobel English were the same person, I've been looking at the Persephone edition of Every Eye and will probably buy it at some point.

Dora Black, Lady Russell (3 April 1894 – 31 May 1986) was a British author, a feminist and socialist campaigner, and the second wife of the eminent philosopher Bertrand Russell.



Dora Black, the daughter of Frederick Black, a senior Civil servant, was born in London in 1894. Black held strong progressive views and believed that girls had the right to as good an education as boys. Dora responded well to her father's encouragement and won scholarships to Sutton High School and Girton College, Cambridge. At university she gained a first-class honours degree in modern languages.

Dora met Bertrand Russell in 1916 and soon afterwards he asked her to marry him. Dora's feminism involved a belief in sexual freedom and although she was willing to live with Bertrand, she rejected his proposal of marriage. Dora saw marriage as a restriction on women's liberty, and although Bertrand accepted her philosophical argument on the subject, he wanted a son and legitimate heir to the family title.

In the First World War Dora joined Russell's campaign against military conscription. After Russell was released from Brixton Prison in 1918 for his role in the struggle against the Military Service Act. Dora and Bertrand visited Russia and China together.

When they returned to England in 1921 Dora agreed to marry Bertrand Russell. After giving birth to her first child Dora became involved in the birth control movement. The 1923 Dora along with Maynard Keynes, paid for the legal costs to obtain the freedom of Guy Aldred and Rose Witcop after they had been found guilty of selling pamphlets on contraception. The following year, Dora, with the support of Katharine Glasier, Susan Lawrence, Margaret Bonfield, Dorothy Jewson and H. G. Wells founded the Workers' Birth Control Group. Dora also campaigned within the Labour Party for birth-control clinics but this was rejected as they feared losing the Roman Catholic vote.

Dora did a considerable amount of writing during this period. With Bertrand she wrote The Prospects of Industrial Civilization (1923) and two years later she published her book, "Hypatia: Women and Knowledge". The book was severely attacked by people who disapproved of Dora's theories on sexual freedom for women.

In 1927 Dora and Bertrand Russell opened their own progressive boarding school, Beacon Hill, near Harting, West Sussex. The school reflected Bertrand's view that children should not be forced to follow a strictly academic curriculum. Other aspects of the school illustrated Dora's ideas on education. The school was run on the principle that freedom, if understood early enough, would result in maturity and self-discipline. Dora also emphasized co-operation rather than competition and believed that the best way to teach the benefits of democracy was to run the school on democratic lines. Dora's educational philosophy was expressed in her book In Defence of Children (1932).

Both Bertrand and Dora continued to have sexual relationships with other partners. This resulted in Dora having two children with the journalist, Griffin Barry. In 1935 Bertrand Russell left Dora for one of his students, Patricia Spence. When Barry returned to the United States, Dora continued to run Beacon Hill School on her own until the Second World War when she went to work for the Ministry of Information.

Dora was active in the peace movement after the war and in 1958 joined with Bertrand Russell, J. B. Priestley, Vera Brittain, Fenner Brockway, Victor Gollancz, Canon John Collins and Michael Foot to form the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND). Later that year Dora organised the Women's Caravan of Peace and toured with it through much of Europe.

After retiring to Cornwall in 1962, Dora wrote Religion and the Machine Age (1982) and three volumes of autobiography, The Tamarisk Tree (1977, 1981, 1985).

Dora Russell died in 1986.

"Between us of the mid-Victorian era and our eye-opening successors, there is a ‘great gulf fixed.’” So wrote Rhoda Broughton, once considered a daring young novelist, as she observed the flapper generation from the vantage point of her eightieth birthday in 1920.



Rhoda Broughton (29 November 1840 – 5 June 1920) became an instant best-selling author with her controversial first two novels about young women and their coming-of-age dilemmas, Not Wisely But Too Well and Cometh Up Like a Flower, both published in 1867. Her strong heroines and witty, unstuffy dialogue drew critical condemnation but also attracted a new generation of readers. However, by the second decade of the twentieth century, Broughton felt left behind by the suffragettes and flappers to whom she did not seem innovative at all, but rather old-fashioned.

Her final years were spent at Headington Hill, near Oxford where she died on the 5th June 1920, aged 79 years

Partial bibliography

Not Wisely, But Too Well - (1867)
Cometh Up As A Flower - (1867) (Persephone is considering a re-issue of this title)
Red as a Rose is She - (1870)
Good-bye, Sweetheart! - (1872)
Nancy - (1873)
Tales for Christmas Eve - (1873); republished as Twilight Stories (1879)
Joan - (1876)
Second Thoughts - (1880)
Belinda - (1883)
Doctor Cupid - (1886)
Alas! - (1890)
A Widower Indeed (With Elizabeth Bisland) - (1891)
Mrs. Bligh - (1892)
A Beginner - (1893)
Scylla or Charybdis? - (1895)
Dear Faustina - (1897)
The Game And The Candle - (1899)
Foes In Law - (1900)
Lavinia - (1902)
A Waif's Progress - (1905)
Mamma - (1908)
The Devil and the Deep Sea - (1910)
Between Two Stools - (1912)
Concerning a Vow - (1914)
A Thorn in the Flesh - (1917)
A Fool in her Folly - (1920)

Now THAT is a horrible hat!

There ought to be a big coffee-table book of hats based on your posts, Cate!

Celia Margaret Fremlin (June 20, 1914 - June 16, 2009) was born in Kingsbury, now part of London, England, the sister of nuclear physicist, John H. Fremlin.

Celia Fremlin used to say that she wrote the sort of book she wanted to read, in which a mysterious threat hangs over someone and escalates chapter by chapter.



Her first book, The Hours Before Dawn (1958) won the American Edgar Prize for best crime novel. It was reprinted as a Virago Modern Classic almost 40 years later, in acknowledgement not just of her ability to create an atmosphere of simmering fear and wickedness amid the trivia of daily life, but also of the meticulously observed dilemma of her heroine, a young wife so exhausted by her baby’s interminable crying that she is persuaded that her fears are psychotic. Self-deception is a recurring theme. In With No Crying (1981), the protagonist is pressured into an abortion, and then feigns a pregnancy to regain attention, with dire results.

Publishers by then sometimes treated her novels as mere precursors of the “woman in jeopardy” genre that Ruth Rendell exploited with such success (when writing as Barbara Vine). But Fremlin had an observant wit all her own, highly valued by her friends as well as her readers.

In Dangerous Thoughts (1991) the heroine is married to a man she believes is lying about his experience as a hostage. She muses on the modern belief in talking things over: “The truth is that unhappy marriages come about in large measures as the end result of a prolonged exercise in communication: in particular, the communicating of unflattering truths on a wide variety of topics, ranging from the correct handling of toothpaste to the squandering of the family fortunes on drink or self-awareness courses. In these sorts of cases, ‘Least Said Soonest Mended’ would be my proverb of choice.”

In old age Fremlin became well known for a different reason — her advocacy of voluntary euthanasia and her announcement that she had personally helped at least three friends to kill themselves. The first occasion, soon after the Second World War, concerned a woman friend with motor neuron disease, and the barbiturates were supplied by her husband, Dr Elia Goller. She remembered that with triumph but was haunted by the time when an assisted suicide went wrong — something that she had imagined with prescient horror in one of her short stories, A Lovely Day to Die (1984).

Celia Margaret Fremlin was born in 1914 in Ryarsh, Kent, and educated at Berkhamsted School for Girls and Somerville College, Oxford, where she read classics and philosophy. During the Second World War she worked in London for Tom Hopkinson’s Mass Observation project, interviewing people in streets and air-raid shelters before and after bombs had dropped. She was proud of this, considering it much better than modern market research. “We used to write down what people actually said, but with these ‘yes’, ‘no’, ‘not very much’ replies you miss the flavour of their words.”

She and Goller were married in 1942 and had a son and two daughters. In one terrible month in 1968 her daughter Sylvia died in an accident and Goller suffered a heart attack — and, rather than live a debilitated life, took an overdose.

For several years she could not write. In her sixties she began to take long walks at night all over London, from Brixton to Hackney, alone. Talking as she had during the Blitz to hundreds of people, mostly women, she recorded many strange or sad stories, but never came across a single first-hand account of injury or attack. She published her findings in New Society in 1979, to the astonishment of younger readers. Her conclusion was that, to make the dark streets lose their terror, “We don’t need more policemen on the beat. We need more grandmothers.”

Her second marriage to Leslie Minchin, a translator of German Lieder and gas consultant, restored her confidence as a writer, and several of her later novels — she wrote 15, plus dozens of short stories — were gratefully dedicated to him: she often said she hoped they might contrive to die together, but he died in 1999.

Fremlin was predeceased by all three of her children.

Celia Fremlin, mystery writer and voluntary euthanasia activist, was born on June 20, 1914. She died on June 16, 2009, aged 94

Celia Fremlin's Page

Bibliography

Manners and Society
1940 - The Seven Chars of Chelsea
1943 - War Factory (with Tom Harrisson)

Novels
1958 - The Hours Before Dawn; (Edgar Award for Best Novel, 1960)
1959 - Uncle Paul
1961 - Seven Lean Years (US: Wait for the Wedding)
1963 - The Trouble Makers
1964 - The Jealous One
1967 - Prisoner's Base
1969 - Possession
1972 - Appointment with Yesterday
1975 - The Long Shadow
1977 - The Spider-Orchid
1980 - With No Crying
1982 - The Parasite Person
1990 - Listening in the Dusk
1991 - Dangerous Thoughts
1993 - The Echoing Stones
1994 - King of the World

Collections
1970 - Don't Go to Sleep in the Dark
1974 - By Horror Haunted
1984 - A Lovely Day to Die

Poetry
1996 - Duet in Verse (with Leslie Minchin)

The Wider Life

I once was a dull, narrow housewife,
With nothing to talk of at all
But the loves, the frustrations,
The rows, the relations,
Of the woman from over the wall.

But now I've a job I'm quite different,
I can talk with a sparkle like wine
Of the loves, the frustrations,
The rows, the relations,
Of the girl at the desk next to mine.

Celia Fremlin

Jane Urquhart, OC. Born June 21, 1949. Canadian novelist and poet.



Jane Urquhart was born in the small northern Ontario mining community of Little Long Lac (near Geraldton) and spent her later childhood and adolescence in Toronto.

She has published three books of poetry (I'm Walking in the Garden of His Imaginary Palace, False Shuffles, and The Little Flowers of Madame de Montespan), four novels (The Whirlpool, Changing Heaven, Away, and The Underpainter), and a collection of short fiction (Storm Glass) as well as numerous articles and reviews.

Her books have been published in many countries, including Holland, France, Germany, Britain, Scandinavia, Australia, and The United States, and have been translated into several languages.

In 1992, her novel The Whirlpool was the first Canadian book to win France's prestigious Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger (Best Foreign Book Award). Her third novel, Away, remained on Globe & Mail's National Bestseller list for 132 weeks (the longest of any Canadian book), and won the 1994 Trillium Award.

In 1994 Urquhart also received the Marian Engel Award for an outstanding body of prose written by a Canadian woman. In 1996 she was named to France's Order of Arts and Letters as a Chevalier, and Away was shortlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award , the world's largest literary prize for a single work of fiction. In 1997 Urquhart was asked to serve on the jury for this award.

Jane Urquhart has been Writer-in-Residence at the University of Ottawa and at Memorial University of Newfoundland and, during the winter and spring of 1997, she held the Presidential Writer-in-Residence Fellowship at the University of Toronto. She has also given readings and lectures in Canada, Britain, Europe, the USA and Australia.

Jane Urquhart's first three novels have recently been reprinted in beautiful new trade paperback editions. In the fall of 1997, her fourth novel, The Underpainter, was published to wide critical acclaim, won the 1997 Governor General's Award, and became a fixture on the national bestseller lists.
Her fifth novel, The Stonecarvers was published in 2001 and shortlisted for the Giller prize.
The author lives in a Southwestern Ontario village with her husband, Tony Urquhart.

Novels
The Whirlpool Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1986.
Storm Glass Erin, ON: Porcupine's Quill, 1987.
Changing Heaven Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1990.
Away Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1993.
The Underpainter Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1997.
The Stone Carvers Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2001.
A Map of Glass (2005)
Sanctuary Line (2010)

Short fiction
Storm Glass (1987)

Poetry
I'm Walking in the Garden of His Imaginary Palace: Eleven Poems for Le Notre Toronto: Aya Press, 1982.
False Shuffles Victoria: Porcépic, 1982. Toronto: Aya Press, 1982.
The Little Flowers of Madame de Montespan Erin, Ontario: Porcupine's Quill, 1984.
Some Other Garden Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2000.

Interview with Jane Urquhart

Jane Urquhart is a new name to me, and she looks like an author I must explore. Thanks, Cate. Once again you are broadening my horizons!

Yes, my thoughts exactly. Very impressive resume too.

Dame Iris Margaret Origo, Marchesa of Val d'Orcia, DBE (15 August 1902 — 28 June 1988), née Cutting, was an Anglo-Irish writer, who devoted much of her life to the improvement of the Tuscan estate at La Foce, near Montepulciano, which she purchased with her husband in the 1920s.



Origo was the daughter of William Bayard Cutting, the diplomat eldest son of a rich and philanthropic New York family and Lady Sybil Cuffe, the daughter of Lord Desart, an Irish peer. Her parents travelled widely after their marriage, particularly in Italy, when her father was diagnosed with tuberculosis. Following her father's death in 1910, Iris and her mother settled in Italy, buying the Villa Medici in Fiesole, one of Florence's most spectacular villas. There they formed a close friendship with Bernhard Berenson, who lived not far away at I Tatti. Iris was briefly enrolled at school in London, but was largely educated at home, by Professor Solone Montia as well as a series of French and German governesses.

In 1918, Lady Sybil Cutting married the architectural historian Geoffrey Scott, who later embarked on a relationship with Vita Sackville-West. The marriage was to last until 1926; following their divorce, she got married for a third time, to the essayist Percy Lubbock; she died in 1943. Her second marriage reportedly failed because she was emotionally needy and had married a man who suffered from neurasthenia.

Lady Sybil had a brief affair with Bernard Berenson and then astonished everyone by marrying Mary Berenson's protege, Geoffrey Scott, the fragile and neurasthenic author of The Architecture of Humanism. The marriage was not happy. No one could outdo Sybil where neuroses were concerned, and she spent more and more time in bed on one pretext or another.

Iris Cutting travelled to England and the United States in order to be launched in the society of both countries. In 1922, she first met Colin Mackenzie, a young Scottish businessman working in Milan; a romantic, epistolary affair was followed by a lifelong friendship. On 4 March 1924, Iris married Antonio Origo, the illegitimate son of Marchese Clemente Origo. They moved together to their new estate at La Foce, near Chianciano Terme in the Province of Siena. It was in a state of bad disrepair but, by much hard work, care and attention, they succeeded in transforming it. They had a son, Gian Clemente Bayard (aka "Gianni") (24 June 1925 — 30 April 1933), who died of meningitis, aged seven years old, and two daughters, Benedetta (born 1 August 1940) and Donata (born 9 June 1943). It was following the death of Gianni that Iris Origo embarked on her writing career, with a well-received biography of Giacomo Leopardi, published in 1935. The Observer said: "Her book is a monument to scholarship — the literary and historical background is painted with consummate skill, and a pattern of good taste."

War years
During the Second World War, the Origos remained at La Foce and looked after refugee children, who were housed there. Following the surrender of Italy, Iris Origo also sheltered or assisted many escaped Allied prisoners of war, who were seeking to make their way through the German lines, or simply to survive. Her account of this time, War in the Val D'Orcia, was the first of her books to be a popular, as well as a critical, success.

After the war, she divided her time between La Foce and Rome, where the Origos had bought a flat in the Palazzo Orsini, and devoted herself to writing. The Origos also spent holidays at Gli Scafari, the house built by Iris' mother at Lerici on the Gulf of Spezia.

Antonio Origo died on 27 June 1976. Iris Origo died on 28 June 1988, aged 85.

Works
A Measure of Love (1957), a collection of biographical essays
A Need to Testify (1984), containing biographies of Ignazio Silone, Gaetano Salvemini, Ruth Draper and Lauro de Bosis, four opponents of Fascism
Allegra (1935), a short life of Byron’s daughter
Gianni, a privately printed memorial to Iris' son
Giovanni and Jane (1950), a children’s book
Images and Shadows (1970), an elegiac autobiography
Leopardi (1935), a biography of Giacomo Leopardi
The Last Attachment (1949), an account of the relationship between Byron and Countess Guiccioli
The Merchant of Prato (1957), an account of the life and times of Francesco di Marco Datini
The Vagabond Path (1972), an anthology
The World of San Bernardino (1963), a life of Bernardino of Siena
Un'amica. Ritratto di Elsa Dallolio (1982), a memoir of an old friend
War in the Val D'Orcia (1947), an account of Iris Origo's experiences during the Second World War in diary form

Ahhhhhhh, coffee and catching up with our own dear Cate. What better way to spend the morn? I can think of none.

And I do agree with miss_read on post # 20: There ought to be a coffee-table book of hats based on Cate's posts.

Once again Cate, thank you for all you bring to our days. And thank you for that beautiful tribute to our own gentle Valerie. She has been and will remain missed so very much by us.

hugs,
belva

Ada Cambridge (21 November 1844 – 19 July 1926), later known as Ada Cross, was an English writer. Overall she wrote more than twenty-five works of fiction, three volumes of poetry and two autobiographical works. Many of her novels were serialised in Australian newspapers, and were never published in book form.

While she was known to friends and family by her married name, Ada Cross, she was known to her newspaper readers as A.C.. Later in her career she reverted to her maiden name, Ada Cambridge, and it is thus by this name that she is known.



Ada was born at St Germans, Norfolk, the second child of Thomasine and Henry Cambridge, a gentleman farmer. She was educated by governesses, an experience she abhorred. She wrote in a book of reminiscences: "I can truthfully affirm that I never learned anything which would now be considered worth learning until I had done with them all and started foraging for myself. I did have a few months of boarding-school at the end, and a very good school for its day it was, but it left no lasting impression on my mind." (The Retrospect, chap. IV). It was, in fact, an unmarried aunt who most contributed to her intellectual development.

On 25 April 1870 she was married to the Rev. George Frederick Cross and a few weeks later sailed for Australia. She arrived in Melbourne in August and was surprised to find it a well established city. Her husband was sent to Wangaratta, then to Yackandandah (1872), Ballan (1874), Coleraine (1877), Bendigo (1884) and Beechworth (1885), where they remained until 1893. Her Thirty Years in Australia (1903) describes their experiences in these parishes. She experienced her share of tragedy, including the loss of children to whooping cough and scarlet fever.

Cross at first was the typical hard-working wife of a country clergyman, taking part in all the activities of the parish and incidentally making her own children's clothes. Her health, however, broke down, for a number of reasons including a near-fatal miscarriage and a serious carriage accident, and her activities had to be reduced, but she continued to write.

In 1893 Cross and her husband moved to their last parish, Williamstown, near Melbourne, and remained there until 1909. Her husband went on the retired clergy list at the end of 1909 with permission to operate in the diocese until 1912. In 1913 they both returned to England, where they stayed until his death on 27 February 1917. Ada returned to Australia later that year, and died in Melbourne on 19 July 1926. She was survived by a daughter and a son, Dr K. Stuart Cross.
A street in the Canberra suburb of Cook is named in her honour.

Career
While Cambridge began writing in the 1870s to make money to help support her children, her formal published career spans from 1865 with Hymns on the Litany and The Two Surplices, to 1922 with an article 'Nightfall' in Atlantic Monthly. According to Barton, her early works 'contain the seeds of her lifelong insistence on and pursuit of physical, spiritual and moral integrity as well as the interweaving of poetry and prose which was to typify her writing career'. Cato writes that 'some of her ideas were considered daring and even a little improper for a clergyman's wife. She touches on extramarital affairs and the physical bondage of wives'.

In 1875 her first novel Up the Murray appeared in the Australasian but was not published separately, and it was not until 1890 with the publication of A Marked Man that her fame as a writer was established. However, despite regular good reviews, there were many who discounted her because she did not write in the literary tradition of the time, one that was largely non-urban and masculine, that focused on survival against the harsh environment.

She was first president of the Women Writers Club and honorary life-member of the Lyceum Club of Melbourne, and had many friends in the literary world including Grace 'Jennings' Carmichael, Rolf Boldrewood, Ethel Turner, and George Robertson.

Bibliography
Hymns on the Litany (1865)
Hymns on the Holy Communion (1866)
The Manor House: and Other Poems (1875)
My Guardian (Novel, 1877)
In Two Years' Time (Novel, 1879)
A Mere Chance (Novel, 1882)
Unspoken Thoughts (Novel, 1887)
A Woman's Friendship (Serialised in the Age, 1889; first published in book form in 1988)
A Marked Man (Novel, 1890)
The Three Miss Kings (Novel, 1891)
Not All in Vain (Novel, 1892)
A Little Minx (Novel, 1893)
A Marriage Ceremony (Novel, 1894),
Fidelis (Novel, 1895)
A Humble Enterprise (Novel, 1896),
At Midnight: and Other Stories (1897)
Materfamilias (Novel, 1898),
Path and Goal (Novel, 1900)
The Devastators (Novel, 1901)
Thirty Years in Australia (Memoir, 1903)
Sisters (Novel, 1904)
A Platonic Friendship (Novel, 1905)
A Happy Marriage (Novel, 1906)
The Eternal Feminine (Novel, 1907)
The Retrospect (Memoir, 1912)
The Hand in the Dark: and Other Poems (1913)
The Making of Rachel Rowe (Novel, 1914)

Dear Cate If ever I had to have a governess, I would hope that it would be you. I always find these entries so enlightening and deeply comforting. I love seeing all the connections between people and hearing about their ordinary as well as extraordinary lives. It's funny reading these entries and then coming across sentences like "A street in the Canberra suburb of Cook is named in her honour." and then thinking I probably passed that street or drove down it and never knew and isn't it funny that Cate from California should be telling me!! I love the way we are all connected....wonderful words and wonderful writing. By the way, and apropos of nothing, you can get some very nice jam from Yackandandah....

Fascinating. Apart from The Three Miss Kings there don't seem to be many copies of her books around. Must be hard to find them these days.

PS. Three cheers for unmarried aunts!

I hope you find that street, Alex. Another good one, Cate.

Dear Luvvie, what a lovely compliment and I thank you though I'm not sure if I would've been cut out to be a governess....I would probably be the one child that drives the governesses away! However, when I think about Holtby's Sarah Burton, I might have made some kind of mark on my charges in a red-headed sort of way.

As Tui says, I hope you find that street and come back to tell us about it. Oh, and more about the jam!

My thanks again too, Cate, for your consistently good research and reporting! What I really want to know though, is what is the dark stuff hanging in the middle of that very intricate crocheted or tatted lace that AC is wearing. Is it all one piece? Is it hanging around her neck? Somebody please help these old eyes out!

It looks like something made out of jet beads.

it's jam of course

Jan Struther was the pen name of Joyce Anstruther, later Joyce Maxtone Graham and finally Joyce Placzek (June 6, 1901 – July 20, 1953), an English writer remembered for her character Mrs. Miniver. She was the daughter of Henry Torrens Anstruther and spent her childhood in Whitchurch in Buckinghamshire, England.



In 1923 she married Anthony Maxtone Graham, a broker at Lloyd's, by whom she had three children. In the 1930s she started to write for Punch magazine, and this brought her to the attention of The Times newspaper, where Peter Fleming asked her to write a series of columns for the paper, about "an ordinary sort of woman who leads an ordinary sort of life - rather like yourself". The character she created, Mrs Miniver, proved a huge success, and the columns were subsequently collected into book form in 1939.

Upon the outbreak of war, this book was used as the basis for a patriotic and sentimental film about Mrs Miniver, released in 1942, which won six Academy Awards, including Best Picture.

By this time, Struther had herself gone to America as a lecturer. In the 1940s she was a frequent guest panelist on the popular American radio quiz show Information Please, where she provided a warm and witty presence. She was one of the few women panelists to appear repeatedly on the program. In a possibly apocryphal story by fellow panelist Oscar Levant, her appearances on the show stopped abruptly after she answered a question by referring to Agatha Christie's book Ten Little Niggers, which was the original British title of the book Ten Little Indians (later retitled And Then There Were None). She was supposedly so hurt and surprised by the backlash to her reference that she refused to appear on the show again.

Her long marriage to Anthony Maxtone Graham eventually failed, and she started an affair with Adolf Placzek, a Viennese art historian 12 years her junior. She married him as her second husband, 5 years before her death.

Her final years were marked by severe depression, leading to a five-month stay in a psychiatric hospital. Following a mastectomy for breast cancer, she died of cancer in New York in 1953 at the age of 52. Her ashes are buried beside her father in the family grave at St. John The Evangelist Church, in Whitchurch.

As well as the creation of the character Mrs Miniver in a fortnightly column in The Times, she is remembered for her hymns for children, including "Lord of All Hopefulness", "When a Knight Won His Spurs" and "Daisies are Our Silver". These resulted from an approach by Canon Percy Dearmer of Westminster Abbey, who in 1931 was commissioned by Oxford University Press to compile a collection of hymns. Ironically, she herself was an agnostic, although she did go to church.

Struther is the subject of a biography, The Real Mrs. Miniver, written by her granddaughter, Ysenda Maxtone Graham.

She is the great-aunt of Ian Maxtone Graham, former co-executive producer of The Simpsons.

Collected Works
Betsinda Dances and Other Poems, 1931
Hymns selected from Songs of Praise, 1931
Sycamore Square and Other Verses, 1932
The Modern Struwwelpeter, 1936
Try Anything Twice: Essays & Sketches, 1938
Mrs. Miniver, 1939
The Glass-Blower and Other Poems, 1940
Poems selected from A Pocketful of Pebbles, 1946

Is it true that the name Jan Struther came about because of someone mis-reading her name, J. Anstruther?

#34 my money is on Blueberry and Orange http://www.yackandandahjam.com.au/index.php?page=preserves

Now back to planning dinner for Saturday night - http://www.yackandandahjam.com.au/index.php?page=recipes - what say you? I'm leaning towards the lime curd trifle somewhat precipitously.....I've always been very fond of trifle...particularly Aunt Jane's Tipsy Trifle from mother's 200 years of Australian Cooking - it certainly livened up proceedings at the viewing of the recent royal wedding - leading us to participate fully in the proceedings from afar - singing old hymns with gusto and leaping up and sitting and kneeling with the congregation, as we passed withering comments on assorted headgear from the back row.

I thought it was blackberry and apple but I may be wrong. Lime curd trifle sounds/looks good to me.

Lettice Ulpha Cooper. Born in Eccles, Lancashire 3 September 1897; and died Coltishall, Norfolk 24 July 1994.
She began to write stories when she was seven, and studied Classics at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford graduating in 1918.



LETTICE COOPER
by Francis King

IN THE EARLY years of a long friendship with the novelist Lettice Cooper, I used to think of her as a brisk, sensible and sympathetic aunt, indulgent to some of my follies and outspoken about others. Then there was a period when she became a favourite cousin, to whom I could always turn for help and advice. Finally, despite her being 26 years my senior, I came to regard her as a high-spirited niece, whose optimism, zest for life and radical opinions often made me feel intellectually musty and emotionally stiff-jointed.

That she had spent a long period undergoing psychoanalysis never ceased to astonish me, since I have rarely met anyone more firmly in control both of herself and her circumstances. Either her analyst was a remarkable man or she herself was possessed of remarkable powers of self-healing.

For many years, until his death, she was the devoted friend of Lionel Fielden, creator of All India Radio, friend of JR Ackerley and EM Forster, and a man with the dark, aristocratic good looks and graceful physique of some cricket-playing maharajah. In the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, when I was also resident in Florence, Cooper used to visit Fielden at his beautiful villa in Antella, a few miles outside the city. At a period when a homosexual, even a charming, intelligent, Rolls-Royce-owning, English one, tended to be mal vu in Florentine society, Fielden more than once referred to Cooper, in my presence but not of course in hers, as 'my cover girl'. That this was her role, I never imagined that she realised. But years later, talking to me about the relationship, she made it clear that she had never for a moment deceived herself about its nature. She had known Fielden's terms and she had been willing to accept them, such was her love and admiration for a not wholly lovable or admirable man.

From this friendship, probably the most important of her life, came what is one of her three best novels, Fenny (1953), about an English girl who, in the Thirties, goes out to Florence to be a governess in a house not unlike Fielden's, somehow survives there during the war, and then continues there after it. The book is not strictly an autobiography, since Fenny is a victim of circumstance in a way in which Cooper never allowed herself to be. But, among many echoes from Cooper's own experiences, there is one scene that has always stuck in my mind, since it is so moving. Fenny, now middle-aged and suffering from vague feelings of illness, consults a doctor. He reassures her: all that is wrong with her is the onset of the menopause. She then goes into a cafe and, sitting alone, is overcome by sadness. There is now no possibility that she will ever have a child. Lettice Cooper would have liked to have children. She would have been as near perfect a mother as is possible.

If one were to look for a title for her whole oeuvre of 20 novels, it would have to be Mrs Gaskell's 'North and South'. Born in Yorkshire but resident in London for more than 50 years, she returned again and again to the theme of the contrast between the people of her origins and those of her adoption. She was also fascinated, as in Fenny, by the contrast between the English and the Italians. The contrast in each case represented one within her own self. She had a northern forthrightness, sincerity and toughness. But she had a southern charm, wit and capacity for enjoyment.

Another theme of hers was that of fresh starts, best expressed in her The New House (1936). To start afresh was, like the breaking and resetting of a deformed limb, something painful. But it was something that must be endured for the greater mobility and straightness to follow. She would often tease me about my hatred of a change - 'I think that for you all changes are bad.' Into her nineties she believed in change, sticking to her socialist beliefs despite a growing disillusion with the Labour Party.

It was largely because of this openness to change that she got on so well with the young, enjoying their company as they enjoyed hers. At literary parties, writers tend to congregate with writers of their own generation. This was not Cooper's way. If some young writer was standing self-consciously alone in a corner, she would at once walk over, to start a conversation totally without any condescension on her side or any embarrassment on the other.

After the death of her sister, Barbara, with whom she had lived for so many years in an always hospitable flat at the top of a north London house, many of her friends feared that she would lose the will to continue. But, although obviously bereft, she was soon talking of another novel, of the future work of International PEN (she had been a notably capable and yet self-effacing President of the English Centre from 1977 to 1979), and of how to help friends or neighbours, far younger than herself, who were ill or in financial or emotional trouble.

At a PEN Congress in Stockholm, a Swedish writer remarked of Lettice Cooper: 'She is what we expect English people to be but what they so seldom are.' That is a fitting epitaph for her.

Selected Works
The Lighted Room (1925)
The New House (1936) (Reprinted by Persephone Books in 2004)
National Provincial (1938)
Fenny (1953)
Biography of Robert Louis Stevenson (1947)
Black Bethlehem (1947)
Blackberry's Kitten (1960)
Tea on Sunday (1973)
Snow and Roses (1976)
Desirable Residence (1980)
Unusual Behaviour (1986)
Une Journee avec Rhoda (1994)

The New House was a VMC as well, though it's probably easier to get as a Persephone. I have the VMC edition.

Lettice Cooper also wrote the introduction to one of my VMCs, I think it might be the first VMC edition of South Riding (the current one is introduced by Marion Shaw, Holtby's biographer)

The writer, journalist and playwright, F Tennyson Jesse, known to her friends as Fryn was born at Holly Bowers on 1st March 1888. Her mother, Edith Jesse, was a daughter of Henry James, the Cornish coal merchant who lived at Holly Bowers, and his wife Helen. Her father was a cleric and a nephew of Alfred Lord Tennyson. Fryn was the second of three daughters and was christened Wynifried Margaret Jesse. She first used her pen-name when she was 19, but adopted it for the remainder of her life.



Her father’s quest for a suitable position in the church led him to many places, and for the first twelve years of her life Fryn travelled with her parents to Cape Town, The Canary Islands, Guernsey and Sicily, and lived in Balham, Exeter and London. She had rickets as a child, and had to wear leg irons for a while. Whenever she was in England Fryn visited Holly Bowers regularly, since her elder sister, Stella, was living there permanently, and she enjoyed the company of her aunt and uncles. Her mother (like her grandmother) was something of an invalid, and became increasingly irascible, so that Fryn’s childhood appears to have been something of a trial, particularly as her father eventually took a position in Ceylon, leaving his family inEngland. Her times at Holly Bowers appear to have been something of a relief for her.

She was a strikingly beautiful young woman, “I have never seen a lovelier girl”, wrote Rebecca West later. At the age of 19 Fryn was able to leave home and enrolled at art school in Newlyn, Cornwall, where she was very popular with her fellow students. While she did undertake some book illustrating, it was to writing that she was drawn. Her first job was writing for The Times, but at the same time she was writing short stories. Her first, “The Mask”, received good reviews when it was published in The English Review, and in 1912 it was produced as a play at the Royalty Theatre, Shaftesbury Avenue, when Fryn was only 24.

It was around this time that Fryn badly damaged her right hand on the propeller of a light aircraft she was about to board. This required amputation of two fingers, and surgery on other parts of her hand. She had several operations, and eventually she went to New York where she had false fingers fitted. However, the lasting damage seems to have been that she became addicted for a while to morphia, which she took to ease the pain during the months after the accident.

At the outbreak of war in 1914, Fryn asked The Daily Mail to send her to Belgium to report on the war for the paper, and she reported from Antwerp, including from the front-line, until she was forced out by the German occupation of the city. The Daily Citizen wrote of her “To my mind, quite the most brilliant ... is Miss F Tennyson Jesse, who has been doing splendid work in Belgium. Not only has she an infallible nose for news, but she has unlimited courage. Best of all, she can write.” In 1915 she went to Holland, and later she went a number of times into France to report on the state of the Red Cross hospitals there, and to write about what was then called The Women’s Army.

She still found time throughout the war to write novels, plays, short stories and poetry and she also met her future husband, a budding playwright called Harold Harwood, whom she always called Tottie. They collaborated on plays as well as writing their own. They were eventually married in 1918. She was 30 and he was 44. They had no children. They were able to run two houses on their financial successes; in the winter they would stay in a house in Provence, and in the summer at a house near Goodwood, Sussex. They continued these arrangements until 1937 when they moved to London, to a smaller house in St John’s Wood.

The twenties were dazzling times for both of them, despite an undercurrent of instability due possibly to her addictions to morphia and alcohol, but also perhaps a feature of her family history; her grandmother and mother were both notably bad tempered, and the Tennyson family is said to have been known for “moods of gloomy instability”. It appears that at least twice she tried to commit suicide.
In addition to her literary works, which she continued almost up to her death, she wrote works of criminology, and went on to edit and write introductions to a number of books in the series “Notable British Trials”, which established Fryn as a perceptive authority on the criminal mind.
The number of published works diminished as she became frail, perhaps as a result of her addictions. She also suffered a great deal from migraine, for which she needed treatment throughout her life, and had operations on both eyes to clear cataracts. Fryn died in her sleep at the age of 70, on August 6, 1958, shortly after a last cataract operation.

Fryn’s obituaries were fulsome. Rebecca West added a note to the obituary in The Times, which included the following: “In her youth she was one of the loveliest girls of her time. Many people knew her later as a charming and clever and kindly woman, but it would be a pity if the girl that she was should be totally forgotten”.

Her husband was heart-broken and died nine months after Fryn, in April 1959. Fryn had never had a good relationship with her mother Edith, who had become increasingly bad tempered, especially after Eustace, Fryn’s father, died in 1927. Her mother died in 1941, and her sister Stella a year later, in June 1942. Fryn had one other long standing relationship; with May King, her housekeeper and companion for 43 years from 1915. May survived Fryn, and she died at the age of 92 in 1978.

Fryn had 36 works published during her life, including 9 novels, (her most famous being A Pin to see the Peepshow, 3 books of short stories, 2 volumes of poems, 9 plays, 8 books of criminology, 1 history book The Story of Burma, 2 collections of letters from London in the early days of the 1939/45 war, and 4 books of collected essays, including ‘The Sword of Deborah” a picture of the lives of women during the Great War. She collaborated with her husband in the writing and production of 7 plays. Most of her works were published by William Heinemann, and most can be obtained through web-sites such as www.abebooks.com.

This account is mostly taken from A Portrait of Fryn, by Joanna Colenbrander, Andre Deutsch 1984

Written Works
Act of God
Alabaster Cup
Anyhouse
Beggars on Horseback
Billeted
Comments on Cain
Dragon in the heart
Happy Bride
The Lacquer Lady
London Front
Man Who Stayed at Home
Many Latitudes
Milky Way
Moonraker
Murder and its Motives
Pelican
Pin to See the Peep Show
Saga of "San Demetrio
Secret Bread
Solange Stories
Story of Burma
Sword of Deborah
The White Riband
Tom Fool
Trial of Alma Victoria Rattenbury and George Percy Stoner
Trials of Timothy John Evans and John Reginald Halliday Christie
While London Burns

Another gorgeous woman with a face full of character of some sort. Thank you, Cate!

Obituary: Brigid Brophy
Giles Gordon

Brigid Antonia Brophy, writer: born 12 June 1929; co- organiser, Writers' Action Group for Public Lending Right 1972-82; married 1954 Michael Levey (Kt 1981; one daughter); died Louth, Lincolnshire 7 August 1995.

"Whatever became of Brigid Brophy?" I was her literary agent, and people increasingly asked me that question in the Eighties. They had ceased by the Nineties.



The terrible answer was that on the last day of 1979 she had to come to terms with living with multiple sclerosis. She wrote about the experience, with almost unbearable lucidity and detail, in her coruscating collection of essays Baroque 'n' Roll (1987). This debilitating, life-sapping illness kept her more or less housebound thereafter, administered to by professional paid help, her friend the novelist Shena Mackay and, especially, by her remarkable husband, Sir Michael Levey, who took early retirement in 1987 as Director of the National Gallery to look after her.

For a decade, life must have been pretty much hell in the elegant, statue- dominated flat in Old Brompton Road. Then Michael Levey found his beloved wife a nursing home, Fir Close, in Louth, Lincolnshire, which was particularly sympathetic to patients with MS and he and his married daughter and family moved to Louth to be near her.

She was educated at St Paul's Girls' School, then awarded a Jubilee Scholarship at St Hugh's College, Oxford, where she read Classics before being sent down. Given the achievement of her 25 publications, not least of her seven idiosyncratic novels, it has to be believed that Brigid Brophy's reputation as a most distinctive and original novelist and critic would be more considerable had she not elected, in 1972, to resurrect the battle for Public Lending Right: a cause which her father John Brophy, A.P. Herbert and others had espoused a generation earlier whereby authors would be paid a pittance from central government funds each time their books were borrowed from Britain's public libraries.

The fight to put PLR on the statute book was won in 1979 and the first payments made in 1984 - almost entirely as a result of the remorseless, tireless persuasion of Brigid Brophy and her fellow strategist, and then close friend, Maureen Duffy (and the other founder members of Writers' Action Group: Lettice Cooper, Francis King and Michael Levey). It is ironic that it was the best-selling likes of Catherine Cookson and Jeffrey Archer who were then paid the annual maximum of pounds 5,000 (now pounds 6,000) and it was Brophy and her fellow campaigners whose cheques were in the low hundreds.

PLR, as Brophy never tired of pointing out, was an author's right, not a handout or accolade for literary merit (whatever that is), and if other writers' books were borrowed more than hers then it was appropriate that those authors were paid more, irrespective of whether they "needed" the money or not. Although PLR was never based on literary distinction, it was often assumed, not least by some of those who campaigned for it - the hundreds of members of Wag were mostly "serious" (i.e. underfunded) writers - that "literary" books were borrowed, "popular" books bought. The biggest surprise was how little poets received.

Brigid Brophy's achievement as patron saint of PLR is all the more remarkable in that writers rarely have the energy or commitment to do anything but write, and grumble about how inadequately they have been paid and published. She motivated and mobilised hundreds of them whilst, for a decade, withholding her labour as book author. She had, in certain quarters (no doubt including Whitehall) the reputation of being "difficult". No one who knew this deeply shy, courteous woman well (she raised the level of the thank-you letter to a minor art form) ever found her difficult, and no author was more sensitive, considerate and professional in her dealings with her literary agent; or with her publishers. But woe betide the "editor" who tried to rewrite her fastidious, logical, exact prose, change a colon to a semi- colon (or vice versa), or try to spell "show" other than "shew", slavish Shavian that Brophy was.

Atheist, vegetarian, socialist; novelist and short-story writer; humanist; biographer; playwright (The Burglar had a brief West End run in 1967); Freudian promoter of animal rights; children's author (the adventures of Pussy Owl, only progeny of Edward Lear's pair); tennis fanatic (not least Navratilova) and, on television, football fancier; most loyal of friends; reverer of Jane Austen; lover of Italy; Mozart adorer (her radical Mozart the Dramatist: a new view of Mozart, his opera and his age, 1964, was reissued in a new edition in 1989); aficionado of the English National Opera (but not of the Royal Opera House); disliker of "Shakespeare in performance"; smoker of cigarettes in a chic holder and painter of her fingernails purple; mother, grandmother, wife; feminist; lover of men and women; Brigid Brophy was above all an intellectual, which British (although she was Irish) authors aren't supposed to be. We mistrust logical, rational thought in our writers, finding it easier to live with instinct, intuition. Brophy was ever the Aristotelian logician.

You crossed swords, or pens, with her at your peril, as, during the PLR campaign in 1975, civil servants and ministers found, not least Hugh Jenkins, Lord (as he then wasn't) Jenkins of Putney, Labour Minister for the Arts, when Brophy led a large, much-publicised demonstration to his offices in Belgrave Square, the writers frustrated at the extent to which Jenkins was having wool pulled over his eyes by civil servants who seemed to disapprove of the proposed legislation.

To watch Brigid Brophy arguing with Lord Goodman, when he was chairman of the Arts Council and she a member of the advisory literature panel in 1969, as to whether the then avant-garde literary quarterly Ambit should continue to receive grant-in-aid in spite of its publishing a story which Goodman asserted advocated the consumption of illegal substances, was one of the intellectual treats of the year.

Her greatest literary disappointment, I believe, was that Michael Holroyd, not she, was appointed by the Society of Authors to write George Bernard Shaw's biography. It was typical of Brophy, a being without personal animosity, not to realise that the then secretarial regime at the society was deeply hurt by her persuading the (screenwriters') Writers' Guild to embrace the members of the Writers' Action Group and to set up a division to represent book authors, and that the guild, fervently led by Lord (Ted) Willis, should fight strenuously for PLR.

The guild was a writers' union, affiliated to the TUC, and thus had political teeth; the society was a typically British, genteel, middle-class mutual admiration association. Brophy was never, at any time, part of a literary clique. To her the writer's responsibility was to the mind and to language.

Oddly, as her books never sold particularly well, her novels were much admired by publishers, the best of them being regularly reissued. In 1990 Cardinal republished her finest novel, the perfectly Mozartian The Snow Ball, in which the protagonists attend a ball dressed as characters from Don Giovanni with unexpected results. First published by Fred Warburg in 1964 (he had more time for Brophy than she had for him in that she couldn't understand why the most perspicacious publishers tended to be so conceited), it then had a life as a Corgi paperback, before being reissued in 1979 in a handsome edition, hardback and soft, by Allison & Busby, together with new editions of her wickedly witty first novel, Hackenfeller's Ape (1953), concerning the relationship between an ape at London Zoo and a professor observing the animal's mating ritual (it won the Cheltenham Festival's prize for a first novel in 1954), and Flesh (1963), also reissued by Cardinal in 1990, in which, by the end of the book, the husband, previously suffering from the Firbankian complaint of hyperaesthesia, proclaims, "I have become a Rubens woman."

In 1987 the Gay Men's Press (Brophy no doubt enjoyed the irony of being published by a house which announced the sex of its authors in its name), brought out a new edition of her waspish jeu d'esprit The Finishing Touch (1963), about a girls' finishing school dominated by a headmistress who makes Miss Jean Brodie seem backward. In a new introduction, Brophy revealed that the headmistress was modelled on the sometime Director of the Courtauld Institute, one Anthony Blunt.

Her other novels are The King of a Rainy Country (1956), reissued in 1990 as a Modern Classic by Virago; In Transit (1969), set in the hermetic world of an airport departure lounge, linguistically her most demanding; and Palace without Chairs (1978), published the year before disease struck her down. This last novel, which many consider her best, is a Shavian dialogue about the nature of democracy posing as a Ruritanian entertainment, less baroque than sceptical.

Her non-fiction is as ambitious as her fiction. Black Ship to Hell (1962) comprises nearly 500 footnoted pages of stylish, rigorous psychoanalysis: "The theme of the book is man as a destructive and, more particularly, a self-destructive animal: a theme whose urgency is obvious at a time when he is threatening to commit suicide as a species." In the mid-1980s, Brophy prepared a revised text for publishers.

There were two books (Black and White in 1968; Beardsley and His World in 1976) on "the most intensely and electrically erotic artist in the world", and, in 1973, the gargantuan Prancing Novelist: a defence of fiction in the form of a critical biography in praise of Ronald Firbank, the length of the defence equal to the entirety of Firbank's slim, almost anorexic fiction, including his only play.

Other books include the once infamous Fifty Works of English Literature We Could Do Without (1967), co-authored with Michael Levey and Charles Osborne; two collections of short stories; and essays - The Rights of Animals (1965), The Longford Threat to Freedom (1972), and a Fabian pamphlet, Religious Education in State Schools (1967). A Guide to Public Lending Right (1983), although by now out-of-date in certain respects, sold steadily until its publisher let it go out of print.

For anyone who has not read Brigid Brophy, the 1989 original paperback collection Reads is a typically invigorating miscellany. It contains essays on the rights of animals, Fabritius's Goldfinch, Lisbon, Genet and Sartre, Ellen Terry, Louisa M. Alcott, Miss J. Austen, Mozart of course and "The Menace of Nature" - an urban soul, Brigid Brophy was not enamoured of the countryside. The mind and prose are as alive, original and combative as ever.

Fiction
The Crown Princess and Other Stories, Viking (New York, NY), 1953.
Hackenfeller's Ape, Hart-Davis (London), 1953, Random House (New York, NY), 1954, Virago Press (London), 1991.
The King of a Rainy Country, Secker & Warburg (London), 1956, Knopf (New York, NY), 1957, reprinted with afterword, Virago Press, 1990.
Flesh, Secker & Warburg, 1962, World (Cleveland, OH), 1963.
The Finishing Touch (also see below), Secker & Warburg, 1963, revised edition, GMP (London), 1987.
The Snow Ball (also see below), Secker & Warburg, 1964.
The Finishing Touch and The Snow Ball, World, 1964.
The Burglar (play; first produced in London at Vaudeville Theatre, February 22, 1967), Holt (New York, NY), 1968.
In Transit: An Heroicycle Novel, Macdonald & Co. (London), 1969, Putnam (New York, NY), 1970, Dalkey Archive Press, (Chicago, IL), 2002.
The Adventures of God in His Search for the Black Girl: A Novel and Some Fables, Macmillan (London), 1973, Little, Brown and Company (Boston), 1974.
Pussy Owl: Superbeast (for children), illustrated by Hilary Hayton, BBC Publications (London), 1976.
Palace without Chairs: A Baroque Novel, Atheneum (New York, NY), 1978.

Nonfiction
Black Ship to Hell, Harcourt (New York, NY), 1962.
Mozart the Dramatist: A New View of Mozart, His Operas and His Age, Harcourt, 1964, revised edition, Da Capo (New York, NY), 1990.
Don't Never Forget: Collected Views and Reviews, Cape (London), 1966, Holt, 1967.
(With husband, Michael Levey, and Charles Osborne) Fifty Works of English and American Literature We Could Do Without, Rapp & Carroll (London), 1967, Stein & Day (New York, NY), 1968.
Religious Education in State Schools, Fabian Society (London), 1967.
Black and White: A Portrait of Aubrey Beardsley, Cape, 1968, Stein & Day, 1969.
The Rights of Animals, Animal Defence and Anti-Vivisection Society (London), 1969.
The Longford Threat to Freedom, National Secular Society (London), 1972.
Prancing Novelist: A Defence of Fiction in the Form of a Critical Biography in Praise of Ronald Firbank, Barnes & Noble (New York, NY), 1973.
Beardsley and His World, Harmony Books (New York, NY), 1976.
The Prince and the Wild Geese, pictures by Gregoire Gagarin, Hamish Hamilton (London), 1982, St. Martin's (New York, NY), 1983.
A Guide to Public Lending Right, Gower (Hampshire, England), 1983.
Baroque 'n' Roll and Other Essays, David & Charles (North Pomfret, VT), 1987.
Reads: A Collection of Essays, Cardinal (London), 1989.

Contributor
Best Short Plays of the World Theatre, 1958-1967, Crown (New York, NY), 1968
Animals, Men and Morals, edited by Godlovitch and J. Harris, Gollancz (London), 1971
The Genius of Shaw, edited by Michael Holroyd, Hodder & Stoughton (London), 1979
Animal Rights: A Symposium, edited by D. Paterson and R. D. Ryder, Centaur Press (West Sussex, England), 1979
Shakespeare Stories, edited by Giles Gordon, Hamish Hamilton, 1982.

A collection of Brophy's manuscripts are housed in Lilly Library at Indiana University at Bloomington.

Gosh Tennyson Jesse WAS a pretty girl!

And Brigid Antonia Brophy had bedroom eyes to die for!

She does Belva! All I could see was the horrible 'set' hair.

LOL!~!

Emily Hilda Young (21 March 1880 - 8 August 1949) was an English novelist.



Although almost completely forgotten by recent generations, E. H. Young was a best-selling novelist of her time. She was born in Whitley, Northumberland, (now known as Whitley Bay), the daughter of a shipbroker. She attended Gateshead Secondary School (a higher grade school later renamed Gateshead Grammar School) and Penrhos College, Colwyn Bay, Wales. In 1902, at the age of 22, she married Arthur Daniell, a solicitor from Bristol, and moved with him to the upscale neighbourhood of Clifton.
Here, Young developed an interest in classical and modern philosophy. She became a supporter of the suffragette movement, and started publishing novels. She also began a lifelong affair with Ralph Henderson, a schoolteacher and a friend of her husband.

When the First World War broke out in 1914, Young went to work, first as a stables groom and then in a munitions factory. Her husband was killed at the Third Battle of Ypres in 1917. The following year she moved to Sydenham Hill, London to join her lover, now the headmaster of the public school Alleyn's, and his wife in a ménage à trois. Young occupied a separate flat in their house and was addressed as 'Mrs Daniell'; this concealed the unconventional arrangement.

This change seems to have been the catalyst that she needed. Seven major novels followed, all based on Clifton, thinly disguised as 'Upper Radstowe'. The first of these was The Misses Mallett, published originally under the title The Bridge Dividing in 1922. Her 1930 novel Miss Mole won the James Tait Black Award for fiction. In the 1940s, Young also wrote books for children, Caravan Island (1940) and River Holiday (1942).

After Henderson's retirement and the death of his wife, Young moved with him to Bradford on Avon in Wiltshire. They never married. During the Second World War, she worked actively in air raid precautions. She lived in Wiltshire with Henderson until her death from lung cancer in 1949.

Although popular in her time, Young's work has nearly vanished today. In 1980, a four-part series based on her novels – mainly Miss Mole – was shown on BBC television as Hannah. The feminist publishing house Virago reprinted several of her books in the 1980s, and the Clifton and Hotwells Improvement Society has marked her Clifton home with a plaque.

The 'E H Young Prize for Greek Thought' was an annual essay prize awarded in her memory at Bristol Grammar School.

Bibliography

A Corn of Wheat (1910)
Yonder (1912)
Moor Fires (1916)
A Bridge Dividing (1922) (subsequently published as The Misses Mallett)
William (1925)
The Vicar's Daughter (1927)
Miss Mole (1930)
Jenny Wren (1932)
Celia (1937)
The Curate's Wife (1934)
Chatterton Square (1947)

Children's Fiction
Caravan Island (1940)
River Holiday (1942)

There is a lifetime of character in Ms. Young's face. Nice bio. Thank you Cate.

She is one of my favourites.

Meant to post this yesterday!

It was on this day, 10 August, in 1912 that the novelist Virginia Stephen married Leonard Woolf, a quiet wedding at the St. Pancras Registry Office.



Leonard Woolf was friends with Virginia's beloved brother, Thoby, who had recently died of typhoid; and also with one of her closest friends, Lytton Strachey. Strachey had proposed marriage to Virginia in 1909, and she had accepted. Strachey was gay at a time when it was illegal to be gay in England, Virginia was hesitant about her sexuality, and they liked and respected each other as intellectual equals. But Lytton quickly changed his mind — he wrote to Leonard: "I was in terror lest she should kiss me" — and Virginia admitted that she didn't love Lytton.

Instead, Lytton campaigned for his old friend Leonard to marry Virginia. Leonard Woolf was stationed in what is now Sri Lanka as a civil servant in the Colonial Service, but when he came home after seven years of service, he reacquainted himself with Virginia and fell in love. He was smart, and a writer, and he knew enough to be cautious with her — they went on walks and talked. He proposed to her in January of 1912, and she didn't accept. But she continued to see him and agonized over why she did not want to get married. She wrote to Leonard in May of 1912: "All I can see is that in spite of these feelings which go chasing each other all day long when I am with you, there is some feeling which is permanent, and growing. You want to know of course whether it will ever make me want to marry you. How can I say? I think it will, because there seems to be no reason why it shouldn't — But I don't know what the future will bring. I'm half afraid of myself. I sometimes feel that no one ever has or ever shall feel something — It's the thing that makes you call me like a hill, or a rock. Again, I want everything — love, children, adventure, intimacy, work. (Can you make any sense out of this ramble? I am putting down one thing after another.) So I go from being half in love with you, and wanting you to be with me always, and know everything about me, to the extremes of wildness and aloofness. I sometimes think that if I married you, I could have everything — and then — is it the sexual side of it that comes between us? As I told you brutally the other day, I feel no physical attraction in you. There are moments — when you kissed me the other day was one — when I feel no more than a rock. And yet your caring for me as you do almost overwhelms me. It is so real, and so strange. Why should you? What am I really except a pleasant attractive creature? But its just because you care so much that I feel I've got to care before I marry you. I feel I must give you everything; and that if I can't, well, marriage would only be second-best for you as well as for me. If you can still go on, as before, letting me feel my own way, as that is what would please me best; and then we must both take the risks. But you have made me very happy too. We both of us want a marriage that is a tremendous living thing, always hot, not dead and easy in parts as most marriages are. We ask a great deal of life, don't we? Perhaps we shall get it; then, how splendid!"

At the end of May, Virginia had made up her mind; she told Leonard that she loved him and wanted to marry him. She sent a letter to her friend in which she misspelled her future husband's name and said, "I am going to marry Leonard Wolf — he is a penniless Jew." But her sister Vanessa thought they seemed happy.

Virginia was overwhelmed by Leonard's large Jewish family, who lived in Putney, a suburb of London. She wrote: "Work and love and Jews in Putney take it out of me." When she and Leonard did get married, his family was not invited — it was a small and simple wedding, but of course they were still offended.

The wedding had been originally planned for August 12th but it was moved to August 10th to suit the schedule of Virginia's sister and brother-in-law, Vanessa and Clive Bell. The ceremony was at the registry office, and several things went wrong. There was a bad thunderstorm. The registrar couldn't see very well and kept stumbling over parts of the service, especially over the names Virginia and Vanessa. Then, in the middle of the service, Vanessa interrupted to say that she had a question: She remembered that she would like to change her son's name, and she wondered how to legally do so. They made it through the ceremony eventually, and Virginia Stephen became Virginia Woolf.

After the ceremony, the Bells hosted a midday wedding breakfast. Virginia's half-brothers were there, George and Gerald Duckworth, dressed in their finest; as well as Roger Fry, Vanessa's lover; and Duncan Grant, soon to become Vanessa's lover. Virginia's aunt Mary attended, as did a couple of other members of the Bloomsbury group — Saxon Sydney-Turner and Frederick Etchells.

That evening the Woolfs set off on a two-month honeymoon through France, Spain, and Italy. They had a wonderful time as companions, and Virginia wrote to a friend: "We've talked incessantly for seven weeks, and become chronically nomadic and monogamic." But she wrote to another friend: "Why do you think people make such a fuss about marriage and copulation? Why do some of our friends change upon losing chastity? Possibly my great age makes it less of a catastrophe; but certainly I find the climax immensely exaggerated. Except for a sustained good humor (Leonard shan't see this) due to the fact that every twinge of anger is at once visited upon my husband, I might still be Miss S."

Charlotte Yonge


Enid Blyton


Louise Bogan


Mavis Gallant


Diana Mitford


JG Farrell


Frieda Lawrence


Edith Wharton

I was just imagining them all being at the "quiet" wedding in the St Pancras Registry Office. What a guest list!

Indeed. Loved the Woolf bit Cate. Thank you. And for the pics as well. :-)

OMG as my daughter would say - look at that photo! What a fabulous account - love the ceremony being interrupted by Vanessa to ask a completely inconsequential question - hilarious....I wonder what Virginia's great age was? I'm a bit stumped by the last paragraph. And now want to ask my godmother if she's related to George and Gerald !! Or is Duckworth as common as Smith?

By my calculations, Virginia would have been 30 when she married. A "great" age, indeed.

The photo looks just a little like Charles and a simpering Diana!

It does!!

Mabel Evans Dodge Sterne Luhan (pronounced LOO-hahn), née Ganson (26 February 1879 – 13 August 1962) was a wealthy American patron of the arts. She is particularly associated with the Taos art colony.



Early life
Mabel Ganson was the heiress of a wealthy banker from Buffalo, New York. Her first marriage, at the age of 21, was to Karl Evans, the son of a steamship owner in 1900. They had one son, and Karl died in a hunting accident two-and-half years later leaving her a widow at the age of 23. In the Spring of 1904, an oval portrait of her in mourning dress was painted by the Swiss-born American artist Adolfo Müller-Ury for her paternal grandmother Nancy Ganson of Delaware Avenue in Buffalo. Later that year she married Edwin Dodge, a wealthy architect.

She was actively bisexual during her early life and frankly details her passionate physical encounters with young women in her autobiography Intimate Memories, (1933).

Florence
Mabel and Edwin lived in Florence from 1905 to 1912. At her palatial Medici villa — the Villa Curonia — in Arcetri, not far from Florence she entertained local artists, as well as Gertrude Stein, her brother Leo, Alice B. Toklas, and other visitors from Paris, including André Gide. A troubled liaison with her chauffeur led to two suicide attempts: the first was by eating figs with shards of glass; the second with laudanum.

New York and Provincetown
In mid-1912, Mabel and Edwin (who by this time were becoming estranged) returned to America, and she began to set herself up as a patron of the arts, holding a weekly 'salon' in her new apartment at 23 Fifth Avenue in Greenwich Village. Often in attendance were such luminaries as Carl Van Vechten, Margaret Sanger, Emma Goldman, Charles Demuth, "Big Bill" Haywood, Max Eastman, Lincoln Steffens, Hutchins Hapgood, Neith Boyce, and John Reed. Van Vechten took Dodge as the model for the character "Edith Dale" in his novel Peter Whiffle. Anthropologist Raymond Harrington introduced Dodge and her friends to peyote in an impromptu "ceremony" there.

She was involved in mounting the Armory Show of new European Modern Art in 1913, and she published in pamphlet form a piece by Gertrude Stein, "Portrait of Mabel Dodge at the Villa Curonia", which Mabel distributed at the exhibition. This brought her to public attention.

She sailed to Europe at the end of June 1913. Her new acquaintance John Reed ('Jack') — worn out from having recently organized the Paterson Pageant — travelled with her. They became lovers after arriving in Paris, where they socialized with Stein and Pablo Picasso. They moved down to the Villa Curonia, where the guests this time included Arthur Rubinstein. At first this was a very happy time for the couple, but then tension grew between the two as Jack grew uncomfortable with the affluent isolation and Mabel saw his interests in the world of people and achievements as a rejection of her. They returned to New York in late September 1913. In October 1913 Jack was sent to report on the Mexican Revolution by The Masses magazine. Mabel followed him to Presidio, a border town, but left after a few days. In 1915, she returned to Provincetown with painter Maurice Sterne.

Over 1914-16 a deep and continuing relationship developed between the intelligentsia of Greenwich Village and Provincetown. Jack Reed contributed to the start of the Provincetown Players, and Mabel had a rivalry with Mary Heaton Vorse.

Mabel became a nationally syndicated columnist for the Hearst organization.

She moved to Finney Farm, a large Croton estate. Sterne, who was to become Mabel's third husband, was staying in a cottage behind the main house. Mabel offered Jack the third floor of the house as a writing studio; he moved in for a short period but the situation was untenable. Later that year, 1916, Mabel married Maurice.

Santa Barbara
Around this period of time Mabel Dodge Sterne spent a great deal of time living in Santa Barbara, California where her friend Lincoln Steffens had relatives who were living at the time. Lincoln Steffens sister Lottie was married to local rancher John J. Hollister.

Taos
In 1919 Mabel Dodge Sterne, her husband Maurice, and Elsie Clews Parsons moved to Taos, New Mexico and started a literary colony there. On the advice of Tony Luhan, a Native American whom she would marry in 1923, she bought a 12-acre (49,000 m2) property. Tony set up a teepee in front of the small house and drummed there each night until Mabel came to him. Maurice bought a shotgun with the intention of chasing Tony off the property, but he was unable to use it, and simply took to insulting Mabel. Mabel sent Maurice away, and supported him with monthly payments until their divorce four years later.

D. H. Lawrence, the English author, accepted an invitation from her to stay in Taos and he arrived, with Frieda his wife, in early September 1922. He had a fraught relationship with his hostess and wrote about this in his fiction. Mabel later published a memoir about his visit entitled, Lorenzo in Taos (1932).
Mabel and Tony hosted a number of influential artists and poets including Marsden Hartley, Arnold Ronnebeck, Louise Emerson Ronnebeck, Ansel Adams, Willa Cather, Robinson Jeffers and his wife Una, Florence McClung, Georgia O'Keeffe, Mary Hunter Austin, Frank Waters, and others.

Mabel Dodge Luhan died at her home in Taos in 1962 and was buried in Kit Carson Cemetery. The Mabel Dodge Luhan House has been designated a national historic landmark and is a historic inn and conference center. Natalie Goldberg frequently teaches at Mabel Dodge Luhan House, where Dennis Hopper wrote the script for Easy Rider.

Archives
The Mabel Dodge Luhan Papers Collection—a collection of letters, manuscripts, photographs and personal papers documenting the life and works of Mabel Dodge Luhan—is housed at the Beinecke Library at Yale University. A portion of these is available online.

Bibliography
Her 1935 book Winter in Taos is listed among the 100 Best Books In New Mexico (Jan 2011).


The Magel Dodge Luhan House

I haven't got anything intelligent to add but just wanted to say how much I really do enjoy this thread! Thank you, once more, bleuroses!

You're welcome, Dee, and thanks!

So do I, thank you Cate.

Thanks Grant!

The Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (15 May 1689 – 21 August 1762) was an English aristocrat, writer, early `feminist', socialite, and she introduced smallpox inoculation in England.



The Works of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu

Amalie Skram (22 August 1846 – 15 March 1905) was a Norwegian author and feminist who gave voice to a woman's point of view with her naturalist writing. She moved to Denmark in 1894 where she settled in Copenhagen with her husband, the Danish writer Erik Skram. She is considered the most important female writer of the Modern Breakthrough.



Early life
Berthe Amalie Alver was born in Bergen, Norway. Her parents were Mons Monsen Alver and Ingeborg Lovise Sivertsen. Amalie had 4 brothers. Her parents operated a small business, which went bankrupt when Amalie was 17 years old. Her father emigrated from Norway to the United States to avoid a term of imprisonment and her mother was left with five children to care for.

Her mother pressured Amalie into a marriage with an older man, Bernt Ulrik August Müller (1837–1898), a ship captain, later mill owner. Following thirteen years of marriage and the birth of two sons she suffered a nervous breakdown, in part attributed to his infidelity. After several years in a mental hospital, she was divorced from Captain Müller. Together with her two sons, she moved to Kristiania (now Oslo) and began her literary activities. There she met the Kristiania Bohemian community, including writers Arne Garborg and Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, with whom she remained in contact for many years.

In 1884 Amalie Müller married again, this time the Danish writer Erik Skram (1847–1923), with whom she moved to Copenhagen, Denmark. They had a daughter from this union. Her obligations as housewife, mother and author as well as the public’s limited acceptance for her then-radical work, led to a further breakdown in 1894, after which Amalie lived in a psychiatric hospital near Roskilde. In 1899 her second marriage was dissolved. She died six years later in Copenhagen, Denmark.

Literary career
In 1882 Amalie Skram debuted (as Amalie Müller) with the short story "Madam Høiers leiefolk", published in the magazine Nyt Tidsskrift. Her work continued until her death. She dealt with topics she knew well.

Her work can be divided into three categories:
Novels concerning marriage, which explored taboo topics such as female sexuality, and the subservient status of women in that period. These works were perceived by many as overly provocative and resulted in open hostility from some segments of society.

Multi-generation novels, which dealt with the fate of a family over several generations. With these she explored the social institutions and conditions of the time and campaigned for change.

Mental hospital works such as Professor Hieronimus and Paa St. Jørgen, which dealt with the primitive and brutal conditions of such institutions of the period. Her novels created a major stir in Denmark and precipitated improvements in these institutions.

She is recognized as an early and strong proponent of what has come to be known as the women's movement, setting the early European trend. Her works, which had been generally forgotten with her death, were rediscovered and received strong recognition in the 1960s. Several of her works are currently available in recent translations to English.

Subsequent recognition
Statue of Amalie Skram at Klosterhaugen in Bergen, by Maja Refsu (1949)
The Amalie Skram-prisen or Amalie Skram prize is a travel stipend that has been awarded annually since 1994 to Norwegian authors who show exceptional skill in addressing women's issues. A statue of Skram, by Maja Refsum (1897–1986), was unveiled at Convent Garden (Klosterhaugen) in Bergen 1949. A marble bust by Ambrosia Tønnesen (1859–1948) is in Bergen Public Library. She was also honored with a Norwegian postage stamp in 1996.

Bibliography
Under Observation
Madam Høiers leiefolk (Madam Høier's Lodgers), 1882
Constance Ring, 1885
Karens Jul
Lucie, 1888
Fru Ines, 1891
Forraadt (Betrayed), 1892
Hellemyrsfolket (The People of Hellemyr), a tetralogy of the following four works:
Sjur Gabriel, 1887
To venner (Two Friends), 1888
S.G. Myre, 1890
Afkom, 1898
Børnefortellinger, short stories, 1890
Kjærlighed i Nord og Syd (Love in the North and South), short stories, 1891
Agnete, play, 1893
Professor Hieronimus, 1895
Paa St. Jørgen (At St. Jørgen), 1895
Mellom Slagene (Between Conflicts), letters, 1895
Sommer (Summer), short stories, 1899
Julehelg (Christmas Season), novel, 1900
Mennesker (People), 1905 (unfinished)

I'm on my phone at the moment, so I can't look her up myself, but today is May Sinclair's birthday.

May Sinclair was the pseudonym of Mary Amelia St. Clair (24 August 1863 - 14 November 1946), a popular British writer who wrote about two dozen novels, short stories and poetry. She was an active suffragist, and member of the Woman Writers' Suffrage League. She was also a significant critic, in the area of modernist poetry and prose; the literary term 'stream of consciousness' is attributed to her.



She was born in Rock Ferry, Cheshire. Her father was a Liverpool shipowner, who went bankrupt, became an alcoholic, and died before she was an adult. Her mother was strict and religious; the family moved to Ilford on the edge of London. After one year of education at Cheltenham Ladies College, she acted as carer for her brothers (four of five, all older and all suffering from a fatal congenital heart disease).

From 1896 she wrote professionally, to support herself and her mother, who died in 1901. She treated a number of themes relating to the position of women, and marriage. She also wrote non-fiction based on studies of philosophy, particularly German idealism. Her works sold well in the United States.

Around 1913, at the Medico-Psychological Clinic in London, she became interested in psychoanalytic thought, and introduced matter related to Sigmund Freud's teaching in her novels. In 1914, she volunteered to join the Munro Ambulance Corps, a charitable organization (which included Lady Dorothie Feilding, Elsie Knocker and Mairi Chisholm) that would bring aid to wounded Belgian soldiers on the Western Front in Flanders. Due to shell shock, she was able to endure only a few weeks at the front; she wrote about the experience in both prose and poetry.

She wrote early criticism on Imagism and the poet H. D. (1915 in The Egoist); she was on social terms with H. D. (Hilda Doolittle), Richard Aldington and Ezra Pound at the time. She also reviewed in a positive light the poetry of T. S. Eliot (1917 in the Little Review) and the fiction of Dorothy Richardson (1918 in The Egoist). It was in connection with Richardson that she introduced 'stream of consciousness' as a literary term, which was very generally adopted. Some aspects of Sinclair's subsequent novels have been traced as influenced by modernist techniques, particularly in the autobiographical Mary Olivier: A Life (1919). She was included in the 1925 Contact Collection of Contemporary Writers.

She was a member of the Society for Psychical Research from 1914. Some supernatural fiction devices appear in her shorter fiction.

From the late 1920s she was suffering from the early signs of Parkinson's disease, and ceased writing. She settled with a companion in Buckinghamshire in 1932.

Works
Nakiketas and other poems (1886) as Julian Sinclair
Essays in Verse (1892)
Audrey Craven (1897)
Mr and Mrs Nevill Tyson (1897) also The Tysons
Two Sides Of A Question (1901)
The Divine Fire (1904)
The Helpmate (1907)
The Judgment of Eve (1907) stories
The Immortal Moment (1908)
Outlines of Church History by Rudolf Sohm (1909) translator
The Creators (1910)
The Flaw in the Crystal (1912)
The Three Brontes (1912)
Feminism (1912) pamphlet for Women’s Suffrage League
The Combined Maze (1913)
The Three Sisters (1914)
The Return of the Prodigal (1914)
A Journal of Impressions in Belgium (1915)
The Belfry (1916)
Tasker Jevons: The Real Story (1916)
The Tree of Heaven (1917)
A Defense of Idealism : Some Questions & Conclusions (1917)
Mary Olivier: A Life (1919)
The Romantic (1920)
Mr. Waddington of Wyck (1921)
Life and Death of Harriett Frean (1922)
Anne Severn and the Fieldings (1922)
The New Idealism (1922)
Uncanny Stories (1923)
A Cure of Souls (1924)
The Dark Night: A Novel in Unrhymed Verse (1924)
Arnold Waterlow (1924)
The Rector of Wyck (1925)
Far End (1926)
The Allinghams (1927)
History of Anthony Waring (1927)
Fame (1929)
Tales Told by Simpson (1930) stories
The Intercessor, and Other Stories (1931)

May Sinclair and the First World War

What a woman she must have been and a beauty as well. I had no idea of all that. So interesting. She obviously, was a very strong woman even though she did suffer from shell shock. Makes me want to read much more of her.
Thank you Cate.

Dorothy Coade Hewett (21 May 1923 – 25 August 2002) was an Australian feminist poet, novelist, librettist and playwright. She was also a member of the Communist Party of Australia, though she clashed on many occasions with the party's leadership.



Hewett was born in Perth and was brought up on a sheep and wheat farm near Wickepin in the Western Australian Wheatbelt. She was initially educated at home and through correspondence courses. From the age of 15 she attended Perth College, which was run by Anglican nuns. Hewett was an atheist, remaining so all her life.

In 1944 Hewett began studying English at the University of Western Australia (UWA). It was here that she joined the Communist Party in 1946. Also during her time at UWA she won a major drama competition and a national poetry competition.

In 1948 she married communist lawyer Lloyd Davies. The marriage ended in divorce in 1959, following Hewett's departure to Sydney to conduct a relationship with a boilermaker named Les Flood. She bore Flood three sons over nine years, during which time she wrote no poetry owing to the family's constant struggle against poverty. However, the time she spent working in a clothing factory during this period did inform some of her most famous works.

Following the end of this relationship in 1958 Hewett returned to Perth to take up a teaching post in the English department at UWA. This move also inspired her to begin writing again. Jeannie (1958) was the first piece she completed following her enforced hiatus, Hewett later admitted to finding this a rejuvenating experience.

Hewett published her first novel, Bobbin Up, in 1959. As the title suggests it was a semi-autobiographical work based on her time in Sydney, the novel was a cathartic work for Hewett. The novel is widely regarded as a classic example of social realism. It was one of the few western works that was translated into Russian during the Soviet era. Vulgar Press re-published the book in 1999, 40 years after its first publication.

In 1960 Hewett married again, this time to writer Merv Lilley, the marriage would last until the end of her life. They had two daughters, Kate and Rose. The couple published a collection of poetry together in 1961 entitled What About the People!.

In 1967 Hewett's increasing disillusionment with Communist politics was evidenced by her collection Hidden Journey. Things came to a head for her on 20 August 1968, when the Red Army brutally suppressed the Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia. She renounced her membership of the Communist Party. This and her critical obituary of the Communist novelist Katharine Susannah Prichard, caused several Communist writers to circulate material attacking her.

In 1973 Hewett was awarded one of the first fellowships by the newly formed Australia Council. The organisation granted her several fellowships, and later awarded her a lifetime emeritus fellowship. Hewett returned to Sydney that year with the hope that this move would further her career as a playwright. During her life she wrote 15 plays, the most famous of which are: This Old Man Comes Rolling Home (1967), The Chapel Perilous (1972), and The Golden Oldies (1981). Several plays, such as The Man From Mukinupin (1979), were written in collaboration with Australian composer Jim Cotter.
In 1975, she published a controversial collection of poems, Rapunzel in Suburbia, which resulted in the pursuit of successful libel action by her ex-husband Lloyd Davies in relation to specific verses and their quotation in a review by Hal Colebatch in The West Australian newspaper.

Virago Press published the first volume of her autobiography, Wild Card, in 1990. The book dealt with her lifelong quest for sexual freedom and the negative responses she received from those around her. Two years later she published her second novel, The Toucher.

In 1990 a painting of Hewett by artist Geoffrey Proud won the Archibald Prize, Australia's most prominent portrait prize.

Hewett moved to Faulconbridge in the Blue Mountains, west of Sydney, with her husband Merv Lilley in 1991. She suffered from osteoarthritis but continued to write prolifically, including a novel, Neap Tide (Penguin 1999), a collection of poetry, Halfway Up The Mountain, a play commissioned by the Playbox Theatre in Melbourne, Nowhere, and other unpublished works. At the time of her death, from breast cancer, she was working on the second volume of her autobiography, The Empty Room.

In Conversation with Dorothy Hewett

I like Dorothy Hewett, I quite enjoyed Bobbin Up.

Eleanor Dark (née O'Reilly) (26 August 1901 – 11 September 1985) was an Australian author whose novels included Prelude to Christopher (1934) and Return to Coolami (1936), both winners of the Australian Literature Society Gold Medal for literature, and her best known work The Timeless Land (1941).



Eleanor Dark was born in Sydney. She was the second of three children born to the poet, writer and parliamentarian, Dowell Philip O'Reilly and his wife, Eleanor McCulloch O'Reilly. On finishing school and unable to enter university, having failed mathematics, she learnt typing and took a secretarial job. In 1922 she married Dr Eric Payten Dark, a general practitioner who wrote books, articles and pamphlets on politics and medicine. Dr Eric Payten Dark (1889–1987) was an active member of the Labor left in New South Wales, was involved in contemporary political debate and was a committed socialist, although never a member of the Communist Party. His books include The World Against Russia and Who are the Reds. They lived in Katoomba, New South Wales, where Eleanor wrote eight of her ten novels, including short stories and articles.

In the 50s the Darks bought a farm in Queensland where they spent part of the year for seven years. Eleanor wrote her last published work, Lantana Lane at the farm. Their son Michael had also moved to Queensland where he eventually married and had two daughters. The move to Queensland has, by some, been associated with the desire to escape a growing sense of persecution and isolation within the Katoomba community due to growing attacks on members of Left wing parties in the press and by the Menzies Government. Dr Dark's political writing and involvement in Left wing circles attracted attention from anti communist elements within the Menzies Government and the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO). Like many writers and social commentators of the time, who were critical of Menzies or were Left wing, it is certain that the Darks were under surveillance. This surveillance extended to Eric Dark's first son from his first marriage, John Dark, and possibly to his second son with Eleanor, Michael Dark.

The Darks' second son, Michael, inherited the family home 'Varuna' in Katoomba, which in 1988 was turned into a writers' centre, managed by the Eleanor Dark Foundation, of which Michael Dark remains President. The centre has retained its name, and is known as Varuna – The Writers' House.
Eleanor Dark's best known work is The Timeless Land (1941), the first part of a trilogy, with Storm of Time (1948) and No Barrier (1953).

She died in 1985, aged 84.

Bibliography

Novels
Slow Dawning (1932)
Prelude to Christopher (1934)
Return to Coolami (1936)
Sun Across the Sky (1937)
Waterway (1938)
The Little Company (1945)
The Timeless Land (1941)
Storm of Time (1948)
No Barrier (1953)
Lantana Lane (1959)

Varuna: The Writer's House

Another of my favourite Virago (and non Virago) authors!

Ada Leverson (née Beddington; 1862 – August 1933) was a British writer who is now known primarily for her work as a novelist.



Ada began writing during the 1890s, as a contributor to "Black and White", "Punch", and The Yellow Book. She was a loyal friend to Oscar Wilde, who called her Sphinx. She was a wit, and a friend of Max Beerbohm; her writing has been compared to Beerbohm's, and the stories of Saki.

She was also a friend of George Moore; Osbert Sitwell in Great Morning has an anecdote in which she tries, unsuccessfully, to get Moore to see the young William Walton. Of the Sitwells' circle – Sacheverell Sitwell dedicated a poetry collection to her, while she was hopelessly in love with Osbert – she lived out her old age in the Hotel Porta Rossa in Florence.

She married Ernest Leverson, when she was 19, and without her parents' consent. The marriage broke up when he moved to Canada in 1905. Her daughter and biographer Violet married Guy Percy Wyndham (1865–1941) in 1923, his second marriage. Sydney Schiff was her brother-in-law.

Bibliography
The Twelfth Hour (1907)
Love's Shadow (1908)
The Limit (1911)
Tenterhooks (1912)
Bird of Paradise (1914)
Love at Second Sight (1916)
Letters To The Sphinx From Oscar Wilde and Reminiscences of the Author (1930)
Little Ottleys (Virago 1982) omnibus: Love's Shadow, Tenterhooks, Love at Second Sight

Portrayal in film
In the 1997 film Wilde she is played by Zoë Wanamaker.

References
Violet Wyndham (1963) The Sphinx and her Circle: A biographical sketch of Ada Leverson 1862–1933
Charles Burkhart (1973) Ada Leverson
Julie Speedie (1993) Wonderful Sphinx: The Biography of Ada Leverson

Charmian Clift (30 August 1923 – 8 July 1969) was an Australian writer and essayist during the mid 20th century. She was the second wife of Australian journalist George Johnston.



Clift was born in Kiama, New South Wales. She married Johnston in 1947. They had three children, the eldest of which was the poet Martin Johnston. After Clift and Johnston's collaboration, High Valley (1949), won them recognition as writers, they left Australia with their young family, working in London before relocating to the Greek Islands to try living by the pen.

Johnston returned to Australia to receive the accolades of his Miles Franklin Award Winner, "My Brother Jack". Clift moved back to Sydney with their children in 1964, after which her novels Mermaid Singing, Peel Me a Lotus, and Honour's Mimic became successes. She was also well-known for her essays in Sydney and Melbourne newspapers, which included Images in Aspic and The World of Charmian Clift. In the meantime, Clift and Johnston's marriage was disintegrating under the pressures of their drinking habits and the problems their children had settling into life in Sydney.

On 8 July 1969, the eve of the publication of Johnston's Clean Straw For Nothing, Clift committed suicide by taking an overdose of barbiturates in Mosman, Sydney. Her ashes were later scattered in the rose garden of the Northern Suburbs Crematorium, in Sydney.

Bibliography

Novels
High Valley, (with George Johnston) 1949
The Big Chariot, (with George Johnston) 1953
The Sponge Divers, (with George Johnston) 1955
Walk to the Paradise Gardens, 1960
Honour's Mimic, 1964

Short Stories Collections
Strong Man from Piraeus and Other Stories, (with George Johnston) 1983

Autobiography
Mermaid Singing, 1956
Peel Me a Lotus, 1959

Non-Fiction
Images in Aspic, Selected Essays, Sydney, 1965
The World of Charmain Clift, Sydney, 1970
Trouble in Lotus Land, Sydney, 1990
Being Alone with Oneself, Sydney, 1991
Charmian Clift: Selected Essays, 2001

Fabulous hat on Ada!

I read Mermaid Singing, a lovely memoir of their life on a Greek island.

Yes I was going to say can we please bring hats back...and then I saw the photo of Charmian Clift and now I'm wondering if it's just black and white photography that we need back.....fabulous lighting...and such looks...I really must practice looking like that at least once today....off to the left and thoughtful....only I think people would just walk past and not notice...sigh

Katherine Cecil Thurston (18 April 1875 - 5 September 1911) was an Irish novelist.



She was born Katherine Cecil Madden in Cork, Ireland, the only daughter of banker Paul J. Madden (who was Mayor of Cork 1885-1886, and a friend of Charles Stuart Parnell) and Catherine Madden (born Barry). Privately educated, by the end of the nineteenth century she was a contributing author of short stories for various British publications such as Pall Mall Magazine, Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Harpers, Windsor Magazine, and others.

In 1901, she married writer Ernest Temple Thurston (1879-1933). They separated in 1907 and were divorced in 1910. The divorce was filed on grounds of his adultery and desertion. The suit went undefended. "He complained that she was making more money by her books than he was, that her personality dominated his and had said that he wanted to leave her."

Katherine Thurston's novels achieved success not only in Great Britain but in the United States as well. Her best known work was a political thriller titled "John Chilcote" (as The Masquerader in the United States) published in 1904. It was on the New York Times Best Seller list for two years, ranking as the third best-selling book for 1904 and the seventh best selling in 1905.

Ms. Thurston's next book, The Gambler, came out in 1905 and it too made the list of bestselling novels in the United States for that year, coming in at number 6. It marked the first time the New York Times recorded any author, female or male, as having two top ten books in a single year.

In 1910, she was back on the New York Times best selling books of the year list at number 4 with her novel, "Max," the story of a young Russian princess, who, disguised as a boy, flees to the Montmartre Quarter of Paris the night before her arranged marriage.

Thurston's book, "John Chilcote" was adapted to the stage by John Hunter Booth and opened on Broadway in 1917. It was made into a motion picture four times, the first silent film by American Pathé in 1912 under the title
"The Compact" and starring Crane Wilbur; the second was a 1920 Russian / French co-production titled Chlen parlamenta. Two more films were made using the American book title The Masquerader in 1922 and then by the Samuel Goldwyn Company in 1933 as a "talkie" starring Ronald Colman.

An epileptic, her blossoming career was cut short at the age of thirty-six when she was found in her hotel room in Cork dead. The official inquiry held 6 September 1911, lists the cause of death from asphyxia as result of a seizure. She was due to remarry later that month, and is buried in St. Joseph's Cemetery, Cork. Her untimely death has been the subject of much speculation, since the circumstances indicate the possibility of either suicide or murder.

Bibliography
The Circle (1903)
John Chilcote M.P. (aka The Masquerader) (1904) #3 best selling book in the U.S. for the year 1904 and # 7 for 1905
The Gambler (1905) # 6 best selling book in the U.S. for the year 1905
The Mystics (1907)
The Fly on the Wheel (1908)
*Max (1910) #4 best selling book in the U.S. for the year 1910

Scottish novelist Susan Edmonstone Ferrier (September 7, 1782 in Edinburgh - 1854) was the daughter of James Ferrier, one of the principal clerks of the Court of Session, in which office he was the colleague of Sir Walter Scott.



Ferrier wrote three novels, Marriage (1818), "The Inheritance" (1824), and
"Destiny" (1831), all characterised by racy humour and acute character-painting. Her cheerful and tactful friendship helped to soothe the last days of Sir Walter Scott.

Another lovely lady. It amazes me how many of these authors are truly lovely.

Anna Haycraft (9 September 1932 – 8 March 2005) was an English writer and essayist who wrote under the nom de plume Alice Thomas Ellis. She was the author of numerous novels, and also of some non-fiction, including cookery books. Born Anna Margaret Lindholm, she was half-Finnish, half-Welsh and spent part of her childhood as an evacuee in North Wales, a period she later wrote about in A Welsh Childhood. She later moved to North London.



Haycraft's parents belonged to the positivist and atheist Church of Humanity founded by Auguste Comte, but she left to become a Roman Catholic at the age of 19. Shortly afterwards, she entered a convent as a postulant, but had to leave due to a health condition.

In 1956, she married Colin Haycraft, owner of the publishing company, Duckworth. They were happily married until his death, in 1995. The couple had seven children, raised in Anna's religion, but they were also struck by tragedy: their daughter Mary died in infancy at the age of two days, and their son Joshua was killed in an accident while still in his teens.

The Birds of the Air is dedicated to her son, Joshua, with the following inscription:
All his beauty, wit and grace
Lie forever in one place.
He who sang and sprang and moved
Now, in death, is only loved.

Haycraft published her first novel, The Sin Eater, in 1977 under the pen name of Alice Thomas Ellis, which she used in all her subsequent writing.

She was well known as a hostess; her skill at cooking and entertaining was a considerable asset to the Duckworth company. Her cookery books include "All-natural Baby Food" (published Fontana/Collins, 1977) and Darling, you shouldn't have gone to so much trouble, co-written with Caroline Blackwood. Caroline Blackwood and her husband, the American poet Robert Lowell, were often in and out of the Haycraft home. She was also a close friend of Beryl Bainbridge.

Her best-known novel was probably Unexplained Laughter (1985), which was adapted for British television, as was her Summerhouse Trilogy. Her novel The 27th Kingdom (1982) was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Her "Home Life" column in The Spectator was published in four volumes.

All her work was livened by a dry, dark sense of humour. One of her most famous witticisms is as follows: "There is no reciprocity. Men love women. Women love children. Children love hamsters. Hamsters don't love anyone".

As a conservative Roman Catholic who was unhappy with the changes in the Church triggered by the Second Vatican Council, she became a sharp polemicist in the press against what she believed were abuses of liturgy and practice that led to a watering-down of the faith. Though her fiction often seems feminist, with women as the usual leads, she was bitterly opposed to feminists in the Church, and claimed that since the change from the Tridentine Mass she could barely bring herself to attend on Sundays. A regular columnist of the Catholic Herald newspaper, she launched a sharp attack in 1996 on Derek Worlock, the former Archbishop of Liverpool, shortly after his death, accusing him of being responsible for a strong fall in Mass attendance in the previous decade. After protests from readers of the newspaper she was sacked as a columnist, though the staff and some others took her side.
She was elected in 1999 a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Haycraft survived a bout of lung cancer but died a year later after secondary complications at age 72, in 2005.

Feature film
In early 2009, it was announced that an adaptation of The Inn at the Edge of the World by Charles Dance is to be made into a feature film with a cast including Stephen Fry, Michael Gambon and Penelope Wilton. The plot involves the main characters responding to an advertisement to spend Christmas on a remote Scottish island. Shooting at an undisclosed location in the west of Scotland was expected to commence in May 2009.

Fiction
The Sin Eater (1977)
The Birds of the Air (1980)
The 27th Kingdom (1982)
The Other Side of the Fire (1983)
Unexplained Laughter (1985)
The Clothes in the Wardrobe (1987) (Summerhouse Trilogy I.)
The Skeleton in the Cupboard (1988) (Summerhouse Trilogy II.)
The Fly in the Ointment (1990) (Summerhouse Trilogy III.)
The Inn at the Edge of the World (1990)
Pillars of Gold (1992)
The Evening of Adam (1994) (stories)
Fairy Tale(1996)
Hotel Lucifer (1999)

Alice Thomas Ellis Obit in the Guardian

Alice Thomas Ellis Obit in the Times.

I've read some Alice Thomas Ellis and love The Inn at the Edge of the World. I would recommend it as a perfect, unsentimental Christmas read.

The hamster quote is the one thing that I always remember about her. I think of it sometimes when I see children with their pets!

Someone else on this site also recommended that Inn book (Paola?). I own it and will move it up the pile. Personally I loved The Summerhouse Trilogy but others did not.

I have that trilogy Barbara, and need to read it sooner than later.

#83> No, Barbara, I do not have the book and, until now, never heard of it.

I clicked on the conversations section for The Inn at the Edge of the World and it was recommended by both Marise and Urania. And now Dee.

Elsa Yur'evna Triolet (September 12 (or September 24) 1896 - June 16, 1970)



Born Ella Kagan (Russian: Элла Каган) into a Jewish family of a lawyer and a music teacher in Moscow, she and her sister, Lilya Brik received excellent educations; they were able to speak fluent German and French and play the piano. Elsa graduated from the Moscow Institute of Architecture.

Elsa enjoyed poetry and in 1915 befriended the aspiring futurist poet and graphic artist Vladimir Mayakovsky. When she invited him home, the poet fell madly in love with her older sister Lilya, who was married to Osip Brik. Elsa was the first to translate Mayakovsky's poetry (as well as volumes of other Russian-language poetry) to French.

In 1918, at the outset of Russian Civil War, Elsa married the French cavalry officer André Triolet and emigrated to France, but for years in her letters to Lilya Elsa admitted to being heartbroken. Later she divorced Triolet.

In the early 1920s, Elsa described her visit to Tahiti in her letters to Victor Shklovsky, who subsequently showed them to Maxim Gorky. Gorky suggested that the author should consider a literary career. The 1925 book In Tahiti, written in Russian, was based on these letters.

In 1928 Elsa met French writer Louis Aragon. They married and stayed together for 42 years. She influenced Aragon to join the French Communist Party. Triolet and Aragon fought in the French Resistance.

In 1944 Triolet was the first woman to be awarded the Prix Goncourt.

She died, aged 73, in Moulin de Villeneuve, Saint-Arnoult-en-Yvelines, France of a heart attack.

In 2010, La Poste, the French post office, issued three stamps honoring Triolet.

Bibliography
На Таити (In Tahiti, in Russian, 1925)
Fraise des bois (in Russian, 1926)
Camouflage (in Russian, 1928)
Bonsoir Thérèse (Good Evening, Theresa - her first book in French, 1938)
Mille regrets (1942)
Le Cheval blanc (The White Horse, 1943)
Qui est cet étranger qui n'est pas d'ici ? ou le mythe de la Baronne Mélanie (1944)
Le Premier accroc coûte deux cents francs (A Fine of 200 Francs, 1945, Prix Goncourt 1944)
Personne ne m'aime (Nobody Loves Me, 1946)
Les Fantômes armés (The Phantom Armies, 1947)
L'Inspecteur des ruines (The Inspector of Ruins, 1948)
Le Cheval roux ou les intentions humaines (1953)
L'Histoire d'Anton Tchekov (1954)
Le Rendez-vous des étrangers (1956)
Le Monument (1957)
Roses à crédit (1959)
Luna-Park (1960)
Les Manigances (1961)
L'Âme (1962)
Le Grand jamais (1965)
Écoutez-voir (1968)
La Mise en mots (1969)
Le Rossignol se tait à l'aube (1970)

Maud Pember Reeves (24 December 1865-13 September 1953) (born Magdalene Stuart Robison) was a feminist, writer and member of the Fabian Society. She spent most of her life in New Zealand and Britain.


Described as "tall and striking, with a handsome face, full red lips, dark eyes, and brown hair"

She was born in Mudgee, New South Wales, Australia, to bank manager William Smoult Robison; the family moved to Christchurch, New Zealand in 1868. In 1885 she married the journalist and politician William Pember Reeves and became interested in socialism and the suffragette movements. (See also first wave feminism.)

In 1896 the family moved to London after William's appointment as Agent-General, the representative of New Zealand government within the British Empire. There, the couple became friends with a number of left-wing intellectuals, such as George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, and Sidney and Beatrice Webb. Maud joined the Fabian Society, a precursor to the Labour Party, which promoted social reform.

In 1913 Maud published a survey of poverty in Lambeth, a poor borough in South London, called Round About a Pound a Week, a work that was reprinted in 2008 by Persephone Books and remains relevant today. During the First World War she served on a government committee concerned with women's issues.

William and Maud had three children. Their son, Fabian Pember Reeves, was killed in the First World War, and one of their daughters, Amber Reeves, was a noted feminist writer.

And I was only drinking Apple Tree Flat semillon sauvignon blanc from Mudgee last night in Park Road Milton - I shall now keep an eye out for Maud's work to go with it.

That is a face out of Dickens.

>83 romain:, 86 Yes, I highly recommend The Inn at the Edge of the World! I have liked everything I've read by Ellis so far, but that is my favorite.

Mary Florence Elinor Stewart (née Rainbow; born 17 September 1916) is a popular English novelist, best known for her Merlin series, which straddles the boundary between the historical novel and the fantasy genre.



Stewart was born in Sunderland, County Durham, England and graduated from Durham University, from where she received an honorary D.Litt in 2009. She was a lecturer in English Language and Literature there until her marriage in 1945 to Sir Frederick Stewart, former chairman of the Geology Department of Edinburgh University. Sir Frederick died in 2001.

Stewart is the bestselling author of many romantic suspense and historical fiction novels, which were well-received by critics due to her skillful story telling and enchanting prose. Her novels are also known for their well-crafted settings, many in England but also in such exotic locations as Damascus and the Greek islands, as well as Spain, France, Austria, etc.

She was at the height of her popularity in the 1960s and 1970s when many of her novels were translated into many languages; The Moon-Spinners was also made into a movie. Stewart is considered one of the founders of the romantic suspense subgenre, blending romance novels and mystery. She seamlessly combined the two genres, maintaining a full mystery while focusing on the courtship between two people, so that the process of solving the mystery "helps to illuminate" the hero's personality - thereby helping the heroine to fall in love with him.

Following the success of T. H. White's The Once and Future King, and the connection of the Kennedy presidency with "Camelot", Arthurian Legends became quite popular again. Mary Stewart added to this climate by publishing The Crystal Cave, the first in what was to become a 5 book series later dubbed "The Merlin Chronicles". It placed Lady Stewart on the best seller list many times throughout the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s.

Bibliography

The Crystal Cave (1970)
The Hollow Hills (1973)
The Last Enchantment (1979)
The Wicked Day (1983)
The Prince and the Pilgrim (1995)

Madam, Will You Talk? (1954)
Wildfire at Midnight (1956)
Thunder on the Right (1957)
Nine Coaches Waiting (1958)
My Brother Michael (1959)
The Ivy Tree (1961)
The Moon-Spinners (1962)
This Rough Magic (1964)
Airs Above the Ground (1965)
The Gabriel Hounds (1967)
The Wind Off the Small Isles (1968)
The Little Broomstick (1971) (children's novel)
Ludo and the Star Horse (1974) (children's novel)
Touch Not the Cat (1976)
A Walk in Wolf Wood (1980) (children's novel)
Thornyhold (1988)
Frost on the Window: And other Poems (1990) (poetry collection)
Stormy Petrel (1991)
Rose Cottage (1997)

Hodder and Stoughton have reissued many of Mary Stewart's novels in 2011.

Message from Mary Stewart...
"I am well into my nineties now, and I am afraid I have almost forgotten how to write. But if a few vague memories will do, here they are. My first novel was called MURDER FOR CHARITY, and was sent off hopefully to publishers who now prefer to forget that they turned it down. But they were probably right, and their comments did me a power of good. I cut off the last third of the story, re-wrote it, re-named it MADAM, WILL YOU TALK? And sent it to Hodder and Stoughton. Some half century later I am still with my dear Hodder and Stoughton, and can only add that I love the new cover style, and I hope that it will attract a new generation to read my books. MS"

I have long loved and read Mary Stewart. There is an innocence about her writing that draws me in. I read her in my school days and I read her still.

For some reason I missed that Mabel Dodge woman above and only just read it. What a hoot.
Reams of infidelities, including two suicide attempts over the chauffeur, and then Bleuroses writes, 'In mid-1912 Mabel and Edwin (her husband) (who by this time were becoming estranged), returned to America... By this time!? Why is it that all the most interesting people were impossible to live with? Or was Edwin also sleeping with the chauffeur?

ha ha ha Barbara,,,,,,,,,,,,that is funny!~!

Rainbow? Mary Stewart's maiden name was Rainbow? That's fantastic!

My doctor's name is Rainbow! When I first met him, I was so fascinated that I had to look it up - it's apparently from the French Rainbaut.

On Friday, Mary Stewart's birthday, I came across two of her books at a thrift shop and snapped them up! She is such a comforting read. I am so happy to know that she is still living and knows that her books are still read!

I agree marise. She is a comforting read. Many more times I get sent to Ann of Green Gables, I may need to find a fresh comfort read....although I thought I already had but have now forgotten what it was. This darned 'sometimers'!

I have a whole stack of the new Mary Stewart reissues to read, as I could not resist the "set of 10 for £9.99" offer from The Book People. I'm saving them for the upcoming winter evenings.

Bummer dudes & dudettes; The Book People only ship to U.K., Spain & Ireland. ***sad***

"I don't want to dust and polish...And I don't want to work on a farm.
I want to write poetry. Great poetry. As great as Shakespeare."?
The White Bird Passes

Jessie Kesson (October 28, 1916 - September 26, 1994), (born Jessie Grant McDonald) was a Scottish novelist, playwright and radio producer.



Jessie Kesson was born in a workhouse in Inverness and brought up in Elgin and then in an orphanage at Skene, Aberdeenshire from the age of 8. In her circumstances, she was not permitted to enter further education and had to go into domestic service.

In 1934 she married Johnnie Kesson, a cattleman, living in Abriachan and then Rothienorman.

Encounters with Nan Shepherd and then Neil M. Gunn opened opportunities in writing, including plays for the BBC in Aberdeen.

She moved to London in 1947, where she lived for the rest of her life. As well as domestic work, she worked as a radio producer, producing Woman's Hour and over 90 radio plays.

Her writings include The White Bird Passes (1958), filmed for BBC Television in 1980, Glitter of Mica (1963), Another Time, Another Place (1983) which became an award-winning film, and Where the Apple Ripens (1985).

Jessie Kesson: Writing Herself by Isobel Murray

brave woman.

Very brave and the Scottish people adore her writings. Sadly the two I have tried, I found very difficult going. But I won't give up. If the whole of Scotland love her; then I think I am missing something when I read her. The two I read are The White Bird Passes and Where the Apple Ripens. Perhaps I need to read a bio on her and then go back to her works. **thinking aloud**

Cate, I don't always comment but I ALWAYS enjoy. I know it's hard to see me smiling and nodding my head through your monitor so I thought I'd better say, again, how much I love these posts of yours. You make my life richer for them.

>105 tiffin:: I'm looking for the "like" button ...

Amen and Amen. It's a labor of love, and we love it and you.

Tui, Laura and Peggy...you've made me smile today. I really love posting these remembrances but it's all the more meaningful when others enjoy it as well! Thanks ladies!

okay, I give in - now I'm off to Caboolture library in search of Jessie Kesson.....

#104 Dear Belva, I'm inclined to agree with you. I just borrowed and read quick smart Another Time, Another Place. The style is. I think. very different and not easy to read. There are great leaps from one action or conversation to the next with no signposts. A proliferation of idiom, with which I'm not familiar, proves to be another barrier. Having said that I did walk away with a distinct impression of place and time and thought the concept was clever - aka who is the real prisoner? You can be a "prisoner" of your own gender/society. But I'm not sure I'll be rushing off to grab another one - although they are slim volumes. There was not much let up from bleak. And whilst I lean to bleak, this was almost too spare.

I also don't comment much but I do love reading about these extraordinary women. Some of them were so ahead of their time it leaves me astounded.

I have only read one Jessie Kesson. I didn't find it hard to read at all, but nor did it bowl me over. I liked the mother/daughter relationship but once she was removed to the orphanage the book was no longer of much interest to me.

Ann Petry (October 12, 1908 – April 28, 1997) was an American author who became the first black woman writer with book sales topping a million copies for her novel The Street.



Ann Lane was born on October 12, 1908 in Old Saybrook, Connecticut as the youngest of three daughters to Peter Clark Lane and Bertha James Lane. Her parents belonged to the black minority of the small town. Her father was a pharmacist and her mother was a shop owner, chiropodist, and hairdresser. Ann and her sister were raised "in the classic New England tradition: a study in efficiency, thrift, and utility. They were filled with ambitions that they might not have entertained had they lived in a city along with thousands of poor blacks stuck in demeaning jobs."

The family had none of the trappings of the middle class until Petry was well into adulthood. Before her mother became a businesswoman, she worked in a factory, and her sisters, Ann's aunts, worked as maids. The Lane girls were raised sheltered from most of the disadvantages other black people in the United States had to experience due to the color of their skin; however there were a number of incidents of racial discrimination.

As she wrote in "My Most Humiliating Jim Crow Experience," published in Negro Digest in 1946, there was an incident where a racist decided that they did not want her on a beach. Her father wrote a letter to The Crisis in 1920 or 1921 complaining about a teacher who refused to teach his daughters and his niece. Another teacher humiliated her by making her read the part of Jupiter, the illiterate ex-slave in the Edgar Allan Poe short story "The Gold-Bug".

Petry had a strong family foundation with well-traveled uncles, who had many stories to tell her when coming home; her father, who overcame racial obstacles, opened a pharmacy in the small town; and her mother and aunts who set a examples to become strong herself. Petry, interviewed by the Washington Post in 1992, says about her tough female family members that “it never occurred to them that there were things they couldn’t do because they were women.”

Career
The wish to become a professional writer was raised in Ann for the first time in high school when her English teacher read her essay to the class commenting on it with the words: “I honestly believe that you could be a writer if you wanted to.” The decision to become a pharmacist was her family’s. She enrolled in college and graduated with a Ph.G. degree from Connecticut College of Pharmacy in New Haven in 1931 and worked in the family business for several years. She also began to write short stories while she was working at the pharmacy.

On February 22, 1938, she married George D. Petry of New Iberia, Louisiana, which brought Petry to New York. She not only wrote articles for newspapers such as The Amsterdam News, or The People's Voice, and published short stories in The Crisis, but also worked at an after-school program at P.S. 10 in Harlem. It was during this period of her life that she had realized and personally experienced what the majority of the black population of the United States had to go through in their everyday life.

Traversing the streets of Harlem, living for the first time among large numbers of poor black people, seeing neglected children up close – Petry’s early years in New York inevitably made impressions on her. Impacted by her Harlem experiences, Ann Petry used her creative writing skills to bring this experience to paper. Her daughter Liz explained to the Washington Post that “her way of dealing with the problem was to write this book, which maybe was something that people who had grown up in Harlem couldn’t do.”

Petry’s most popular novel The Street was published in 1946 and won the Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship with book sales topping a million copies.

Back in Old Saybrook in 1947, the writer worked on Country Place (1947), The Narrows (1953), other stories, and books for children, but they have never achieved the same success as her first book. Until her death Petry lived in an 18th century house in her hometown, Old Saybrook. Ann Lane Petry died at the age of 88 on April 28, 1997. She was outlived by her husband, George Petry, who died in 2000, and her only daughter, Liz Petry.

Bibliography
The Street (1946)
Country Place (1947)
The Narrows (1953)
Tituba of Salem Village (1955)

Another Virago author previously unknown to me, and now firmly situated on my Want List. Thanks, Cate. I think!

I was going to say the exact same thing Linda. I have never before heard of her but am now on the hunt for her books. She and the other women of her family sound fascinating and so strong. Likewise, the men. What really struck me whilst reading this bio was how very matter of fact the women were about going into their studies and careers; very nonchalant. I think the men in this family must have been rather unique for that era in not belittling their women.
Thank you for another enlightening & interesting bio Cate.

You're welcome, as always, ladies!! :~)

I have owned a non-Virago copy of The Street for quite some time. Mentally moving it up the TBR list as a result of your article.

Looking forward to your review Barbara.

Regarding The Street one reviewer had this to say:
"A phenomenal story. "The street" itself is actually one of the novel's main characters, taking on a life of its own throughout the story."

Sounds plummy to me. Gonna go find me a copy somewhere.

The non-Virago was available on PBS when I posted above. Couldn't make up my mind to request it, holding out for a Virago copy for now.

I got my request entered. Thank you Linda.

Jennifer Dawson, (24 January 1929 – 14 October 2000) was an English novelist. Her works explored the theme of mental illness and society's attitudes to those suffering from such conditions.

Born in London, she attended school in Camberwell and went on to read Modern History at St Anne's College, Oxford. During her time at Oxford she suffered a breakdown and spent several months in Warneford Hospital, Oxford.

Following the completion of her studies, she worked as a teacher at a convent in Laval in France and later at Oxford University Press where she made editorial contributions to a number of reference works. In addition to these roles, she also worked as social worker in a psychiatric hospital in Worcester and it was her experiences here and, as a patient of such an institution, that formed the basis for her debut novel The Ha-Ha. The novel, which explores schizophrenia, received considerable critical acclaim, being awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, being adapted for the stage by Richard Eyre and was later broadcast by the BBC on both radio and television.

She continued to explore similar themes throughout the 1960s and 1970s via novels such as The Cold Country, Strawberry Boy and A Field of Scarlet Poppies. In the 1980s two further novels The Upstairs People and Judasland were released by the Virago Press.

Awards and Distinctions
James Tait Black Memorial Prize (1961)
Cheltenham Festival Award (1962)

Bibliography
The Ha-Ha (1961)
The Cold Country (1965)
The Queen of Trent (1972)
Strawberry Boy (1976)
Hospital Wedding (1978).
A Field of Scarlet Poppies (1979)
The Upstairs People (1988)
Judasland (1989)

Barbara Strachey, broadcaster and writer: born 17 July 1912; married 1934 Olaf Hultin (one son; marriage dissolved 1937), 1937 Wolf Halpern (died 1943); died Oxford 15 October 1999



Barbara Strachey's Obituary
by Paul Levy
Published in the Independent in November 1999

IN OLD age Barbara Strachey could be alarming to meet. It was hard to tell when she was pleased, though she was capable of laughing at a good story - a slight frown was more common than a broad smile. It was not difficult to get her full attention, and you could see her concentrating behind her thick glasses, while she smoked one of her tiny cigars. Though she made a life-size doll of her uncle Lytton Strachey, which always occupied a chair or shared the sofa with her and a cat or two, she was fundamentally a serious person.

This trait she believed she had inherited from her mother's family, the Pearsall Smiths, immensely rich Philadelphia Quakers. Two generations earlier they had moved to England in 1899, settling in a big house in Surrey, to carry out their mission of revivalism and social reform. High up on the agenda was female emancipation, for, despite the fact that the most celebrated of their number was Barbara's uncle Logan Pearsall Smith (who published his collections of Trivia and who had employed both Kenneth Clark and Cyril Connolly as secretaries), the family was a strict matriarchy. Barbara once told me, "All the Pearsall Smith women were monsters, and I'm one too."

Her father, Oliver Strachey, one of Lytton's elder brothers, was an ace cryptographer during both world wars. Her mother, Ray, was his second wife. (The daughter of his first marriage, Barbara's half-sister, was the writer Julia Strachey.) As little girls, Ray Costelloe and her sister Karin (who married Virginia Woolf's brother, the analyst Adrian Stephen) were abandoned by their mother, Mary, who left her first husband and children to live with Bernard Berenson at Villa I Tatti, near Florence. Barbara was largely brought up by her aunt Alys Pearsall Smith, who never stopped loving the husband who had unceremoniously dumped her - Bertrand Russell.

Many of these famous friends and relations were painted by Ray, who took up painting as a hobby late in life. (Some of her Bloomsbury portraits are on view temporarily at the National Portrait Gallery.) When I first met Barbara, she was living in a large house in Kensington that had a long room, empty of furniture, with these pictures lining the walls.

She was then retiring from her job at the BBC, where she had been central to the metamorphosis of the General Overseas Service into the World Service in 1965. Barbara had had a great deal to do with making the fairly rudimentary foreign broadcasting service, which relied heavily on repeats of domestic broadcasts, into a 24-hour English broadcasting service. She was very good at the details of programming on different frequencies to audiences in different time zones.

Barbara Strachey was at school in Switzerland and was then sent to Oxford High School and to Vienna before Oxford, where she took a disappointing Third in history. In an attempt to end her youthful rebellion, her parents sent her on a windjammer journey to Australia. She rebelled even further, by marrying a fellow passenger, Olaf Hultin, the son of Professor Arvid Hultin of Helsingfors. They married in January 1934, had a son, Roger, in October and divorced three years later in 1937.

In September of that year she married Wolf Halpern, son of Dr George Halpern of Jerusalem. (Barbara was pleased to have enlarged her ethnic horizons. She was a keen amateur ethnographer, and boasted, after a stay in hospital where several of the nurses were of West African origin, that she could guess their national tribal affiliations with 100 per cent accuracy.) Halpern joined the RAF and died in action in 1943. Barbara used his name until she began her second career as an author.

Following the untimely death in 1975 of her brother Christopher, who was Oxford's first professor of computing, Barbara moved into a small house in Jericho. There she managed to pursue a passion for gardening in a truly tiny space at the back. The house had a lot of stairs. In a room in the basement were stacks of filing cupboards, which contained the 20,000 letters and manuscripts that had devolved upon her from her grandmother, aunts and mother, each of whom wrote a daily letter to the others. Eventually she lodged Alys's large correspondence (which included some self-incriminating letters from Russell about his relationship with G.E. Moore, about whom I was writing a book, and which she gleefully produced for me, as she disapproved of "Bertie") with the great Russell collection at McMaster University in Canada.

These papers contained most of the sources she needed to write her first book, Remarkable Relations (1980), the story of the Pearsall Smith family. She was a fine writer, and the material was superlative, resulting in a book that received much critical praise.

This gave her the confidence to seek a publisher for a project she had been working on for a very long time. Barbara's daily routine included polishing off the Times crossword in a very few minutes, and working on her maps of Frodo's journeys in Middle Earth. Though she had no training in cartography, she drew the maps herself for Journeys of Frodo (1981), an atlas of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, to which she was devoted. To Tolkien adepts she is one of the immortals.

Next she did a book that she particularly enjoyed, because it gave her a reason to visit I Tatti, Mary Berenson: a self-portrait from her letters and diaries (1983), which she edited with Jayne Samuels. Then in 1985 she did a partial history of the other half of her own family: The Strachey Line: an English family in America, in India and at home, 1570 to 1902.

Despite her forbidding demeanour, Barbara Strachey enjoyed entertaining, and was a meticulous hostess. I remember a lunch in Jericho with Lady Ottoline Morrell's daughter, Julian, and her husband Igor Vinogradoff. The food and, especially, the wine were good. Barbara was an unlikely bon vivant, but she used to relish her excursions with the Sunday Times Wine Club. She was a great traveller while her health allowed, even travelling overland to India by bus - and her house was filled with tribal art souvenirs of her journeys to distant places.

Even when she had lost some mobility, she was energetic. To mark her 80th birthday in 1992 she hired a boat and took her guests on the river around Oxford. Before she had to leave her house with its impossible stairs, she used to navigate Oxford in a 4mph electric cart. She loved going to the opera, and was proud of belonging to the Cranium Club, a dining club that numbers many descendants of the Bloomsbury group among its members.

Barbara Strachey was formidable rather than likeable, and it has to be admitted that she was a difficult woman. But she had the resources of character of both sides of her remarkable families. Though she inspired nervousness rather than tenderness, it was difficult not to feel a fondness for her.

REMARKABLE RELATIONS The Story of the Pearsall Smith Women. By Barbara Strachey

She sounds a fascinating woman, very independent. I will be looking for The Strachey Line.
Thank you Cate. This was very interesting.

I'll say. What a family and what a lady.

Rachel Ferguson (17 October 1893-1957) was born in Hampton Wick. The household soon moved to Kensington where Rachel was educated privately, before being sent to finishing school in Italy. On her return, she flaunted her traditional upbringing to become a vigorous campaigner for women’s rights and member of the WSPU.



Her interest in theatre developed, and in 1911 Rachel Ferguson became a student at the Academy of Dramatic Art. She graduated two years later and enjoyed a brief though varied career on the stage, cut short by the First World War. It was after service in the Women’s Volunteer Reserve that she began writing in earnest.

Working as a journalist at the same time as writing fiction, Rachel Ferguson started out as ‘Columbine’, drama critic on the Sunday Chronicle. False Goddesses, her first novel, was published in 1923, and two years later she moved to Punch, where her ‘Rachel’ column became immensely popular.

A second novel The Bröntes Went to Woolworths did not appear until 1931, but its wide acclaim confirmed Rachel Ferguson’s position in the public eye.

Over the next two decades she wrote extensively and published nine more novels: Popularity’s Wife (1931); The Stag at Bay (1932); A Child in the Theatre (1933); A Footman for the Peacock (1940); Evenfield (1942); A Stroll Before Sunset (1946) and Sea Front (1954). Her talent for depicting the domestic comedy of well-to-do late-Victorian families found its clearest expression in the satirical memories Passionate Kensington (1939) and Royal Borough (1950), both of which draw on her childhood experiences as a resident of that area.

Rachel Ferguson lived in Kensington until her death in 1957.

(Copied from Bloomsbury.com website)

Works

Novels and Short Story Collections
False Goddesses (1923)
The Brontës Went to Woolworths (1931) (Reprinted as a Virago Classic in 1988 and as part of 'The Bloomsbury Group' in 2009)
Victorian Bouquets: Lady X Looks On (1931)
The Stag at Bay (1932)
Nymphs and Satires: Humorous Sketches (1932)
Celebrated Sequels (1934)
A House in Lowndes Square (1936)
Alas, Poor Lady (1937) (Reprinted by Persephone Books in 2006)
Passionate Kensington (1939)
A Footman for the Peacock (1940)
Evenfield (1942)
A Stroll Before Sunset (1946)
The Royal Borough (1950)
Sea Front (1954)

Memoirs and Biographies
Memoirs of a Fir Tree: The Life of Elsa Tannenbaum (1946)
We Were Amused: Memoirs (1958)

Plays
Charlotte Brontë: A Play in Three Acts (1933)
The Late Widow Twankey (1943)
And Then He Danced the Ife of Espionosa by Himself (1946)

Flora Macdonald Mayor (20 October 1872, Kingston Hill, Surrey – 28 January 1932, Hampstead, London), was an English novelist and short story writer who published under the name F. M. Mayor.



Mayor's father, Joseph Bickersteth Mayor (1828–1916), was an Anglican clergyman and professor of classics and then of moral philosophy at King's College London; her mother, Alexandrina Jessie Grote (1830–1927), was niece of the utilitarian George Grote as well as the Anglican clergyman and Cambridge moral philosophy professor John Grote.

Flora Mayor read history at Newnham College, Cambridge, before becoming an actress. She later turned to writing. In 1903 she became engaged to a young architect, Ernest Shepherd, who died in India of typhoid before Mayor was able to travel out to join him. She never married, and lived closely with her twin sister Alice MacDonald Mayor (1872–1961).

Mayor's first book was a collection of stories, 'Mrs Hammond's Children', published in 1902 under the pseudonym Mary Strafford. Her short novel, The Third Miss Symons, was published in 1913 with a preface by John Masefield.

Her best-known novel is The Rector's Daughter (1924). In October 2009, this novel was identified in the BBC's 'Open Book' programme as one of the best 'neglected classics'.

She also wrote ghost stories, which were much admired by M.R. James. Correspondence and some literary papers are held at Trinity College, Cambridge.

Bibliography
The Rector's Daughter
The Third Miss Symons
The Squire's Daughter

Love the hat. Wish they would bring them back.

Isabelle Eberhardt (17 February 1877 – 21 October 1904) was a Swiss explorer and writer who lived and travelled extensively in North Africa. For the time she was an extremely liberated individual who rejected conventional European morality in favour of her own path and that of Islam. She died in a flash flood in the desert at the age of 27.



Eberhardt was born in Geneva, Switzerland, to an aristocratic Lutheran Baltic German Russian mother, Nathalie Moerder (née Eberhardt), and an Armenian-born father, Alexandre Trophimowsky, anarchist, ex-priest, and convert to Islam. Isabelle's mother had been married to elderly widower General Pavel de Moerder, who held important Imperial positions. After bearing him two sons and a daughter she traveled to Switzerland to convalesce, taking along her stepson and her own children, with their tutor Trophimowsky. Soon after arriving in Geneva she gave birth again, to Isabelle's brother Augustin and four months later came the news that her husband had died of a heart attack. She elected to remain in Switzerland and four years later, Isabelle was born and registered as her "illegitimate" daughter to avoid acknowledging the tutor's paternity. Isabelle's illegitimacy caused her emotional and financial troubles later in life, preventing her inheritance and contributing to her feelings of estrangement from her siblings, who hated her father.
Despite this, Isabelle was well educated, becoming fluent in Arabic and many other languages. From an early age she dressed as a man in order to enjoy the greater freedom this allowed her.

Her first trip to North Africa was with her mother in May, 1897. On this journey they were attempting to set up a new life there, and while doing so they both converted to Islam, fulfilling a long-standing interest. However, her mother died suddenly in Annaba and was buried there under the name of Fatma Mannoubia. Shortly after her mother's death, Isabelle took the side of local Muslims in violent fighting against colonial rule by the French.

Two years later Trophimowsky died of throat cancer in 1899 in Geneva, nursed by Isabelle. Following the suicide of her half-brother, Vladimir, and the marriage of Augustin to a French woman she had nothing in common with (she wrote: "Augustin is once and for all headed for life's beaten tracks"), Isabelle's ties to her former life were all but severed. From then on, as recorded in her journals, Isabelle Eberhardt spent most of the rest of her life in Africa, making northern Algeria her home and exploring the desert. She also spent some time in Tunisia.

Dressed as a man, calling herself Si Mahmoud Essadi, Eberhardt travelled in Arab society, with a freedom she could not otherwise have experienced. She had converted to Islam and regarded it as her true calling in life.
On her travels she made contact with a secret Sufi brotherhood, the Qadiriyya. They were heavily involved in helping the poor and needy while fighting against the injustices of colonial rule. At the beginning of 1901, in Behima, she was attacked by a man with a sabre, in an apparent attempt to assassinate her. Her arm was nearly severed, but she later forgave the man and (successfully) pleaded for his life to be spared. She married Slimane Ehnni, an Algerian soldier, on October 17, 1901, in Marseille.

On October 21, 1904, Eberhardt died in a flash flood in Aïn Séfra, Algeria. After a long separation, her husband had just joined her. She had rented a house for the occasion. This house, constructed of clay, collapsed on the couple during the flood; Eberhardt managed to save her husband but perished herself. Slimane Ehnni died in 1907.

Isabelle wrote on her travels in many books and French newspapers, including Nouvelles Algériennes ("Algerian Short Stories") (1905), Dans l'Ombre Chaude de l'Islam ("In the Hot Shade of Islam") (1906), and Les journaliers ("The Day Laborers") (1922). She started working as a war reporter in the South of Oran in 1903.

A novel, Vagabond, translated by Annette Kobak, and Departures: Selected Writings, translated by Karim Hamdy and Laura Rice are available in English. Eberhardt's journals, recovered from the flash flood which killed her and covering the last 4 years of her life, are also available in English ("The Nomad: The Diaries of Isabelle Eberhardt" Interlink Books, 2003).

In addition to these works, Paul Bowles has translated some of her work into English. The Oblivion Seekers (City Lights Publishing, 1975) consists of 13 different short pieces translated by Bowles for publication in 1972.

Eberhardt Press, a small Anarchist publishing house in Portland, Oregon, is named for her, and has published some of her writings in a 40 page collection.

In the 1990s Peter Owen Publishers in London brought out two of Eberhardt's travel memoirs, In the Shadow of Islam and Prison of Dunes, both translated by Sharon Bangert.

I continue to be awed by the women written about by Cate in this thread. Are there some of us still out there? I wonder..........

There are some of us IN HERE, Belva.

WOOT WOOT!~! I see you Linda!~!
EEEEEEEEEYYYYYYYYYYYYUUUUUUUUUUUPPPPPPPPPP!~!

Just a note to say The Passionate Nomad: The Diary of Isabelle Eberhardt is a Virago/Beacon Traveler. I found one after much searching, so they're out there! Haven't read it, of course. *sigh*

Me too! I'm here! This is one of my favourite threads, even though I don't often comment on it. But please know that I'm always reading it! ALWAYS!!

When I turn my computer on in the morning LT is the first place I sign into; Virago is the first group I go to & Cate's Remembrance Thread is the first thread I look at.
It is indeed a special place to be.

Ditto...snap...and other synonyms...

Ladies, ladies, ladies.....thank you all!

Beryl Markham (born Beryl Clutterbuck on this day in 1902 in Leicester, England 1902, wrote just one book in her life. Her 1942 memoir, West with the Night, a singular work that prompted the following letter from Ernest Hemingway to his editor that same year:
"... she has written so well, and marvelously well, that I was completely ashamed of myself as a writer. I felt that I was simply a carpenter with words, picking up whatever was furnished on the job and some times making an okay pig pen. But this girl who is, to my knowledge, very unpleasant ... can write rings around all of us who consider ourselves as writers. ... I wish you would get it and read it because it is really a bloody, wonderful book."

Hemingway, who typically savaged other writers rather than praising them, had known Markham from a safari he'd taken in Kenya, where she had grown up. Markham's family had moved to colonial East Africa when she was three. Markham learned to speak several African languages and how to hunt wild game with a spear, was once attacked by a friend's pet lion, and fought and killed a deadly black mamba snake.



Markham married a wealthy young Englishman named Mansfield Markham in 1927; the couple moved to England and Beryl gave birth to a son, but her marriage soon ended and she returned to Africa alone.

Back in Africa, Markham took her first plane ride with a friend who was a big-game hunter and a pilot, and it so thrilled her that she immediately decided she would learn to fly. Within months she'd earned her pilot's license, bought a plane, and began a career as a bush pilot, delivering supplies and passengers to remote areas, rescuing miners and hunters from the bush, finding elephants and game for wealthy hunters, and learning to land her plane in whatever forest clearing or field was at hand. After less than a year in the cockpit, Markham undertook a daring solo flight from Africa to England and from there determined she would complete a flight no one else had yet dared — a solo, nonstop transatlantic flight from London west to New York City, flying the entire way against the prevailing winds of the jet stream.

On the evening of September 4, 1936, Markham departed from London in a borrowed single-engine Vega Gull capable of flying up to 163 miles per hour and fitted with enough extra fuel tanks to go almost 4,000 miles without stopping. Two hours later she was seen passing Ireland, then spied by a ship at sea, and then spotted the following day over the tip of Newfoundland. And then she disappeared.

Markham's flight had almost ended earlier, in the Atlantic, when a fuel line froze in the high, thin, cold air, causing the engine to fail and the Vega to nosedive toward the ocean. Just above the water, the line warmed enough to allow gas through and Markham was able to pull her plane back to safety. The same thing happened again just off the edge of Nova Scotia, but this time Markham crash landed nose-first into a peat bog. With her plane now stuck in the mud, she climbed out and hailed a couple of fisherman, calling out, "I'm Mrs. Markham. I've just flown from England."

Markham was certain her flight would be considered a failure — she'd meant to land in New York, after all — but she was picked up by a U.S. Coast Guard plane, which she copiloted back to the city, and was driven in a motorcade through New York City in a flurry of confetti and ticker tape. She returned to England a celebrity and did not take up flying again.

Beryl Markham was many things, although she does not appear to have considered herself a writer, wondering at the beginning of West with the Night, "How is it possible to bring order out of memory? I should like to begin at the beginning, patiently, like a weaver at his loom. I should like to say, 'This is the place to start; there can be no other.'

"But there are a hundred places to start for there are a hundred names — Mwanza, Serengetti, Nungwe, Molo, Nakur. There are easily a hundred names, and I can begin best by choosing one of them — not because it is first nor of any importance in a wildly adventurous sense, but because here it happens to be, turned uppermost in my logbook. After all, I am no weaver. Weavers create. This is remembrance."

Copied from The Writer's Almanac

Cate, I found myself confused: so she didn't disappear like Amelia into the ocean off Newfoundland/Labrador but made it to Nova Scotia?

You're right, Tui, she did survive by landing in Nova Scotia. The excerpt reads a little strangely, doesn't it!

#137. West With the Night was a marvelous book. You would love it.

Charlotte Turner Smith (4 May 1749 – 28 October 1806) was an English Romantic poet and novelist. She initiated a revival of the English sonnet, helped establish the conventions of Gothic fiction, and wrote political novels of sensibility.



Selected works

Poetry
Elegiac Sonnets (1784)
The Emigrants (1793)
Beachy Head and Other Poems (1807)

Novels
Emmeline; or The Orphan of the Castle (1788)
Ethelinde; or the Recluse of the Lake (1789)
Celestina (1791)
Desmond (1792)
The Old Manor House (1793)
The Wanderings of Warwick (1794)
The Banished Man (1794)
Montalbert (1795)
Marchmont (1796)
The Young Philosopher (1798)

Educational works
Rural Walks (1795)
Rambles Farther (1796)
Minor Morals (1798)
Conversations Introducing Poetry (1800)
Letters Of A Solitary Wanderer (1801–02)

Janet Flanner (March 13, 1882 – November 7, 1978) was an American writer and journalist who served as the Paris correspondent of The New Yorker magazine from 1925 until she retired in 1975. She wrote under the pen name Genet. She also published a single novel, The Cubical City, set in New York City.



Early life
Janet Flanner was born in Indianapolis, Indiana to Frank and Mary Flanner. She had two sisters, Marie and Hildegarde Flanner. Her father co-owned a mortuary and ran the first crematorium in the state of Indiana. After a period spent traveling abroad with her family and studies at Tudor Hall School for Girls (now Park Tudor School), she enrolled in the University of Chicago in 1912, leaving the university in 1914. Two years later, she returned to her native city to take up a post as the first cinema critic on the local paper, the Indianapolis Star.

In 1918 she married William "Lane" Rehm, a friend that she had made while at the University of Chicago. He was an artist in New York City, and she later admitted that she married him to get out of Indianapolis. The marriage lasted for only a few years and they divorced amicably in 1926. Rehm was supportive of Flanner's career until his death.

Flanner was bisexual. In 1918, the same year she married her husband, she met Solita Solano (Sarah Wilkinson). They met in Greenwich Village, and the two became lifelong lovers, although both became involved with other lovers throughout their relationship. Solita Solano was drama editor for the New York Tribune and also wrote for National Geographic. The two women are portrayed as "Nip" and "Tuck" in the 1928 novel Ladies Almanack, by Djuna Barnes, who was a friend of Flanner's. While in New York, Janet Flanner moved in the circle of the Algonquin Round Table, but was not a member. She also met the couple Jane Grant and Harold Ross through painter Neysa McMein. It was this connection that Harold Ross offered her the position of French Correspondent to the New Yorker. After periods in Pennsylvania and New York, in her mid twenties, Flanner left the United States for Paris.

Paris
In September 1925 Flanner published her first "Letter from Paris" in The New Yorker, launched the previous February, starting a professional association that lasted for five decades. She wrote under the pen-name "Genêt". Flanner had first came to the attention of editor Harold Ross through his first wife, Jane Grant, who was a friend of Flanner's from the Lucy Stone League, an organization that fought for women to preserve their maiden names after marriage, in the manner of Lucy Stone. Flanner joined the group in 1921. Ross famously thought "Genêt" was French for "Janet".

Flanner was a prominent member of the American expatriate community which included Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos, e. e. cummings, Hart Crane, Djuna Barnes, Ezra Pound, and Gertrude Stein - the world of the Lost Generation and Les Deux Magots.

While in Paris she became very close friends with Gertrude Stein and her lover, Alice B. Toklas. In 1932 she fell in love with Noel Haskins Murphy, a singer from a village just outside Paris, and had a short-lived romance. This did not affect her relationship with Solano.

She played a crucial role in introducing her contemporaries - or at least those who read the New Yorker - to new artists in Paris, including Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Henri Matisse, André Gide, Jean Cocteau, and the Ballets Russes, as well as crime passionel and vernissage, the triumphant crossing of the Atlantic Ocean by Charles Lindbergh and the depravities of the Stavisky Affair.

Her prose style has since come to epitomise the "New Yorker style" - its influence can be seen decades later in the prose of Bruce Chatwin. An example: "The late Jean De Koven was an average American tourist in Paris but for two exceptions: she never set foot in the Opéra, and she was murdered."

She was a frequent visitor to Los Angeles because her mother, Mary, lived at 530 E. Marigold St. in Altadena with her sister, poet Hildegarde Flanner, and brother-in-law, Frederick Monhoff.

Later Life
She lived in New York City during World War II with Natalia Danesi Murray and her son William B. Murray, still writing for The New Yorker. She returned to Paris in 1944.

Her New Yorker work during World War II included not only her famous "Letter from Paris" columns, but also included a seminal 3-part series profiling Hitler (1936), and coverage of the Nuremberg trials (1945). Additionally, she contributed a series of little-known weekly radio broadcasts for the NBC Blue Network during the months following the liberation of Paris in late 1944.

In 1948 she was made a knight of Legion d'Honneur. In 1958 she was awarded an honorary doctorate by Smith College. She covered the Suez crisis, the Soviet invasion of Hungary, and the strife in Algeria which led to the rise of Charles de Gaulle. She was a leading member of the influential coterie of mostly lesbian women that included Natalie Clifford Barney and Djuna Barnes. Flanner lived in Paris with Solano, who put away her own literary aspirations to be Flanner's personal secretary. Even though the relationship was not monogamous, they lived together for over 50 years.

Extracts of her Paris journal were turned into a piece for chorus and orchestra by composer Ned Rorem.
In 1971, she was the third guest during the infamous scuffle between Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer on the Dick Cavett Show, getting in between the two after a drunken Mailer started insulting his fellow guests and their host.

Four years later, she returned to New York City permanently to be cared for by Natalia Danesi Murray. Flanner died on November 7, 1978 due to unknown causes.

Flanner was cremated and her ashes were scattered with Murray's over Cherry Grove in Fire Island where they met in 1940 according to Murray's son in his book Janet, My Mother, and Me.

Bibliography
The Cubical City
Paris Was Yesterday 1925 - 1939, edited by Irving Drutman

Women Come to the Front: Journalists, Photographers and Broadcasters during World War II

Please keep up this thread. I just hooked up with it today. I have been working my way through the VMC reading list very slowly. I also have been compiling bios of as many of the authors as I am able to find. I've relied on Wikipedia but you're provided me with some new ones and I especially love the photos. I hope that you'll continue this wonderful task as I look forward to many more of the bios. They're absolutely wonderful.

>142 kayclifton:: Kay (may I call you Kay?), our dear Cate (bleuroses) has been performing this labor of love since last year. This is actually the 6th remembrance thread. If you visit the VMC Group Wiki you'll find links to all the previous threads. It's a treasure trove!

It is indeed, and we're very happy to have you with us, Kay! (If Laura can call you so, I can too!)

Hi Kay!

Kay, where have you been girl? We have been looking all over for you to come and join in and party with the rest of us.
Our Cate (bleuroses) is the best and we all love this thread that she lovingly produces for us.
Welcome. :-)

Valentine Ackland (20 May 1906 – 9 November 1969) was an English poet, an important figure in the emergence of modernism in twentieth-century British poetry.



Born Mary Kathleen Valentine Ackland and nicknamed Molly by her family, Ackland was the child of privilege and of emotional abuse and neglect. With no sons born to the family, Valentine’s father Robert, a West End London dentist, worked at making a symbolic son of Molly, teaching her to shoot rifles and to box. This attention to Molly made her sister Joan immensely jealous. Older by eight years, Joan psychologically tormented and physically abused Molly as a way of unleashing her jealousy and anger.

Molly received an Anglo-Catholic upbringing in Norfolk and a convent school education in London. In 1925 at the age of nineteen, she impetuously married Richard Turpin, a homosexual youth who was unable to consummate their marriage. Upon her marriage, she was also received into the Catholic church, a religion that she later abandoned, returned to, and then abandoned again in the last decade of her life. In less than a year, she had her marriage to Turpin annulled, and, despite numerous pleas from her family and much psychological pressure from them, never returned to a serious relationship with a man again.

Alert to social mores of her day, she became aware of societal patterns of male privilege and female submission set about challenging the female gender identifications expected of her. She took to wearing men’s clothing, cut her hair in a short style called the Eton crop, and was at times mistaken for a handsome young boy. She changed her name to the androgynous Valentine Ackland when she decided to become a serious poet in the late 1920s. Her poetry appeared in British and American literary journals during the 1920s to the 1940s, but Valentine deeply regretted that she never became a noted and widely read poet. In this regard, a good deal of her poetry was published posthumously, and she received little attention from critics until a revival of interest in her work in the 1970s.

In 1930, Valentine was introduced to the short story writer and novelist Sylvia Townsend Warner with whom she had a lifelong relationship, albeit tumultuous at times given Valentine’s increasing alcoholism and infidelities. Sylvia was twelve years older than Valentine, and the two lived together until Valentine’s death from breast cancer in 1969. Warner went on to outlive Ackland by nine years, dying in 1978. The pair were together for thirty-nine years. Valentine’s reflections upon her relationship with Sylvia and the latter's long affair with the American heiress and writer Elizabeth Wade White (1908–1994) were posthumously published in “For Sylvia: An Honest Account” (1985).

Valentine was a highly emotional woman prone to numerous self-doubts and shifts in emotions and intellectual interests. She was responsible for involving Sylvia in membership in the Communist Party in the 1930s and in the Spanish civil war as well as numerous socialist and pacifist activities. The two women’s involvement in the Communist Party came under investigation by the British government in the late 1930s and remained an open file until 1957, when the investigation was halted.

After World War II, Valentine turned her attention to confessional poetry and a memoir concerning her relationship with Warner and its many emotional issues as Valentine pursued involvements with other women. At first, Warner was tolerant with her younger lover’s dalliances, but the seriousness and length of Ackland’s relationship with Elizabeth Wade White was distressing to Warner and also pushed her relationship with Ackland to the edge. Ackland’s distresses at loving two women simultaneously and of endeavoring to balance her feelings for each woman with the responsibilities and commitments of her primary relationship with Warner are presented openly in Ackland’s poetry and in her memoir of this period.

Ackland was struggling with additional doubts and conflicts during this period as well. She continued to battle her alcoholism, and she was undergoing shifts in her political and religious alliances. Doubts about her sexual identity and her identity as a poet as well as about her Christian faith and her political convictions are evident in her poetry.

In 1934, Ackland and Warner produced a volume of poetry, “Whether a Dove or a Seagull” that was an unusual and democratic experiment in writing as none of the poems are ascribed to either author. The volume was also an attempt by Warner to introduce Ackland to publication as Warner had an already established reputation as a novelist, and her work was widely read in the 1930s. The volume was controversial for its frank discussion of lesbianism at a time and in a society in which lesbianism was regarded as deviant and immoral behaviour.

In 1937, Ackland and Warner moved from Dorset to a house near Dorchester. Both became involved with Communist ideals and issues, with Ackland writing a column called “Country Dealings” concerning rural poverty for the “Daily Worker” and the “Left Review.” In 1939, the two women attended the American Writers Congress in New York City to consider the loss of democracy in Europe and returned when World War II broke out. Ackland’s poetry of this period attempted to capture the political dynamics she saw at work, but she had a difficult time as a poetry mastering the craft of combining political polemics with her natural tendency toward lyrical expression. In a similar vein, her distress over the loss of democracy in Europe became a broader identification with Existentialism and the sense that the human condition itself was hopeless.

Ackland died on 9 November 1969 from breast cancer that had metastasised to her lungs. She was buried in a churchyard at Chaldon Herring with the inscription Non omnis moriar ("Death is not the end") on her gravestone.

Critical assessment
Ackland’s poetry—largely neglected after the 1940s—came into a resurgence of interest with the emergence of both women’s studies and of lesbian literature. Contemporary critical reaction finds much to value in Ackland’s poetry and confessional writings, which are of historical interest to the development of self-reflective, modernist poetry, and to the political and cultural issues of the 1930s and 1940s. One example of a recent critical analysis is Wendy Milford’s 1988 study, “This Narrow Place: Sylvia Townsend Warner and Valentine Ackland." With regard to her self-reflection as a poet, Ackland exhibits themes and explorations similar to poets like Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. Of interest, too, is Ackland explorations of terminal illness as her life was drawing to a close from cancer. In her later years, Ackland turned from Catholicism to Quaker beliefs and also to involvement with issues of environmentalism.

In overall assessment, Milford considers the two-minds at work in Ackland’s work. She cites as examples Ackland’s focus on optimism and dread, the longing for emotional closeness and the fear of intimacy, self-assertion and self-negation, the search for privacy and solitude amidst the longing for connection and social acceptance as a lesbian and as a noteworthy poet. In this regard, Ackland shares much thematically—though not in artistic achievement—with metaphysical poets like John Donne and Philip Larkin in the effort to see personal experience from multiple perspectives and never fully resting with one perspective or another.

A contemporary examination of Ackland’s poetry and essays was published by Carcanet Press in 2008 titled “Journey from Winter: Selected Poems.” The volume is edited by Francis Bingham, who also provides a contextual and critical introduction.

Bibliography
Whether a Dove or a Seagull (1934) volume of poetry with Sylvia Townsend Warner
Twenty-Eight Poems (1957) privately printed in London
Later Poems by Valentine Ackland (1970)
The Nature of the Moment (1973)
Further Poems of Valentine Ackland (1978)
For Sylvia: An Honest Account (1985) a memoir of Ackland's relationship with Sylvia Townsend Warner
This Narrow Place: Sylvia Townsend Warner and Valentine Ackland 1931-1951, by Wendy Mulford (1988)
Jealousy in Connecticut, by Susanna Pinney (1998)

Dorothy Canfield Fisher (February 17, 1879 – November 9, 1958) was an educational reformer, social activist, and best-selling American author in the early decades of the twentieth century. She was named by Eleanor Roosevelt as one of the ten most influential women in the United States.



Dorothy Canfield worked with Maria Montessori when in Rome in 1911-12, wrote A Montessori Mother (1912) and brought the Montessori method of child-rearing to the United States. She wrote Why Stop Learning? (1927) and presided over the country's first adult education program, and shaped literary tastes by serving as a member of the Book of the Month Club selection committee from 1925 to 1951.

Her best-known work today is probably Understood Betsy, a children's book about a little orphaned girl who is sent to live with her cousins in Vermont. Though the book can be read purely for pleasure, it also describes a schoolhouse which is run much in the style of the Montessori method, for which Canfield was one of the first and most vocal advocates.

Dorothy Canfield also wrote The Bent Twig (1915), Home Fires in France (1918), The Day of Glory (1919), The Brimming Cup (1921) and The Home-Maker (1924), which was reprinted by Persephone Books in 1999. Later novels are Her Son's Wife (1926), The Deepening Stream (1930), Seasoned Timber (1939). A collection of 17 of her stories was Four Square (1949).

A quote by Dorothy Canfield Fisher in the Vermont State House's Hall of Inscriptions discusses her adopted state of Vermont's motto, "Freedom and Unity" – the relationship of individual freedom as balanced with the needs of the community.

Dorothea Frances Canfield, as she was named at birth, was born in Lawrence, Kansas, on February 17, 1879. Her father was James Hulme Canfield, a college professor at the University of Kansas and the University of Nebraska, and president of Ohio State University; her mother, Flavia Camp, was an artist and writer. However, Canfield is most closely associated with Vermont, where she spent her adult life, and which served as the setting for many of her books.

In 1899 Dorothy Canfield received a B.A. from Ohio State University. She was also a member of Kappa Kappa Gamma. Canfield went on to study Romance languages at Columbia University and in 1904 received a doctoral degree there; Corneille and Racine in English (1904). With G. R. Carpenter from Columbia she co-wrote English Rhetoric and Composition (1906). She was the first woman to receive an honorary degree from Dartmouth College, and also received honorary degrees from the University of Nebraska, Middlebury, Swarthmore, Smith, Williams, Ohio State University, and the University of Vermont. She spoke five languages fluently, and in addition to writing novels, short stories, memoirs, and educational works, she forayed into literary criticism and translation.

Dorothy Canfield Fisher's son, Battalion Surgeon Captain James Fisher, with his comrades during World War II, shortly before he was killed in the Philippines

In 1907 she married John Redwood Fisher, and together they had two children, a son and a daughter. Another concern of Dorothy Canfield was her war work. She followed her husband to France in 1916 during World War I, and worked with blinded soldiers. She also established a convalescent home for refugee French children from the invaded areas. William Lyon Phelps comments, "All her novels are autobiographical, being written exclusively out of her own experience and observation."

Her son James became a surgeon and captain in the U.S. Army during World War II. He served with the Alamo Scouts for three months at the end of 1944, following which he was attached to a Ranger unit which carried out the raid to free POWs imprisoned at Cabanatuan in the Philippines. The raid was a great success, with the Rangers suffering only two fatalities. Captain Fisher was one, mortally wounded by a mortar shell. As he lay dying the next day, his last words were "Did we get them all out?"

Fisher died at the age of 79, in Arlington, Vermont, in 1958.

The Dorothy Canfield Fisher Children's Book Award, named after her, is a unique award for new American children's books, as the winner is chosen by the vote of child readers.

A dormitory at Goddard College in Plainfield, Vermont, is named for Fisher.

#142 - Thank you for your kinds comments Kay. With January 2012 marking the beginning of the 3rd year for this thread, rest assured I have all intentions of continuing! Given the nature and the duration of this venture, there are and will be, duplicate posts; however, the internet is always updating itself and there are always new readers/Virago Group members!!

Margaret Rumer Godden OBE (10 December 1907 – 8 November 1998) was an English author of over 60 fiction and nonfiction books written under the name of Rumer Godden. A few of her works were co-written by her sister, Jon Godden, who wrote several novels on her own. These include Two Under the Indian Sun, a memoir of the Goddens' childhood in a region of India that is now part of Bangladesh.



Godden was born in Sussex, England. She grew up with her three sisters in Narayanganj, colonial India (now in Bangladesh). She returned to the United Kingdom with her sisters for schooling in 1920, spending time at Moira House Girls School eventually training as a dance teacher. She went back to Calcutta in 1925 to start a dance school for English and Indian children. Godden ran the school for 20 years with the help of her sister Nancy. During this time she published her first best-seller, the 1939 novel, Black Narcissus.



After eight years in an unhappy marriage, in 1942 she moved with her two daughters to Kashmir, living first on a houseboat, and then in a rented house where she started a herb farm. After a mysterious incident in which it appeared that an attempt had been made to poison both her and her daughters she returned to Calcutta in 1944; the novel Kingfishers Catch Fire was based on her time in Kashmir. She remarried in 1949 and returned to the United Kingdom to concentrate on her writing, moving house frequently but living mostly in Sussex and London.

In the early 1950s, Godden became interested in Roman Catholicism, though she did not officially convert until 1968, and several of her later novels contain sympathetic portrayals of Roman Catholic priests and nuns. Two of her books deal with the subject of women in religious communities. In Five for Sorrow, Ten for Joy and In This House of Brede she acutely examined the balance between the mystical, spiritual aspects of religion and the practical, human realities of religious life.

A number of Godden's novels are set in India, the atmosphere of which she evokes through all the senses; her writing is vivid with detail of smells, textures, light, flowers, noises and tactile experiences. Her books for children, especially her several doll stories, strongly convey the secret thoughts, confusions and disappointments, and aspirations of childhood. Godden has been criticized for her class distinctions, which often involve unusual young people not recognized for their talents by ordinary lower or middle-class people but supported by the educated, rich, and upper-class, to the anger, resentment, and puzzlement of their relatives.

In 1968 she took the tenancy of Lamb House where she lived until the death of her husband in 1973. She moved to Moniaive in Dumfriesshire in 1978 when she was 70. She was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 1993. She visited India once more, in 1994, returning to Kashmir for the filming of a BBC Bookmark documentary about her life and books.

Rumer Godden died at the age of 90 on 8 November 1998.

Books for Adults
Fiction
1936 Chinese Puzzle, her first published book-length work.
1937 The Lady and the Unicorn
1939 Black Narcissus, a story about the disorientation of European nuns in India; the first of her books to be adapted for the screen, as the film of the same name in 1947; a radio adaptation was also broadcast in 2008.
1940 Gypsy, Gypsy
1942 Breakfast with the Nikolides
1945 Take Three Tenses: A Fugue in Time, made into the film Enchantment in 1948, starring David Niven and Teresa Wright
1946 The River, made into a film in 1951 directed by Jean Renoir, and she collaborated on the screenplay for the film
1947 A Candle for St. Jude
1950 A Breath of Air
1953 Kingfishers Catch Fire
1956 An Episode of Sparrows, made into the film Innocent Sinners in 1958
1957 Mooltiki, and other stories and poems of India
1958 The Greengage Summer, again made into a film in 1961



1961 China Court: The Hours of a Country House
1963 The Battle of the Villa Fiorita filmed in 1965
1968 Gone: A Thread of Stories (written with Jon Godden)
1968 Swans and Turtles (short stories)
1969 In This House of Brede, follows Philippa (a cloistered Benedictine nun in the abbey of Brede in Sussex) through her first years in the abbey and not only her, but many of the other nuns who live there as well; made into a television film starring Diana Rigg
1975 The Peacock Spring, adapted for television in 1995
1979 Five For Sorrow, Ten For Joy
1981 The Dark Horse
1984 Thursday's Children
1989 Indian Dust (written with Jon Godden)
1990 Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love: Stories (written with Jon Godden)
1991 Coromandel Sea Change
1994 Pippa Passes
1997 Cromartie vs. the God Shiva, her last novel

Non-fiction
1943 Rungli-Rungliot – republished in 1961 as Thus Far and No Further
1955 Hans Christian Andersen (biography)
1966 Two Under the Indian Sun (childhood memories – written with Jon Godden)
1968 Mrs. Manders' Cook Book
1971 The Tale of the Tales: Beatrix Potter Ballet
1972 Shiva's Pigeons (written with Jon Godden)
1977 The Butterfly Lions
1980 Gulbadan: Portrait of a Rose Princess At the Mughal Court
1987 A Time to Dance, No Time to Weep, an autobiography
1989 A House with Four Rooms, an autobiography

Complete Bibliography

Romer Godden Obituary, Telegraph

A House With Four Rooms

>148 bleuroses:: I lived in Lawrence KS for a year and had no idea that Dorothy Canfield Fisher was born there. Understood Betsy wasn't even mentioned on the Kiddie Lit course I took! I am always learning things from this thread!

Love that photo of Canfield! Don't you also love the covers on the Rumer Goddens!

Understood Betsy was one of my favorite books as a kid -- I think I must go back and take a look at it.

I, too, loved Understood Betsy as a child! That is what led me to pick up my first "adult" Canfield when I stumbled across a copy of Four-Square many years ago.

Thanks, Cate, for that wonderful bio of one of my favorite authors! And welcome to the group, Kay!

Dorothy Canfield Fisher was a lovely girl. Check out those eyes. Riveting!

Valentine Ackland and I share the same date of birth (not the year, though). Must see if I can find Understood Betsy too....vaguely remember it.

Can someone explain the title to me? I remember hearing of Understood Betsy in the past, and wondering what it meant.

I think if you read the first few reviews on the book's main page, you'll have a good idea of the title's meaning -- shy, timid orphan girl becomes confident and self-reliant when she moves from the care of fussy great aunts to sturdy cousins -- a bit like Alcott's Eight Cousins and Rose in Bloom

That sounds so good; much check the library or Abe's books.

I just finished reading Fisher's "The Bent Twig". It's not a VMC but I had heard the title at some time in the past. It was a so-so read but that's not stopping me from wanting to read some of her other works. She spent most of her life in VT and I come from New England. I found a review of one of her works in the archives of the Boston Globe and it was fascinating reading. I've been doing research in the New York Times archives also to read reviews from the publication times of the books that I read. They're also so much fun. Some of the old fashioned language that they use for the women is interesting for helping to understand how they (the women) were viewed in their time period.

Janette Turner Hospital was born on 12, November 1942, and grew up on the steamy sub-tropical coast of Australia in the north-eastern state of Queensland. She began her teaching career in remote Queensland high schools, but since her graduate studies she has taught in universities in Australia, Canada, England, France and the United States.



Her first published short story appeared in the Atlantic Monthly (USA) where it won an 'Atlantic First' citation in 1978. Her first novel, The Ivory Swing (set in the village in South India where she lived in l977) won Canada's $50,000 Seal Award in l982. She lived for many years in Canada and in 1986 she was listed as by the Toronto Globe & Mail as one of Canada's 'Ten Best Young Fiction Writers'. Since then she has won a number of prizes for her eight novels and four short story collections and her work has been published in multiple foreign language collections. Three of her short stories appeared in Britain's annual Best Short Stories in English in their year of publication and one of these, 'Unperformed Experiments Have No Results', was selected for The Best of the Best, an anthology of the decade in l995.

The Last Magician, her fifth novel, was listed by Publishers' Weekly as one of the 12 best novels published in 1992 in the USA and was a New York Times 'Notable Book of the Year'. Oyster, her sixth novel, was a finalist for Australia's Miles Franklin Prize Award and for Canada's Trillium Award, and in England it was listed in 'Best Books of the Year' by The Observer, which noted "Oyster is a tour de force… Turner Hospital is one of the best female novelists writing in English." In the USA, Oyster was a New York Times 'Notable Book of the Year'.

Due Preparations for the Plague won the Queensland Premier's Literary Award in 2003, the Davitt Award from Sisters in Crime for "best crime novel of the year by an Australian woman”, and was shortlisted for the Christina Stead Award. In 2003, Hospital received the Patrick White Award, as well as a Doctor of Letters honoris causa from the University of Queensland.

Orpheus Lost, her most recent novel, was one of five finalists for the $110,000 Australia-Asia Literary prize in 2008. Orpheus Lost was also on Booklist's Top 30 novels of the year in 2008, along with novels by Booker Prize winner Anne Enright, National Book Award winner Denis Johnson, Philip Roth, Don DeLillo, Michael Ondaatje, Ian MacEwan, Ha Jin, and Michael Chabon. The novel also made the list of Best 25 Books of the Year of Library Journal, and Hospital was invited to be a keynote speaker at the annual convention of the American Library Association in Los Angeles in June 2008. The Italian edition, Orfeo Perduto, has been so well-received in Italy that it will be a featured title at the literary festival on Lake Maggiore in June 2010 where Hospital will be a featured author.

She holds an endowed chair as Carolina Distinguished Professor of English at the University of South Carolina and in 2003 received the Russell Research Award for Humanities and Social Sciences, conferred by the university for the most significant faculty contribution (research, publication, teaching and service) in a given year.

(Biography copied from her official website)

The Ivory Swing (novel) (1982),
The Tiger in the Tiger Pit (novel) (1983),
Borderline (novel) (1985),
Dislocations (short stories) (1986),
Charades (novel) (1988),
Isobars (short stories) (1990),
A Very Proper Death, as Alex Juniper (novel) (1990),
The Last Magician (novel) (1992),
Oyster (novel) (1996)
Collected Stories (short stories) (1995),
Due Preparations for the Plague (novel) (2003),
North of Nowhere, South of Loss (short stories) (2003),
Orpheus Lost (novel) (2007)8

Regarding her works, does anyone happen to know if the titles: Charades and Borderline are one and the same?

162: They're listed here and elsewhere with separate publication dates, I can't find a description of Borderline though I own it. Charades is linked stories, apparently. I don't think so. I'm more intrigued that the Alex Juniper book, which I have, is her under a pseudonym.

Belva, from the book descriptions on her website, Charades and Borderline are two separate books.

Her Story

Margaret Wise Brown wrote hundreds of books and stories before she died in 1952 at the age of 42. Before she began writing books for children, fairytales and fables dominated the world of illustrated stories. But Margaret, or Brownie, as her friends often called her, created stories about the lives of children. Hundreds of stories and poems poured out of her. She said she dreamed stories and then had to write them down in the morning before she forgot them.

She wrote with the then "new" idea that children would rather read about their own lives instead of fairytales and fables. This approach, dubbed the "here and now" philosophy, was created and tested at the Bank Street Experimental School in New York City. There, under Lucy Sprague Mitchell's tutelage, Margaret encouraged children to swap stories with her. In that special writing laboratory, she communicated with children about what they wanted to read and the problems they faced.

She often brought illustrators into kindergarten classes to draw in front of the young, but discerning audience. She got a feel for the accuracy small minds require and the creative eyes within these small bodies, and began to write stories with this first-hand knowledge at the center of her work. Mrs. Mitchell credited Margaret with giving the "here and now" philosophy artistic wings.

Within a few short years dozens of Margaret Wise Brown books reached bookstore shelves, with dozens more in the publishing pipeline. Brownie said the stories wouldn't stop flowing. She woke up with a "head full of stories" and by the time she could scribble the stories down more ideas would pour in. She kept six publishers busy with her prolific output and created pen names to keep from flooding the market with Margaret Wise Brown titles. Golden MacDonald, Juniper Sage, Kaintuck Brown and Timothy Hay were among the nom de plumes she used.

The stunning green-eyed blonde who penned the future of children's literature was as fascinating a character as any pajama-clad talking bunny she created on paper. Even now, over forty years after her sudden and unexpected death, those who comprised her inner circle still speak of her enormous creative powers as true genius. She attributed her success to being able to reach down into the soul of the child that still lived within her and bring it to life. Considering the meagerness of words required by children's writing, Margaret's ability to express these childhood issues in beautiful and touching, but sparse verse was rare.

She fought for proper author and illustrator royalties at a time when the industry was establishing payment practices. She insisted her artists receive the same royalty as she did, although they had previously only received a flat payment. Her negotiations with her publishers were often sprinkled with her personal outrage at how the business treated their creative talent. In the midst of one dispute, Margaret teasingly threatened to shoot a publisher with "her bow and arrow" if she saw him walking down the street. Her relationships with her editors were less antagonistic, but still openly critical if they didn't see eye to eye on the development of a story.

She lived extravagantly off of her royalties, including buying a street vendor's entire cart of flowers with her first royalty check. After having them delivered to her Upper East Side apartment, she threw a party for her friends to enjoy her purchase. She would, at times, sell a story to buy a coat, car or airplane ticket to Europe. She was rarely seen without one of her dogs in tow. Standard poodles and Kerry blue terriers were her canine of choice and in some stories became the central characters.



To encourage one of her deadline-dismissive illustrators to finish a book that featured Kerry blues, she bought two puppies to be his models. The illustrator dutifully locked himself and the pups away at Margaret's writing retreat in Maine and began to paint. After an exhaustive day of painting the needed pictures for the book, the illustrator collapsed in a deep sleep. The next morning he woke to find all of the paintings he had just completed were bare. The dogs had licked the pages clean.

Her social circle included the famous and royalty. She dated the then Prince of Spain, Juan Carlos, and was friends with John Barrymore and his one of wives, Michael Strange. She was reputed to have had a long term affair with a prominent New York attorney and with Michael Strang. Her Vinylhaven, Maine retreat was purchased to be near the attorney, but it became legendary because of Margaret's touches of hospitality and humor.

Since there was no electricity on the property, her well served as a refrigerator. Butter, milk and other perishables could be had simply by pulling up the appropriately labeled rope. She stored wine in the streams, strategically placing bottles to refresh her guests on hikes around the property. She paid a local fisherman to keep her lobster traps full, thereby impressing her visitors with the ease at which dinner could be had. She called this retreat The Only House. From one of the rooms you could see the sea at any angle, since she hung mirrors around all of the walls to reflect the sparkling sea that lay just beyond a flower-filled meadow.
The Only House wasn't her only writing refuge. When walking around the streets of New York, Margaret came upon a tiny four-room house, nestled between skyscrapers and warehouses. She promptly rented the home and christened it Cobble Court, giving homage to the stone entryway. Since this retreat also had no utilities, she draped the floors, furniture and walls with fur and kept fires burning in the winter. She often welcomed guests to this cozy den and supplied a servant with the accommodations who kept the brass brightly polished and food within arm's reach.

Her life as a children's best-selling author was featured in an amusing Life magazine article, which captured the whimsical side of Brownie. Her penchant for practical jokes included tying cherries or lemons to a potted tree to fool city folk into thinking she had a unusually skillful green thumb. Her circle of friends started The Bird Brain Society. Any member, upon inspiration, could declare a day to be Christmas, and all the members would gather to celebrate.

Even though Margaret wrote so prolifically and beautifully for children, she never had any children of her own. One illustrator claimed she liked children in theory, but in person it was a different story. This was only partly true, since there were individual children she enjoyed. One such child often visited her and exchanged his thoughts on her works. He was named in her will to receive royalties on many of her works, including Runaway Bunny and Goodnight Moon.

The author who created tale after tale of soft, cuddly bunnies, kittens and puppies was also the national champion of beagaling. Popular in England and on Long Island during that time, beagaling was a sport of the fleet footed, requiring the winner to be the first runner to reach the prey behind the hunting dogs. Most often, this was a rabbit, and Margaret's trophies of the hunt included the trophy feet of many prey.
Margaret had a difficult relationship with her mother and father. Her parents divorced when she was very young, and her relationship with her father was strained until the time of her death. Margaret and her sister, Roberta, were close, but competitive. Margaret confided her fear of dying to Roberta when she was stricken with appendicitis while on a book publicity tour in France. She wrote about how afraid she had been during this brush with death. Ironically, only two days after writing the letter Margaret died of an embolism after kicking up her leg can-can style to show the doctor how good she was feeling.

Her sudden death at the age of 42 took the publishing world by surprise. The energetic, robust and unforgettable woman who breezed into their offices with ice cream for the staff on a hot day or fought to keep a four-syllable word in a simple text was simply gone. All of her colleagues and friends say the year of her death was, by far, her happiest. She was engaged to be married to "Pebbles" Rockefeller, who shared her zest for life. At the time of her death, he was making another global sailing trip and was to join her in Europe.

Her dual roles of writer and editor kept her at the fore-front of children's works. This platform allowed her to experiment with other avenues of entertainment for children, including music, drama, radio shows and the burgeoning field of television. She wanted stories for children to be available to all children, and suggested to cereal companies they place tales on the backs of their cereal boxes. When Golden books first appeared, many reviewers and librarians were appalled that prior boundaries of "quality" publishing standards were being compromised. Margaret supported the idea of creating affordable books, penning many tales for Golden that are still in print today. She responded to the negative reception of these mass-produced books with the quote "The quality of a book is determined by the writing and the illustrations, not its printing."

Margaret's name is still not as well known as her works. Had she lived, her flamboyant life and cutting edge writing style would have undoubtedly allowed the world to know the creative genius behind all those children's bestsellers. She once stated that the author of a book didn't seem important to her as a child; it was the story that was important. As she once said of writing, "One can but hope to make a child laugh or feel clear and happy-headed as he follows the simple rhythm to its logical end. It can jog him with the unexpected and comfort him with the familiar, lift him for a few minutes from his own problems of shoelaces that won't tie, and busy parents and mysterious clock time, into the world of a bug or a bear or a bee or a boy living in the timeless world of a story."

In her will, Margaret requested that her body be cremated and her ashes scattered to the sea at her beloved Only House in Maine. A simple rough stone was to mark the site with the words "Margaret Wise Brown, writer of Songs and Nonsense." If her words be nonsense, don't tell the generations raised on her magical gift of storytelling or the generations of children to come who will be lulled to sleep alongside a pajama clad bunny in a gradually darkening room with the words that begin, "In the great green room.”

From the Margaret Wise Brown Website.

A standard poodle gal...I like her! But it looks as though she had a doxie too. ;)

Wonderful Cate! I had no idea of anything about the author of Good Night Moon, which was written in my birth year and my children and grandchildren wore out many a copy cutting their teeth on it. A lovely memoir. Thank you my dear.

Ah, I love Goodnight Moon! Thanks for this one, Cate.

Goodnight Moon is my standard baby shower gift. My kids hunted the mouse throughout its pages for many a goodnight story.

A Portrait of Dawn Powell (November 28, 1896 – November 14, 1965) in Diary Entries

March 1, 1939: Wits are never happy people. The anguish that has scraped their nerves and left them raw to every flicker of life is the base of wit—for the raw nerve reacts at once without any agent, the reaction is direct, with no integumentary obstacles. Wit is the cry of pain, the true word that pierces the heart. If it does not pierce, then it is not true wit. True wit should break a good man's heart.

March 14, 1939: A woman should attempt to be as sympathetic, amused, and understanding of a man's vices as his favorite bar is.

May 22, 1939: I find no gaiety or wit that is not based on truth. For me there is nothing delightful in blindness, in people being gay because they do not admit facts... Gaiety should be brave, it should have stout legs of truth, not a gelatine base of dreams and wishes.

January 2, 1941: In the last century, Thackery, Dickens, Edith Wharton, James, all wrote of their own times and we have reliable records. Now we have only the escapists, who write of happenings a hundred or three hundred years ago, false to history, false to human nature. Among contemporary writers, only John O'Hara writes of one very small section of 52nd Street or Broadway. We have Hemingway, who writes of a fictional movie hero in Spain with the language neither Spanish nor English. When someone wishes to write of this age—as I do and have done—critics shy off, the public shies off. "Where's our Story Book?" they cry. "Where are our Story Book People?" This is obviously an age that Can't Take It.

March 23, 1944: For a writer or artist there is nothing to equal the elation of escaping into solitude. The excited feeling of stolen rapture I feel on closing the door of this little room up here, knowing no one can find me, no one will speak to me. I look over rooftops into sky and far-off towers. This is exactly like my sensation of sheer exhilaration as a child when I got up into the attic or in the treetop or under a tree way off by the road where I was alone with a sharp pencil and notebook.

June 16, 1948: The artist who really loves people loves them so well the way they are he sees no need to disguise their characteristics—he loves them whole, without retouching. Yet the word always used for this unqualifying affection is "cynicism."

March 8, 1963: Was told yesterday I had not won the National Book Award. I felt some relief as I have no equipment for prize-winning—no small talk, no time for idle graciousness and required public show, no clothes either or desire for front. I realize I have no yen for any experience (even a triumph) that blocks observation, when I am the observed instead of the observer. Time is too short to miss so many sights. Also chloroforms, removes the weapons—de-fanging, claws cut, scorpion tail removed, leaves helpless fat cat with no defenses and maybe exposing not a sweet, harmless pet but a bad case of mange.



When asked about the characters in her novels and plays, Dawn Powell said, "I give them their heads. They furnish their own nooses." Powell's wicked sense of humor, keen ear for dialogue and human sense of pathos pervade her barbed, shrewd fiction about mid-century Americans in Manhattan and Ohio. "Always sharp, never cranky, and with a pagan's delight in the pleasures of this world, Powell's work elaborates the human comedy with a vigor matched only by its unpretentious wisdom," wrote one of her critics.

Born in Mount Gilead, Ohio in 1896, Dawn Powell ran away from an abusive stepmother when she was thirteen and settled with her unconventional aunt in nearby Shelby, Ohio. "Auntie May," a divorcée, owned a home near the railroad depot, made lively by Powell's cousins, Auntie's lover, and passing strangers who stopped for meals. Encouraged by her aunt to further her education, Powell begged a scholarship to Lake Erie College for Women. There she wrote and performed in plays and edited the Lake Erie Record, a campus quarterly, which often contained her playful yet pessimistic stories.

In 1918, Powell moved to New York City. There she worked briefly for the Butterick Company, the U. S. Navy, and the Red Cross while writing freelance articles and stories. She married Joseph Gousha, Jr., a Pennsylvania-born poet turned ad man, and the couple had a son, Jojo. They settled in Greenwich Village. Powell loved her bohemian neighborhood and the Manhattan nightlife she spent alongside friends John Dos Passos, Edmund Wilson, E. E. Cummings, and others from the literary scene. "There is really one city for everyone just as there is one major love," she wrote.

Powell tried her hand at writing plays, particularly when the family felt pinched financially, and several were produced, but she came to consider her primary work the creation of novels. Powell set her fiction in the small Ohio towns of her youth and later, most successfully, in familiar New York neighborhoods and cafés. Though dogged by Gousha's drinking, Jojo's probable autism, financial strain, and her own struggles with alcohol, illness, and depression, Dawn Powell managed to write sixteen novels, nine plays, and numerous short stories and reviews. She died in 1965. Her remarkable diaries, published in 1995, were hailed by the New York Times as "one of the outstanding literary finds of the last quarter century."

Dawn Powell Bibliography

When I taught kindergarten I faithfully read Good Night Moon every year. Invariably it was a spellbinder for the children. When a book was of good quality and spoke to the children, it was so easy to read because it never lost the children's attention.

I am appalled that I know nothing of Dawn Powell's work. Must remedy that situation very soon.

She sounds like a cracker, doesn't she! I'm with you, Linda.

Mary Edith Durham (8 December 1863 – 15 November 1944)

Edith Durham, it should be said, was a difficult woman. The first entry for her in the British Foreign Office files, from 1908, reads "Durham, Miss M. E., Inadvisability of Corresponding With".


"Queen of the Highlanders"

Rebecca West, R. W, Seton-Watson, Henry Wickham Steed, and most other important writers on East European affairs between the two world wars thought her a woman to be avoided. An advocate of the national aspirations of the Albanians, she was vilified by her critics in Britain, who generally looked more favourably on the cause of Yugoslav unity than she did. Her polemics on Balkan politics and the retrograde culture of what she called the "Serb vermin" alienated her contemporaries. Many thought her at best wildly eccentric and at worst completely mad. Travelling and living among the clansmen of upland Albania, they said, had taken its toll on her judgment and sense of decorum. "The fact is that while always denouncing Balkan mentality", wrote Professor Seton-Watson in 1929, "she is herself exactly what she means by the word."

Durham was, however, the twentieth century's indispensable interpreter of Albania, and arguably the most important writer on that culture since J. C. Hobhouse journeyed through the Albanian lands with Byron. She was adored among the Albanians themselves, who knew her as "Kralica e Malësorëve." - the Queen of the Highlanders. "She gave us her heart and she won the ear of our mountaineers", the exiled Albanian king, Zog, wrote to The Times on her death in 1944 (even though she was not on good terms with him, either). The only other Briton to have been so lionised was, improbably, Norman Wisdom, whom the Communist dictator Enver Hoxha found uproariously entertaining.

Durham's most famous work, High Albania (1909), is valued by collectors. It is still the pre-eminent guide to the folk customs, social structure, customary law, religious beliefs and traditional tales of the Albanians, especially in the highlands north of the Shkumbin river, where tribal social organization and the distinctive Gheg dialect once set off the region's inhabitants from the lowlanders to the south.

Today, Durham is a figure sadly overshadowed by more widely known travellers and correspondents. Only one of her works is still in print and, even then, not easily available. Her papers and photographs are divided between the Museum of Mankind and the Royal Anthropological Institute in London. Her rich collections of Balkan jewellery and textiles are kept at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford and the Bankfield Museum in Halifax, West Yorkshire, where a permanent exhibition on her life and work was installed in 1996. Two essays in the outstanding collection Black Lambs and Grey Falcons: Balkan women travellers, now out in a revised edition edited by John B. Allcock and Antonia Young, provide introductions to Durham's complex personality and career. But unlike Freya Stark and other women adventurers in the Near East, she has not yet found her biographer.

The vehemence of Durham's well-placed detractors is remarkable. Even today, the cutting tone of their denunciations still shocks. In part, it was a reaction to Durham's own confrontational personality. Yet there is more to the Durham question than her personal relationship with other British intellectuals. The way she was perceived by her contemporaries - and especially her stormy exchanges with Seton-Watson - reveals something about how turmoil in the Balkans can infect the personal lives of those who interpret it and, more broadly, about Western intellectuals and their position as willing proxies for competing interests abroad.

Mary Edith Durham was born in 1863 in Hanover Square, London. Her father, Arthur Edward Durham, was a distinguished surgeon who sired a large Victorian family of eight children, all of whom went on to excel in respectable professions. Edith manifested artistic ambitions and, after being educated privately in London, attended the Royal Academy of Arts. She became an accomplished illustrator and watercolourist, exhibiting widely and contributing detailed drawings to the amphibia and reptiles volume of the Cambridge Natural History.

As the eldest child - and still unmarried in her thirties - Edith took on the task of caring for her ailing mother after her father's death. Filial responsibility turned out to be the unlikely impetus for her Balkan entanglements. At thirty-seven, Durham sailed from Trieste down the Dalmatian coast to Cattaro and trekked overland to Cetinje, the capital of the exotic principality of Montenegro. The trip was intended as a palliative, recommended by her doctor after years caring for her mother, but on this journey, she found her vocation.

Over the next twenty years, she travelled frequently in the south Balkans. working in various relief organizations, capturing scenes of village life in water-colour, and collecting folklore and folk art. She also began to write frequently, and during the Balkan wars and the First World War, became a fervent promoter of the Albanian national cause in periodicals in Britain, Germany and the United Slates. Over the next two decades, she wrote seven books on Balkan affairs, beginning with Through the Lands of the Serb (1904), a beautifully evocative if wide-eyed account of her first several trips to Montenegro and Serbia, through to "Some Tribal Origins, Laws and Customs of the Balkans" (1928), a useful compendium of now extinct folk beliefs and rituals. She also became a frequent contributor to the journal Man, and her dispatches and learned articles on Balkan folklore earned her a place as Fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute.

Durham called the Balkans "the land of the living past". For her, the region was not an alien, Oriental domain but rather a kind of mirror in which Western visitors might see themselves at a much earlier stage of development. As she wrote in High Albania, "For folk in such lands time has almost stood still. The wanderer from the West stands awestruck amongst them, filled with vague memories of the cradle of his race, saying, "This did I do some thousands of years ago; thus did I lie in wait for mine enemy; so thought I and so acted I in the beginning of Time." As for previous generations who journeyed south and east, the Balkans were for Durham a kind of proto-Europe, glimpse into the heroic age of Homer.

There is a professional hazard to studying other countries and peoples. No one who travels to faraway lands, managing to learn the language and something of the local culture, can be completely immune to the romantic thrill of being seen by the natives as their intercessor and interpreter to the outside world. Such was Durham's relationship to the Albanians. She came to see their plight - a nation whose territorial aspirations went largely unheeded after the First World War - as unique among the nested grievances in the Balkans. She had been well received in the Albanian uplands, and although it was unusual for a woman to travel to the remoter mountain districts, the notion of a lone female wanderer actually fitted with Albanian custom: the tradition of Albanian "Sworn Virgins" - women who assumed the responsibilities of manhood and wore men's clothes and held a protected status in tribal society - meant that Durham travelled unmolested.

But her energetic promotion of the Albanians did not earn her many admirers in Britain. As Rebecca West wrote cattily in Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, Durham was a member of that class of Balkan travellers who come back "with a pet Balkan people established in their hearts as suffering and innocent, eternally the massacree and never the massacrer".

Some of her stormiest exchanges took place with R. W. Seton-Watson, professor, editor, government adviser, and himself a kind of spokesman for Central Europe's national minorities. The Durham/Seton-Watson correspondence (housed in the Seton-Walson papers at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies in London) is important not merely for the light it sheds on two of the most important writers on Balkan affairs of the last century, but also for the fact that the exchanges reveal something deeper about the nature of intellectuals and the vicarious grievances they make their own.

During the First World War, Seton-Watson established the journal The New Europe to champion the emancipation of Europe's subject nationalities, especially those erupting from the Habsburg empire. The journal called for "la victoire integrale", a victory that would recognize national rights and thus secure a permanent peace for the Continent. Collaborators included, besides Seton-Watson as editor, Tomas Masaryk, the Romanian historian Nicolae Iorga, and many other important writers on international affairs, including Durham.

In March 1920, Durham wrote to Seton-Watson complaining about what she saw as a pro-Serb bias in The New Europe and accusing the editors of wilfully ignoring the Albanians of Montenegro and Kosova:

"I have recent information that ever since the armistice the Serbs have burnt and pillaged Albanian villages, Catholic as well as Moslem. But New Europe, I know, would deny any such charge and imply the informant was a liar. If the truth is thus concealed, what wonder that things go wrong?"

Durham had earlier written a piece on Albanian Bektashi Sufism which, when printed, was accompanied by a note indicating that the editorial board did not necessarily agree with the author's points, including her opposition to the incorporation of Kosovo in the new South Slav kingdom. Seton-Watson apologized in a return note, mentioning that it was not the board's intent to insult Durham personally, but merely to dissociate the editors from the personal views expressed in her article. Durham quickly wrote back. It was not an issue of personal insult, she said, but rather a superb illustration of the incredible arrogance of Western policy-makers in the Balkans. By effectively partitioning the Albanian lands between an independent Albania and the newly created Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes - eventually to become Yugoslavia - the European powers were creating the conditions for "a second Armenia". The Albanians, with no artillery and no planes, would be at the mercy of the Serbian army, "and the guilt will rest on the Peace Conference". The real tragedy, she continued, was the inability of those making policy to comprehend the depth of feeling and intricacies of everyday life in the Balkans. Their attempts to apply European standards of decency to a land rocked by war and poverty were doomed. Even when peace agreements were signed, there was no guarantee that petty officials would not continue to treat minorities as if they were, by virtue of their blood or religion, still enemies of the State:

"These men who have never lived months in the Balkans draw up elaborate clauses about religious rights and minorities which cannot possibly work .... Even though certain of the intelligentsia in all the countries have excellent intentions they are quite powerless to restrain small officials and gendarmes up country."

Durham argued that the solution was quite simply to draw the boundary lines so as to include as few people as possible under foreign rule. Otherwise, the threat of violence spreading across newly drawn frontiers was extremely high, as "half desperate people with little to lose will be ready to rush into a struggle on the off chance of getting something". Violence could sometimes turn out to be the most rational response to local oppression and the ill-conceived plans of foreign peacemakers, not simply a chaotic bloodletting.

Relations between Durham and Seton-Watson were strained already at the time of the Peace Conference, which reaffirmed the existence of an Albanian state but left much of the Albanian nation outside its borders. Over the years, the source of their disagreements evolved from matters of policy to more personal disputes over who was more qualified to comment on Balkan affairs, Durham viewed Seton-Watson as a pointy-headed parvenu. He had come to the Balkans from the north, through his interest in Slovenes and Croats in Austria-Hungary, and therefore had little to say about the very different races to the south. "You I take it made the acquaintance first of the pick of the Austrian Slavs who owed their culture to generations of Austrian civilisation", she wrote to him in December 1924, "and you did not grasp the danger of subjecting them to the Serb savage, whom you did not know."

Durham became even more anti-Serb as time passed. She was convinced that the Kingdom of Serbs. Croats and Slovenes was no more than a mask for Greater Serbia. The new South Slav kingdom was headed by the former Serbian royal house and guided largely by pre-war Serbian politicians. "Pashitsch & Co.", she wrote to Seton-Watson in March 1925, referring to the Yugoslav prime minister, Nikola P. Pašić, "have not created a Jugoslavia but have carried out their original aim of making Great Serbia. Far from being liberated the bulk of people live under a far harsher rule than before." Villages had been razed and atrocities committed, a record of offences that might well push the minorities in Yugoslavia into the arms of Bolshevik Russia. Her dislike of Serbian politics and politicians, though, was born more of disaffection than visceral disdain.

"For many years I supported more or less the idea of a Greater Serbian state. It was when I learnt the Serb from the inside and saw what a retrograde effect on Europe in general the Great Serb scheme might have that I gave it up and finally opposed it."

Amongst Albanians she found view of life that was emotionally liberating and entirely different from that of her stifling London household. While she found her Albanian friends prim characteristic humour and resilience an inspiration, she also observed their struggle for international recognition with increasing concern. She used every available opportunity to communicate her fine appreciation of Albanian culture to all those other Westerners (English and otherwise) who "didn't know anything!"

After the publication of her second book "The Burden of the Balkans" (1905) Edith Durham quickly establshed herself as an authority on Albanian matters. Having successfully accomplished several extended journeys across dangerous terrain, in defiance of restrictions imposed by the Ottoman authorities, and risking kidnap by brigands, she had earned a reputation as one "who could look death in the eyes". The country (including the spectacularly Albanian beautiful landscapes which remain just as remarkable today) and the dignity of its people had captivated her as a tourist and artist, her reactions were summarised by her rapturous comment "Here is Colour, Life and Art!" Through her growing involvement with the land and its people her knowledge and perception of those things which she came to regard as uniquely "Albanian" evolved, and thus her campaiging for Albania became more focused. She had become acutely aware that its destiny as a nation was an issue that had to be resolved.

While the 500 year old Ottoman regime was gradually tottering towards its grave, Albania had become a "debateable land" encircled by the predatory Great Powers (which included Britain). Edith's initial quest had been for exotic adventure (described in her book Through the Lands of the Serb 1904). But during her first extended journey from the South to the North of Albania in 1904 she became impressed by the fact that "what Albania really wants is independence, recognised by Europe....People of all classes throughout the land hastened to explain their hopes and fears for their fatherland, and to pray for English recognition of its existence... People hailed me as a saviour ...I was quite unprepared for this and it appalled me". Around this time Edith Durham discovered a legitimate "voice" for herself through a passionate (but realistic) identification with Albania's struggle for self-determination.

Eventually in 1908 she was lured towards the "Malesia e Madhe", the North Albanian mountains. By then she had already transformed herself into an ethnographer and was intent on making a serious study of the Albanian mountain tribes, described in her book High Albania (1909). Accompanied by her loyal Albanian guide Marko Shantoya, together they scaled perilous mountain peaks and passes, travelling from one village to the next, where they received magnificent hospitality. In return Edith would amuse the "highlanders" with her tales of an English life quite foreign to them, and sketch their houses, costumes and artefacts. She noted, sketched, and photographed nearly every aspect of life in the mountain villages, thereby amassing a rich archive of Albanian folk custom and tradition. In spite of her strenuous denials many believed she was "the sister of the King of England".

She had made the North Albanian town of Shkodra, Scutari her base by the time the Balkan Wars broke out in 1912-13 (chronicled in her book "The Struggle for Scutari" 1914). From here she raised funds from abroad to distribute famine relief to thousands of desperate mountain tribespeople who had been burnt-out by the retreating Turkish army. The legend of Kraltise Durami was born. Her unique experience of the Highland people and their culture enabled her to become the first woman war-correspondent for three leading British newpapers; her inside knowledge made her the envy of the other journalists who flocked to the war zone, since they had to seek her advice.

After living in Albania for long periods of time she was forced to return to London by the outbreak of the First World War. In 1918 she became secretary of the Anglo-Albanian Society founded by Aubrey Herbert in London and with him she vigorously campaigned on behaf of Albania's rights. It was largely due to her unswerving committment that Albania became recognised by the League of Nations in 1920. When she was invited to visit Albania with a delegation in 1921, she was so overwhelmed by the street processions and banquets held in her honour that she fled in despair, realising that her failing health would not allow her to live up to the glorious accolades that were showered upon her. But in London, right up until her death she vociferously supported Albania's interests.

She continued her campaign throughout the 1930s and befriended many Albanians driven into exile in London. On "Black Friday" (Good Friday 1939) after hearing that Mussolini's forces had invaded Albania, the outraged 76 year old Edith Durham paraded the London streets wearing a placard with the slogan "Hands off Albania!"

She died in November 1944, two weeks before Enver Hoxha took power. An obituary containing an emotional tribute written by a leading Albanian politician appeared in the Daily Telegraph:

"Open-minded and generous as she was, she speedily understood Albania's soul ... Fearlessly and without compromise she told the world and its rulers what she had learned... Albanians have never forgotten, and never will forget this Englishwoman. In the Albanian mountains she knew so well, the news of her death will echo from peak to peak, the news of the death of one who was loved there".

Copied from Illyrians.org

Bibliography
Through the Lands of the Serb (1904)
The Burden of the Balkans (1905)
High Albania (1909) (Virago/Beacon Traveler)
The Struggle for Scutari (1914)
Twenty Years of Balkan Tangle (1920)
The Serajevo Crime (1925)
Some Tribal Origins, Laws and Customs of the Balkans (1928)
Albania and the Albanians: selected articles and letters, 1903-1944, ed. by Betjullah Destani (I.B. Tauris, 2001)

Joan Lindsay, Lady Lindsay (16 November 1896 – 23 December 1984) was an Australian author, best known for her "ambiguous and intriguing" novel Picnic at Hanging Rock.



Joan à Beckett Weigall was born in St Kilda East, Victoria, Australia, the third daughter of Theyre à Beckett Weigall, a prominent judge who was related to the Boyd family, perhaps Australia's most famous and prolific artistic dynasty. Her mother was Ann Sophie Weigall née Hamilton.

From 1916 to 1919, Joan studied painting at the National Gallery of Victoria Art School, Melbourne. In 1920 she began sharing a Melbourne studio with Maie Ryan (later Lady Casey). Joan exhibited her watercolours and oils at two Melbourne exhibitions and also exhibited with the Victorian Artists Society.

Joan Weigall married Daryl Lindsay in London, on St. Valentine's Day 1922. The day was always a special occasion for her, and she set her most famous work, Picnic at Hanging Rock, on St. Valentine's Day. When the couple returned to live in Australia, they renovated a farmhouse in Baxter, Mulberry Hill, and lived there until the Great Depression forced them to take up humble lodgings in Bacchus Marsh, renting out their home until the economic situation improved.

With that difficult experience behind them, Daryl abandoned painting to become Director of the National Gallery of Victoria, a position he held between 1942 and 1955. The position necessitated their relocation to Melbourne until his retirement. They retained their country home during their Victoria sojourn, however. Daryl was knighted in 1956, thus Joan became Lady Lindsay.

Her work Time Without Clocks describes her wedding and idyllic early married life. The work takes its title from a strange ability which Joan described herself as having, of stopping clocks and machinery when she came close. The title also plays on the idea that this period in her life was unstructured and free.

Lindsay also wrote several plays which remained unpublished, although one, Wolf, was performed. She contributed articles, reviews and stories to various magazines and newspapers on art, literature and prominent people. She and Daryl co-authored the"History of the Australian Red Cross". She, Daryl, and Lord and Lady Casey were founding members of the National Trust of Victoria, and she encouraged others to bequeath to the Trust. Lady Lindsay was interested in the development of a national identity, and her novel Picnic at Hanging Rock - in Peter Weir's hands - was hailed as initiating a Renaissance in Australian film (1975).



Picnic at Hanging Rock is her best known work. The story is fiction, though Lindsay dropped hints that it was based on an actual event. An ending that explained the girls' fates, in draft form, was excised by her publisher prior to publication. The final chapter was published only in the 1980s, in accordance with her wishes.

Lindsay based Appleyard College, the setting for the novel, on the school that she had attended, Clyde Girls Grammar School (Clyde School), at East St Kilda, Melbourne—which, incidentally, in 1919 was transferred to Woodend, Victoria, in the immediate vicinity of Hanging Rock itself.

Daryl Lindsay died in 1976. Lady Lindsay died in Melbourne in 1984 of natural causes. The Lindsays had no children. They donated their Mulberry Hill house to the National Trust upon her death.



Bibliography
Through Darkest Pondelayo (1936), a satire on English tourists abroad
Time Without Clocks (1962)
Facts Soft and Hard (1964)
Picnic at Hanging Rock (1967)
Syd Sixpence (1983), a children's book

Ahhhhh....Picnic at Hanging Rock....such a seminal film in my youth.....I remember seeing at the cinema in Manuka with a bunch of other girls - I think it was a school excursion and falling instantly in love with the very young John Jarrett...now of course he is more famous for his role in Wolf Creek...sigh...how times change.

Happy Birthday, Margaret Atwood!

Edith Henrietta Fowler (16 February 1865- 18 November 1944), novelist, was born at the house which is now 7 Summerfield Road, West Park, Wolverhampton.



Her grandfather was George Thorneycroft, successful ironmaster and first Mayor of Wolverhampton. Her father, Henry Hartley Fowler, a solicitor, also became a Member of the Council and Mayor, before entering Parliament in 1880. His distinguished career led him to being knighted and made First Lord Wolverhampton. He had a large house built for the family at Wergs Road, Tettenhall, called Woodthorne, to which they moved in1867. (This was later demolished by the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food in the 1970s.) Her sister, Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler, was also a novelist.

Edith and her sister Ellen were educated mainly at home, and began to write at an early age. Contributions to magazines and periodicals were followed by Edith's first two novels, written from a children's level, The Young Pretenders (Reissued by Persephone Books in 2007) in1895 and The Professor's Children in 1897. Two adult novels, both set mainly in rural areas, came next, "A Corner of the West" in 1899 and "The world and Winstow" in 1901.

In 1903 Edith married the Minister of St George's Church, Wolverhampton, Reverend William Robert Hamilton, and he became Rector of Sutton Bonington, near Loughborough. They had two sons, Gavin Robert Fowler in 1905 and Henry Fowler Hew in 1908, but Edith returned home to Woodthorne for the births.

She found time to continue writing, and in 1905 produced the novel "For Richer for Poorer", and in 1912 a biography of her father, who had passed away the year before. After a couple of moves to other churches, Robert retired and their main home for the rest of their life was Carrwood House, Overstrand, Norfolk, which had been built by Sir Henry Fowler for use by his family. Edith's last known published works were Patricia in 1915 and Christabel in 1921. She died on 18 November 1944, and is buried at St Martin's, Overstrand.

Edith had a strong faith, and her novels have a Christian outlook. The stories are quietly imaginative, but occasionally show the Fowler wit learned from her parents. Her biography of her father gives an insight into their family life and also the world of politics in the late 19th century.

© Anthony Perry

Bibliography
The Young Pretenders (1895) - Review from our own RBHardy the 3rd's blog - Rough Draft
The Professor's Children (1897)
Hugh's Burden Bundle (religious tract) (1897)
A Corner of the West (1899)
The World and Winstow (1901)
For Richer for Poorer (1905)
Life of Henry Hartley Fowler (1912)
Patricia (1915)
Christabel (1921)

D. E. Stevenson (19 November 1892–30 December 1973), Dorothy Emily Peploe (married name) was a Scottish author of more than 40 light romantic novels. Her father was the lighthouse engineer David Alan Stevenson, first cousin to the author Robert Louis Stevenson.

D.E. Stevenson was born in 1892 in Edinburgh, Scotland, and was educated at home by governesses. She started to write at eight, but because her parents and governesses disapproved she had to do this in secret. She later wanted to go to university but her father refused, concerned about having an educated woman in the family. Stevenson was married in 1916 to a captain in the 6th Ghurkha Rifles.



2009 saw a renewed interest in Stevenson's books with the reissue of two of her most popular novels, Mrs. Tim of the Regiment (from Bloomsbury) and Miss Buncle's Book (from Persephone Books). The sequel, Miss Buncle Married, was reissued by Persephone in 2011.

Books
Peter West 1923
Mrs Tim of the Regiment 1932
Golden Days 1934
Miss Buncle's Book 1934 (Republished in 2008 by Persephone Books)
Divorced From Reality 1935 (Miss Dean's Dilemma; republished in 1966 as The Young Clementina)
Smouldering Fire 1935
Miss Buncle Married 1936 (Republished in 2011 by Persephone Books)
The Empty World 1936 (A World in Spell)
The Story of Rosabelle Shaw 1937
Miss Bun the Bakers Daughter 1938 (The Baker's Daughter)
Green Money 1939
Rochester's Wife 1940
The English Air 1940
Mrs Tim Carries On 1941
Spring Magic 1942
Crooked Adam 1942 (in US; 1969 in UK)
Celia's House 1943
The Two Mrs. Abbotts 1943
Listening Valley 1944
The Four Graces 1946
Mrs. Tim Gets a Job 1947
Kate Hardy 1947
Young Mrs. Savage 1948
Vittoria Cottage 1949
Music in The Hills 1950
Winter and Rough Weather 1951 (Shoulder the Sky)
Mrs. Tim Flies Home 1952
Five Windows 1953
Charlotte Fairlie 1954 (Blow the Wind Southerly; The Enchanted Isle)
Amberwell 1955
Summerhills 1956
The Tall Stranger 1957
Anna and her Daughters 1958
Still Glides the Stream 1959
The Musgraves 1960
Bel Lamington 1961
Fletcher's End 1962
The Blue Sapphire 1963
Katherine Wentworth 1964
Katherine's Marriage 1965 (The Marriage of Katherine)
The House on the Cliff 1966
Sarah Morris Remembers 1967
Sarah's Cottage 1968
Gerald and Elizabeth 1969
House of the Deer 1970

Inter book links
Miss Buncle spills into The Four Graces as well as Spring Magic, and her book is described in "Anna and her Daughters". Celia's House inspired Listening Valley, where Celia makes a re-appearance. We hear of her again during Anna and Her Daughters. Anna pops up briefly in the Katherine books which link with Charlotte Fairlie (Mr. Heath the vicar makes a re-appearance this time). Later Sarah Morris ends up in Ryddelton in Sarah's Cottage to be befriended by Debbie (who made her debut in Celia's House) and to hear about Tonia (Listening Valley) and Charlotte Fairlie.

More links exist from the Katherine books, via Mr Sandford the lawyer, to House on the Cliff which links via Miss Martineau the landlady to The Blue Sapphire. The Katherine books also tell us more about MacAslan who we first meet in Smouldering Fire. Stevenson's last book, The House of the Deer (a reworking of a serial published in The Glasgow Bulletin in 1936) revisits the MacAslan family in the second generation, and is a sequel to "Gerald and Elizabeth".

Gerald and Elizabeth enter into the saga around Drumburly and re-introduce Freda from Five Windows. Jock from the Music in the Hills trilogy also knows of Freda. Bel Lamington links into these books. Bel's friend Margaret was a Musgrave and there are links from The Musgraves to The Tall Stranger which was a sequel (of sorts) to Five Windows (though Stevenson, uncharacteristically makes an error between the two books - in "Five Windows" the main character is David Kirke, in "The Tall Stranger" his name is spelled Kirk). The Musgraves give a tenuous link back to Ryddelton via the Mulberry Coach, a story written by one of Anna's daughters and nearly performed by Delia Musgrave.

The Amberwell books link closely to Still Glides the Stream which in turn ties in with the Sarah books, in that Will and Sarah both visit Nivennes and meet with the Delormes family, although their visits are many years apart.

Books Within Books:
Another recurring character is the author Janetta Walters, whose light romantic novels are either loved or loathed by Stevenson characters. We first hear of her books in Mrs. Tim Carries On and Spring Magic. She appears in person in The Two Mrs. Abbotts and The Four Graces.

Other DES books published in 2011:
Greyladies Books has issued three newly discovered and previously unpublished DES books, including Portrait of Saskia

DUMFRIES & GALLOWAY LIFE, April 2011DE Stevenson Article (Very small print!)

D. E. Stevenson Website

Warrior of the Imagination

Nadine Gordimer was born in the small gold mining town of Springs, South Africa on 20 November, 1963. Her parents were both immigrants; her mother was born in England, her father in Latvia, then part of the Russian Empire. Although both parents were Jewish by birth, she was raised in a largely secular environment, and educated in part at Catholic girls schools.



The social hierarchy of a small South African town in the 1930s was both complex and rigid. Recent immigrants from Eastern Europe, like Gordimer's father, Isidore, occupied a stratum below that of the earlier English settlers and the white Afrikaners, mostly descendants of Dutch, French and German colonists. The black Africans who worked the town's gold mines were the most disadvantaged, denied access to all public facilities. Gordimer's father, who had experienced religious discrimination as a Jew in Tsarist Russia, accepted the system as he found it, but her mother Nan bristled at the injustice of the South African order, and founded a daycare center for the children of black workers in the town. The brutal reality of the system was fully impressed on young Nadine when local police raided the family home, ostensibly because they suspected the family's black housekeeper of brewing beer illegally. The incident would later form the basis of one of Gordimer's first published stories.

Although she showed an early enthusiasm for writing, Nadine Gordimer also enjoyed a youthful passion for dance. A brief illness of Nadine's frightened her mother so severely that she withdrew the child from dance classes and then from school altogether. From then on she was educated at home. In the midst of this solitary existence, with few friends and no literary life, she found a world of adventure and ideas in reading. She began to write fiction of her own, and published her first story in the children's section of the local paper. At 15, she published for the first time in a journal for adult readers.

With little formal education, she schooled herself by studying the masters of European fiction; Marcel Proust, Anton Chekhov and Fyodor Dostoyevsky were powerful role models, and she studied their work closely. She briefly attended the University of Witwatersrand, where she made the acquaintance of educated young black Africans for the first time. She came to know may of the young black artists and writers who gathered in the Johannesburg neighborhood known as Sophiatown.

Gordimer left college without a degree and settled in Johannesburg in 1948. That same year, the National Party, dominated by the white Afrikaners, won a national election and began to institute its policy of apartheid, mandating absolute separation of the races. Sophiatown and other neighborhoods were demolished, to remove black Africans and replace them with white residents. In Johannesburg, Gordimer formed a deep friendship with the labor activist Bettie du Toit, who had a powerful influence on her political thinking and her increasing opposition to the white supremacist government.

Gordimer's first short story collection, "Face to Face", appeared in 1949. It was quickly followed by two more collections, Town and Country Lovers and The Soft Voice of the Serpent. Gordimer's writing began to attract attention outside her own country in 1951, when her stories began appearing in The New Yorker magazine. Her first novel, The Lying Days, appeared in 1953. It may be her most autobiographical work, describing the political awakening of a young woman growing up in Gordimer's home town, Springs.

A brief first marriage resulted in the birth of a daughter, Oriane, in 1950. In 1954, Gordimer married Reinhold Cassirer, an art dealer who had come to South Africa as a refugee from Nazi Germany. This union lasted until his death in 2001. Gordimer and Cassirer's son Hugo was born in 1955. In the early 1960s, the South African government stepped up its repressive measures against black Africans and against all critics of the regime, black and white. The arrest and imprisonment of Bettie du Toit in 1960, and the bloody Sharpeville Massacre of black protesters, further fueled Gordimer's opposition to the regime. She became close friends with dissident attorneys Bram Fischer and George Bizos, who defended Nelson Mandela at his treason trial in 1962.

One of Gordimer's best early novels, A World of Strangers (1958), was banned by the South African government, but her work continued to attract attention outside South Africa, and in 1961 she received the W.H. Smith Commonwealth Literary Award, the first of many international honors. Despite an increasingly hostile political environment, Gordimer continued to challenge the strictures of apartheid in her work. Her 1963 novel Occasion for Loving portrayed a white woman in love with a black man, while actual interracial relationships were forbidden by law. A Guest of Honour (1971) won praise throughout the English-speaking world, and received the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. In 1974 she published The Conservationist. Hailed as a masterpiece, it was awarded the Booker Prize, the highest literary honor of the United Kingdom.

As the armed conflict between the African National Congress (ANC) and the National Party government intensified in the 1970s, Gordimer traveled frequently to lecture at universities in the United States, but she refused all offers to settle permanently outside her own country. She joined the banned ANC and at times hid its fugitive leaders in her home. In 1976, her novel The Late Bourgeois World was banned by the South African government. She was censored again when the government banned her 1979 novel Burger's Daughter. Partly inspired by her friendship with Bram Fischer, it tells the story of the daughter of a left-wing activist who must deal with her parent's radical legacy. Rather than accepting the ban, Gordimer published a pamphlet protesting the censorship, "What Happened to Burger's Daughter". The government soon lifted the ban on Burger's Daughter, but Gordimer's troubles with the censors were far from over.

In her next novel, July's People (1981), Gordimer imagined a post-apartheid future in which a violent black-led revolution has driven many whites into hiding. The title refers to a servant, July, who hides his former employers in his native village, where they gradually learn to accept second-class status. This novel too was banned, but white South Africans continued to read Gordimer's work covertly. For them, as for readers around the world, her books had exposed the absurdities and injustice of apartheid. By the end of the 1980s, a critical mass of South Africans had finally concluded that the system could not continue.

The year 1990 proved to be the long-awaited turning point in South Africa's history. The government recognized the African National Congress as a legal opposition party and soon thereafter began negotiations for the transition to a multiracial democracy. When ANC leader Nelson Mandela was released from prison, Nadine Gordimer was one of the first people he asked to see. The same year, it was announced that she would receive the Nobel Prize in Literature. In selecting her for the award, the Swedish Academy praised the "intense immediacy" of her work in portraying "extremely complicated personal and social relationships." Her work, it was said, exemplified the concept of literature's "benefit to humanity" that Alfred Nobel had envisioned when he created the Prize.

Gordimer's post-apartheid work has continued to explore the difficult issues of a society in transition from a tragic past to an uncertain future, as well as the sorrows of her own personal experience. Her 1998 book, The House Gun, dealt with the increasing level of violent crime in a newly free South Africa. In 2001, her husband of 47 years, Reinhold Cassirer, died after a long illness. Themes of personal bereavement animate her most recent novel Get a Life, published in 2005. Her nonfiction writings on history, politics and literature have been collected in volumes such as "The Black Interpreters" (on African writers), "The Essential Gesture, Writing and Being and Living in Hope and History".

Gordimer's Nobel Prize not only recognized the achievement of her novels, but her mastery of the short story. In 1992, some of the best stories from the first decades of her career were collected in Why Haven't You Written: Selected Stories 1950-1972. To date, in addition to her 14 novels, she has published 16 separate collections of short stories, including her latest, Beethoven Was One Sixteenth Black and Other Stories.

From the The Academy of Achievement Website

Nadine Gordimer Bibliography

My God! No wonder I have loved the words of this woman. Thank you, thank you so much Cate. A lovely bio.

Wonderful bio on Gordimer. She has been one of my seminal literary influences. Burger's Daughter remains in the top of my most appreciated novels. And I love the picture -- rare to see her as a young woman.

Bloomsbury had a Twitter giveaway earlier this year and one of my best surprises was a copy of her collected non fiction writing - a 700+ page volume, spanning over 50 years of work, Telling Times, and also many changes in South Africa.

I am sure that must have been a wonderful surprise for you, as I am sure it is a wonderful book. I've read none of her non-fiction. That one will have to go on my go-get list.

Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow (April 22, 1873 - November 21, 1945) was a Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist who portrayed the changing world of the contemporary south.



Born into an elite Virginia family in Richmond, Virginia, the young Glasgow developed in a different way from that traditional to women of her class. Due to poor health, she was educated at home in Richmond. She read deeply in philosophy, social and political theory, and European and British literature. She spent her summers at her family's Bumpass, Virginia estate, the historic Jerdone Castle plantation, a setting that she used in her writings. Her father, Francis Thomas Glasgow, was the son of Arthur Glasgow and Catherine Anderson. He was raised in Rockbridge County, Virginia and graduated from Washington and Lee College in 1847. Glasgow thought her father self-righteous and unfeeling. But, some of her more admirable characters reflect a Scots-Calvinist background like his and a similar "iron vein of Presbyterianism."

Her mother, Anne Jane Gholson married Francis T. Glasgow on July 14, 1853, and they had ten children together. Anne Gholson was inclined to what was then called "nervous invalidism"; some attributed this to her having borne and cared for ten children. Glasgow also dealt with "nervous invalidism" throughout her life.

As the United States women's suffrage movement was developing in the early 1900s, Glasgow marched in the English suffrage parades in the spring 1909. Later she spoke at the first suffrage meeting in Virginia. Glasgow felt that the movement came "at the wrong moment" for her, and her participation and interest waned. Glasgow did not at first make women’s roles her major theme, and she was slow to place heroines rather than heroes at the centers of her stories. Her later works, however, have heroines who display many of the attributes of women involved in the political movement.

Glasgow had several love interests during her life. In The Woman Within, an autobiography written for posthumous publication, Glasgow tells of a long, secret affair with a married man she had met in New York, whom she called "Gerald B." Ellen also maintained a close lifelong friendship with James Branch Cabell, another notable Richmond writer. She was engaged twice, and collaborated on novels with one fiancé, but did not marry. She felt her best work was done when love was over.

Reception and Honors
In 1923 a reviewer in Time characterized Glasgow:
"She is of the South; but she is not by any manner of means provincial. She was educated, being a delicate child, at home and at private schools. Yet she is by no means a woman secluded from life. She has wide contacts and interests. . . . Here is a really important figure in the history of American letters; for she has preserved for us the quality and the beauty of her real South."

Works
Glasgow's first novel, The Descendant, was written in secret and published anonymously. She destroyed part of the manuscript after her mother died in 1893. The work was delayed after her brother-in-law and intellectual mentor, George McCormack, died the following year. It was not until absorbing the losses of these two deaths that she returned to her novel, completing it in 1895. The novel features an emancipated heroine who seeks passion rather than marriage. Although it was published anonymously, the novel's authorship became well known the following year, when her second novel, Phases of an Inferior Planet , announced on its title page, “by Ellen Glasgow, author of The Descendant.” By the time The Descendant was in print, Glasgow had finished Phases of an Inferior Planet. The novel portrays the demise of a marriage and focuses on "the spirituality of female friendship." Critics found the story to be "sodden with hopelessness all the way though," but "excellently told."

Glasgow stated that her third novel, The Voice of People, was an objective view of the poor-white farmer in politics. The hero is a young Southerner who, having a genius for politics, rises above the masses and falls in love with a higher class girl. Her next novel, The Battle-Ground, sold over 21,000 copies in the first two weeks after publication. It depicts the South before and during the Civil War and was hailed as "the first and best realistic treatment of the war from the southern point of view."

The Deliverance and her previous novel, The Battle-Ground, were written during her affair with Gerald B. They "are the only early books in which Glasgow's heroine and hero are united" by the novels' ends.

Glasgow's next four novels were written in what she considered her "earlier manner" and were received with mixed reviews. The Wheel of Life sold moderately well based on the success of The Descendant. Despite its commercial success, however, reviewers found the book disappointing. Set in New York, the story tells of domestic unhappiness and tangled love affairs. It was unfavorably compared to Edith Wharton's House of Mirth, which was published that same year. Most critics recommended that Glasgow “stick to the South.” Glasgow regarded the novel a failure.

The Ancient Law portrayed white factory workers in the Virginia textile industry, and analyzes the rise of industrial capitalism and its corresponding social ills. Critics found the book to be overly melodramatic. With The Romance of a Plain Man and The Miller of Old Church, Glasgow began concentrating on gender traditions; she contrasted the conventions of the Southern woman with the feminist viewpoint, a direction which she continued in Virginia.

In Virginia, the title protagonist is a southern lady whose husband abandons her when he achieves success. The protagonist in Life and Gabriella is also abandoned by a weak-willed husband, but Gabriella becomes a self-sufficient, single mother who remarries well by the end of the novel. Glasgow published two more novels, The Builders and One Man in His Time, as well as a set of short stories The Shadowy Third and Other Stories, before producing the novel of greatest personal importance, Barren Ground. In this novel, Glasgow felt she had successfully reversed the traditional seduction plot by producing a heroine completely freed from the southern patriarchal influence. She believed that writing Barren Ground, a “tragedy,” also freed her for her comedies of manners The Romantic Comedians, They Stooped to Folly, and The Sheltered Life. These late works are considered the most artful criticism of romantic illusion in her career.

Glasgow produced two more "novels of character", The Sheltered Life and Vein of Iron, in which she continued to explore female independence.

In 1941 she published In This Our Life, which won the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel in 1942. In addition, it was quickly bought by Warner Brothers and adapted as a movie by the same name, released in 1942.

Her autobiography, The Woman Within, published after her death, details her progression as an author and the influences essential for her becoming an acclaimed Southern woman writer.

Glasgow died on November 21, 1945 and is buried in Hollywood Cemetery, Richmond, Virginia.

Bibliography

Novels
The Descendant (1897)
Phases of an Inferior Planet (1898)
The Voice of the People (1900)
The Battle-Ground (1902)
The Deliverance (1904)
The Wheel of Life (1906)
The Romance of a Plain Man (1909)
Virginia (1913)
The Builders (1919)
The Past (novel) (1920)
One Man In His Time (novel) (1922)
Barren Ground (1925)
The Romantic Comedians (1926)
They Stooped to Folly (1929)
The Sheltered Life (1932)
Vein of Iron (1935)
In This Our Life (1941) (Pulitzer Prize for the Novel 1942) (Filmed 1942 as In This Our Life)

Collections
The Shadowy Third, and Other Stories (1923)
The Collected Stories of Ellen Glasgow

Autobiography
The Woman Within (published posthumously in 1954)

Have read both The Sheltered Life and Barren Ground and enjoyed the latter better than the former. I also have an old copy of her autobiography The Woman Within which I intend reading soon. I believe that she is neglected in the US her homeland.

The details of George Gissing's frequently miserable private life -- miserable largely because of his stunning capacity for self-punishment -- have fascinated generations of readers ever since his friend Morley Roberts published the first biography, thinly disguised under the title The Private Life of Henry Maitland. Roberts' memory failed him over some details and some of his judgements are more than dubious; but fortunately Gissing assiduously chronicled his own life, though the records were damaged before and after his death. Taken together, the new superb edition of his Collected Letters, his Diary and the semi-fictional memoirs The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft give us a unique and touching insight into a very distinctive personality, and the life he struggled through as a moderately successful novelist in late Victorian England. He has also been the subject of several modern biographies.



George Gissing was born at Wakefield, Yorkshire on 22 November 1857, the son of a chemist who died young leaving five children in fairly straitened circumstances. He was a brilliant student who at the age of 15 won a scholarship to Owens College, Manchester. This institution prepared students for university and Gissing proved to be a star pupil, winning many prizes and securing entry to London University. Clearly he was destined for an academic career in the classics, the history and literature of the ancient world being his first and last love. On the eve of his success, however, his prospects were ruined when he was caught stealing money from the students' cloakroom. The money was for Nell Harrison, a young prostitute with whom Gissing was infatuated. After a month's imprisonment he was packed off to America, where he passed a year schoolteaching and writing his first short stories for a Chicago newspaper. He was back in London by October 1877, friendless and penniless; Nell joined him and they married. He scratched a living by doing private tutoring while working on his large first novel, Workers in the Dawn, whose publication in 1880 he paid for with a small legacy. The novel, which was a complete failure, is a naturalistic study of the most desperate levels of poverty-stricken London life.

Gissing's marriage was unhappy: his wife was a drunkard and intermittently returned to prostitution; eventually he paid her to live apart from him. The relationship in Workers between the idealistic Arthur Golding and the sluttish and invincibly stupid Carrie Mitchell is clearly autobiographical. The other female character in Workers, Helen Norman, is a first study for a long line of ladylike, virtuous and intellectual woman, distant as stars and just as unattainable for the Gissing hero. 'My one supreme desire is to marry a perfectly refined woman' says one of his many alter egos, Godwin Peak in a later novel, but he never achieved it.

Nell Gissing died, of drink and (probably) venereal disease, early in 1888; the account in his diary of being called to identify her body in a room in a Lambeth slum is one of Gissing's most moving passages. His investigations into, and personal experience of, the lowest stratum of London working class life had stood him in good stead and supplied him with the materials for four other slum novels, of which the best, unforgettable for its superb evocation of tragic squalor, is the last, The Nether World. On the proceeds of this book, he fulfilled his dearest ambition by paying a long visit to Italy. He recorded how he had long been unable to read a book about Rome without feeling a pain in the heart. He repeated the visit in 1889-90 and 1897-8, and also visited Athens.

Gissing never knew wide fame or considerable prosperity. He was compelled to sell the copyright of most of his novels outright to publishers, which meant that even his occasional successes were often unrewarding. Nevertheless, from 1884 onwards, he earned a modest if precarious living from novels and tutoring. For six years he lived alone, drawing inspiration, as he said sardonically, from his apartment's proximity to the Marylebone workhouse. He was oppressed by his 'guilty secret' -- his having gone to prison for a disgraceful proletarian crime -- and he had few literary associates or, indeed, friends of any kind. He was often desperately lonely, spending many punishing hours a day at his desk and rarely speaking to anyone congenial. The 'secret' moulded his relations with women also: Gissing was attractive to, and powerfully attracted by, women, but he believed no woman of his own kind could possibly be content to share his life, and that anyone in his position -- a struggling intellectual whose books were destined never to have a wide sale -- was forced to choose for a partner either an heiress or a work-girl. How far this was a rationalisation for deeper impulses, including a sexual appetite for lower-class women, and how far from a fear that his past would be exposed, is a matter of dispute. Certainly he explores the theme of exogamy obsessively in his novels, though he was incapable of taking the hard-headed advice he put into the mouths of his own characters.

For, undeterred by his own prophecy in New Grub Street of the inevitable outcome of another such marriage, he was prepared to pay the price a second time. He picked up his second wife, Edith Underwood, daughter of a respectable artisan -- in the street, according to Roberts. As soon as they had married in February 1891 they moved to Exeter, part of Gissing's plan for a deliberate exile from the metropolitan literary world. At first Gissing tried to follow through his private drama of playing King Cophetua to her beggar-maid and wrote patronisingly to his sisters that he was going to make a start by correcting her grammar and pronunciation. This was exactly the program that the fictional Golding had tried out on Carrie in Workers in the Dawn. In real life Gissing soon discovered he had allied himself with a violent and mentally unstable woman who eventually was committed to an asylum. The marriage was a failure from the start. They returned to London to live in 1893 and after many fearsome scenes Gissing parted from his family (they had two sons by that time) in 1897. It was now that he was first diagnosed as suffering from the emphysema that was to end his life so prematurely.

Domestic and other kinds of miseries seemed to feed Gissing's genius. The novels of his middle period in the 1890s, some of which have been severely underrated, deal with the various levels of English middle class life (usually the lowest levels) and the social problems of the day. His themes are struggling authors and their financial and marital difficulties in his masterpiece, New Grub Street; the lack of opportunities for well-educated single women in The Odd Women (reissued by Virago); the attempt, in Born in Exile, of an intelligent but poor man to ingratiate himself with, and to marry the daughter of, a upper class cultured family by pretending to have religious views which he really despises; an attack on conventional marriage and on suburban pretension in In the Year of Jubilee; and a study of various kinds of corruption among the artistic moneyed classes in The Whirlpool. These novels, some of which sold and were reviewed well, rapidly increased Gissing's reputation and expanded his income, which he augmented by the rapid production of unsophisticated short stories and pot-boiling forgettable short fictions. And for the first time he acquired some literary and educated acquaintances: Grant Allen, George Meredith, W.H. Hudson and especially H.G. Wells, who became a close friend; though he still refused to be seen with his wife or to invite people to his house.





After the publication in 1897 of The Whirlpool, which is probably the most formally satisfying of his novels, Gissing's creative energy for fiction seemed to be mined out. He did, however, write two more novels and a number of stories. He spent some months in Italy working on a monograph on Dickens. This can still be read with profit, though it rides a number of Gissing's own hobby-horses: indeed, it has been said, truly, to be "not quite sane" on the subject of Dickens' women. He also wrote his only travel book, about an arduous trip to the South. Soon after his return to London he formed a union with Gabrielle Fleury, a young French translator, and he went to live with her and her mother in Paris, leaving his wife to be supervised by female friends and one child in his sisters' care. The most notable product of this last phase was The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft, the curious part-fictional (not very fictional) set of reminiscences of a retired writer. This was the most popular of all his books for years after his death, but its reputation has faded now. Its mournful and dispirited tone, with the grumbling self-pity rather too much to the fore, does not present the author in his best light, even though he himself thought it "the thing most likely to last when all my other futile work has followed my futile life".

After the turn of the century Gissing's illness grew acute. He moved restlessly from place to place as a semi-invalid, always sure that happiness was to be found elsewhere. His third marital relationship was starting to show some signs of strain: he complained bitterly in letters about French cooking and developed an unlikely and neurotic fascination with English food: the thought of an English potato, he said, made him "frantic with homesickness". His last complete novel, Will Warburton, in part treats the guilty secret theme yet again; the hero runs a grocery store when he loses his money, thereby potentially suffering the humiliation in middle class eyes that Gissing always feared.

Gissing died at St Jean Pied de Port in south-west France on 28 December 1903, and is buried in the English cemetery at St Jean de Luz on the Bay of Biscay. He left unfinished Veranilda, a scholarly but feeble story set in the Rome of the Dark Ages.

From the

George Gissing Bibliography

Thanks for this. Very interesting. I really liked The Odd Women and am glad I didn't know much about the author before reading it.

It is a rather ghastly bio, Barbara, but I thought it was interesting as well. A unique Virago gent along with H.G. Wells.

I shouldn't be surprised when people have feet of clay Cate, and this man seems to have been a nice man, who picked the wrong women. But to so consistently pick the wrong women, and then to steal for them, is a little troubling. A misguided 'rescuer' or someone with, as you say, 'deeper impulses'? If the former, then I guess there is no need to be too condemnatory; after all women have been picking, and enabling, the wrong men for centuries.

Sadly - and here I am revealing my own lack of political correctness - I would be much more tolerant of our dear H G Wells if he had looked more like George Clooney, and less like Dr Crippen. Dashing good looks makes a man's transgressions so much easier to swallow, right? :)

Have a Happy Thanksgiving folks!

It's Nancy Mitford Day!!

(Queue Tui and her fabulous 'Mitford squeal'!)

In celebration, Penquin recently published this bliss......


And from Capuchin Classics!






Added to wish list? check.

Ditto here................
I want.........................

yes please

Grant; too bad we are not each other's Virago Secret Santa..............it would be so easy.......lol!~! (or R we?)
hugs,

Indeed!

Dear Cate, You're the best! Anything Mitford is my absolute favorite and I'm so grateful you mentioned these new editions.

Mitford! Mitford! Mitford! I've never read Christmas Pudding but am wondering if it should be my Christmas read this year!

I say Yes, miss_read!

Hooray for Cate! I think they shriek (with laughter) though, Cate, not squeal? Anyone remember? It seemed that they were always saying "We shrieked!" in their letters.

You're right Tui! I knew squeal didn't sound right!

I want too : ) love anything Mitford.

#185 William Faulkner thought highly of Ellen Glasgow. And that's all I need to think highly of her as well!

From the London Telegraph today...

Christa Wolf, who died aged 82, was, with Günter Grass, Germany's best known contemporary author. Before the end of communism she was revered on both sides of the Iron Curtain as a literary figure and a moral icon; afterwards, however, her reputation suffered a dramatic reverse.



Christa Wolf's identity as a writer living in the communist German Democratic Republic was informed by the traumatic experience of Nazism. Though born in 1929, and therefore a child during Hitler's rule, she was never, as she put it, "able to feel exempted from responsibility, but only horrified at how a system of delusion can seduce people into hatred for mankind".

In order to prevent a recurrence of the Nazi tyranny, Christa Wolf wanted "to hunt for alternatives to these steps towards ruin, however frail the alternatives may be, however utopian they may appear". The answer, in her view, was socialism. From the 1960s she came to be viewed (in the GDR) as a "loyal dissident" and (in West Germany) as a "socialist of independent temper", critical of the GDR regime but maintaining her belief in socialism as superior to western capitalism.

Her second novel, Nachdenken über Christa T (The Quest for Christa T, 1968), was first banned in the GDR, then published in a limited edition. The book explored the development of a woman's individual personality and conscience within a socialist society geared to productivity and universal norms, and showed how hard it is to be oneself in a society where "conformity is the means of survival". The novel became the focus of heated critical debates in both Germanies, but began a new direction in GDR literature with its emphasis on "subjective authenticity".

Christa Wolf was prepared to take some risks in the cause of artistic freedom. When the poet and songwriter Wolf Biermann was deprived of his GDR citizenship for criticising the regime, Christa Wolf was among those who initiated a public protest. She bravely stood up and objected to an artistic purge at the party conference in 1965. But she did not leave the GDR, even though she was allowed to travel abroad regularly. It seems that the regime found her more useful than dangerous; she had private one-to-one chats with Erich Honecker, and between 1963 and 1967 was a candidate for the Party Central Committee. Christa Wolf clung to her socialist ideals through thick and thin. In 1989, even as her fellow citizens were fleeing the country in droves, she appealed to them to stay and help build "a truly democratic society". It was, she wrote, "more difficult but also more honourable to stay in the socialist Fatherland".

The fall of the Berlin Wall marked a dramatic change in her reputation. Her opposition to reunification brought accusations that she had played into the hands of the tyrants of East Germany, and many critics found it astonishing when, in 1990, eight months after the end of communism, she published What Remains, a thinly veiled autobiographical short story in which she described the fears and thoughts of someone who is under observation by the Stasi, the East German secret police.

She had written it in 1979 but kept the manuscript in a drawer until 1989, when she revised it before sending it for publication. Many felt that her cri de coeur had come too late. The controversy became fiercer still in 1993, when Stasi documents came to light showing that Christa Wolf had indeed been one of the millions who were spied upon. But they also revealed that, despite her claim that she had never co-operated with the Stasi, in 1959 – eager to serve the "anti-fascist" cause – Christa Wolf had allowed herself to be recruited as a secret informer. Her collaboration ended in 1962, when the Stasi dropped her because she was not deemed sufficiently helpful. The Stasi dossier on her and her husband was registered under the revealing code name "Double-tongued".

The West German press duly lambasted her as a stooge of the GDR with all the intensity with which they had once praised her as a symbol of heroic integrity. Kinder spirits concluded that she was merely an example of the muddle-headed German idealist who, in some respects, posed more of a threat to Germany's post-war liberties than the jackbooted fascist.

She was born Christa Ihlenfeld in Landsberg an der Warthe in the province of Brandenburg (now Gorzow Wielkpolsky in Poland), where her parents owned a grocery shop, on March 18 1929. At the end of the war her family fled to Mecklenburg in what became the GDR, and Christa attended high school at Gammelin, near Schwerin. She completed her schooling in Bad Frankenhausen and joined the SED (Socialist Unity Party, the governing party of the GDR) in 1949. From 1949 to 1953 she studied German Literature at the universities of Jena and Leipzig; she married her fellow student, the writer Gerhard Wolf, in 1951.
From 1953 to 1957 she worked on the staff of the Deutscher Schriftstellerverband (German Writers' Association), then as chief of the editorial staff of the publishing house Neues Leben and, in 1958-59, as editor of the journal Neue Deutsche Literatur. In 1962 the Wolfs moved to Kleinmachnow, near Berlin, where Christa began writing full-time.

Her first novel, Der geteilte Himmel (The Divided Heaven, 1963), about the love between a student and a chemist which cannot survive the conditions of divided Germany, was awarded the Heinrich-Mann Prize and brought its author recognition in the West as well as in the GDR. She received the National Prize for Art and Literature and was nominated as a candidate for the Central Committee of the SED.

In Kindheitsmuster (Patterns of Childhood, 1976) she traced the origins of present-day German thought patterns to life in the Third Reich, showing how her own childhood had carried on along normal lines while Jews travelled on trains through her town to Chelmno and Treblinka.

In Kein Ort. Nirgends (No Place on Earth, 1977) she chose figures of the German Romantic period to probe "the connection between despair of society and literary failure". In Kassandra (Cassandra, 1983) she examined the origins of war in the patriarchal culture of the Greeks.

By this time she was allowed to travel abroad by the GDR regime to give lectures and accept awards, among them the Büchner Prize of the German Academy of Language and Poetry (1980); the Austrian State Prize for European Literature (1985); and the Geschwister-Scholl-Prize of the city of Munich (1987).

The events following the fall of the Berlin Wall plunged Christa Wolf into a long depression, as her long-held belief that the people of the former GDR were less venal than the citizens of the West was tested to destruction.

In 1993 she published Medea, a version of the ancient myth in which the woman whose name has become a symbol of wickedness is presented as innocent of the charges against her. Medea, and by analogy Christa Wolf herself, is presented as a woman whose reputation consists almost entirely of the sins of her accusers.

Leibhaftig ("In the Flesh", 2003) reports on a life-threatening illness of the narrator shortly before the end of the GDR. Ein Tag im Jahr: 1960-2000 (One Day a Year, 2003) was a book of essays about her life in the GDR.

Gradually a degree of sanity was restored to the debate over Christa Wolf's place in the German literary pantheon. When, in 2002, she was awarded the first Deutscher Bücherpreis (German Book Prize) for her lifetime achievement, the jury praised her for "courageously confronting the great debates of the GDR and reunified Germany".

Christa Wolf never fully reconciled herself to life in the new Germany, and her later writings were pervaded by a sense of loss. As Western products began to appear in the old East German supermarket shelves, she preferred to buy "a bunch of wooden clothespins, guaranteed to be old East German products, and a similarly dusty trash can made of hard rubber, which stands hidden behind all of the new, sensational trash can models".

Christa and Gerhard Wolf had two daughters.

Christa Wolf, born March 18 1929, died December 1 2011

This actually makes me want to read my unread copies of her books. Thank you Cate.

>202 laytonwoman3rd: Glad to read that information about Faulkner's opinion of Glasgow. I intend to do some research to see if I can get reviews of her books at the times that they were published. I have done that with many other authors and enjoy reading them immensely. I do believe that critically Glasgow was well thought of. I'm going to read Virginia as my next choice.

I found Wolf to be an invaluable chronicler of life in Germany. Patterns of Childhood is an incredibly insightful look into what it was to be an ordinary German under the Nazi regime, WWII and the Soviet occupation. Accident: A Day's News is a brilliant meditation on the Chernobyl disaster and In the Flesh Leibhaftig is a fascinating allegory of the decline of communist East Germany as one woman's battle with disease. All the books I have read by her have challenged and enlightened me.

Hon. Daphne Winifred Louise Fielding, née Vivian (11 July 1904 – 5 December 1997), was a popular British author in the early 20th century.



Fielding was the daughter of George Vivian, 4th Baron Vivian and Barbara Fanning. She married, firstly, Sir Henry Frederick Thynne, 6th Marquess of Bath on 27 October 1927: they were divorced in 1953. She married, secondly, Major Alexander Wallace Fielding on 11 July 1953: they were divorced in 1978. As a result of her first marriage, her married name became Thynne; after her second marriage it became Fielding.

She moved in the world of the "Bright Young Things" in the 1920s and produced a series of popular books about high society.

Of Fielding's memoirs, Mercury Presides, Evelyn Waugh wrote: "Daphne has written her memoirs. Contrary to what one would have expected they are marred by discretion and good taste. The childhood part is admirable. The adult part is rather as though Lord Montgomery were to write his life and omit to mention that he ever served in the army."

Bibliography
Mercury Presides (1954)
The Adonis Garden (1961)
Duchess of Jermyn Street: Rosa Lewis (1964)
Emerald and Nancy: Lady Cunard and Her Daughter (1968)
The Nearest Way Home (1970)
The Rainbow Picnic: A Portrait of Iris Tree (1974)
Face on the Sphinx: Biography of Gladys Marie Deacon (1978)

It's the birthday of Pre-Raphaelite poet Christina Rossetti, born in London in 1830. (5 December 1830 – 29 December 1894) She grew up in a large, boisterous household. She had three brothers and sisters, and her parents were Italian, so all the children grew up speaking Italian and English. Her father was a political refugee and a Dante scholar and poet.



Christina Rossetti was a successful and much-admired poet in her own right. She published her most famous collection, Goblin Market and Other Poems (1862), when she was 31 years old. She is also known for her love poem Remember, and for the words of the Christmas carol In the Bleak Midwinter.

It begins:
In the bleak mid-winter
Frosty wind made moan,
Earth stood hard as iron,
Water like a stone;
Snow had fallen, snow on snow,
Snow on snow,
In the bleak mid-winter
Long ago.

From the Writer's Almanac

Article 43 should link to http://www.librarything.com/author/brophybrigid

Oh how I have missed this thread. Each morning I would sit and have my first cup of coffee or tea with this thread. It was a little bit of heaven in the morn.
Wherever has our bleuroses gone?

Hello there,

I'm Thomas son of The Late Valerie Mary Constable.

I just wanted to thank all you on hear as I know that books were her life and she had a high regard for all of you. Even with her last breath I know she would have been grateful for your friendship.

Empathy Reborn (Tom)

Wonderful to hear from you Tom. We loved Valerie and still miss her. Hope all is well with you.

>212 romain:: I agree, thank you for visiting, Tom. We miss Valerie very much.

Hello Thomas, thank you so much for stopping by. Hope all is well with you. Valerie took part in some of my Iris Murdoch book group and I am always sure to mention her when I give presentations about my research.

Thank you for that, Tom and welcome to LibraryThing. I see you've joined the 50 challenge group.

I am with all of the above Tom. It is good to have you, her son, here with us. We do ever miss your mother. I always enjoyed and learned so much from her comments and she was such a warm & beloved part of our little Virago group.
Thank you so much for taking the time to stop over and make yourself known to us.

Tom, how really good of you to come by and speak. As you see, we valued Valerie and miss her.

I think on our Valerie often whenever I see her 'englishrose60'. She was so lovely and kind and intelligent. That you stopped by to post about her means the world to us. Thank you, Tom, so very much - and welcome to LT. May you meet as many wonderful people, as we all have, through our shared passions for books.

Yes, what everyone said. This is a community, and it has lost a valued member. Welcome "home", Tom. May you feel that way about LT as we do.

Welcome Tom and how wonderful that you have come to 'see' us. We all have such happy memories of Valerie - she was a gem. Do you enjoy our Viragoes?

Edith Durham's ultimate vindication is that the British and American Armies are, right now, in the Balkans keeping Bosnia, Kosovo and Macedonia, free and safe from Serbia. Pity that it took two world wars, and 80 million dead to prove her right and the idiotic Lord Grey wrong.