The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone
by Tennessee Williams
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The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone is vintage Tennessee Williams. Published in 1950, his first novel was acclaimed by Gore Vidal as "splendidly written, precise, short, complete, and fine." It is the story of a wealthy, fiftyish American widow recently a famous stage beauty, but now "drifting." The novel opens soon after her husband's death and her retirement from the theatre, as Mrs. Stone tries to adjust to her aimless new life in Rome. She is adjusting, too, to aging. ("The knowledge that show more her beauty was lost had come upon her recently and it was still occasionally forgotten.") With poignant wit and his own particular brand of relish, Williams charts her drift into an affair with a cruel young gigolo: "As compelling, as fascinating, and as technically skillful as his play" (Publishers Weekly). show lessTags
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I'm not at all a fan of Tennessee Williams. The fact that the one Williams play I particularly like, Camino Real, is not that typical of Williams probably speaks for my feelings about him. But The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone (really more a novella than a novel) was much better than I expected, perhaps because its "American abroad" aspect somehow reminded me of Henry James.
Williams' fantasy of what transpired. This is truly an expose so take it seriously. Don't go over there expecting those big brutes to just up and stop because they won't. And you might wind up becoming as lonely, desperate and bitter as she did.
2016 Modern Mrs. Darcy Reading Challenge--
✔️ a book published (1950) before I was born
✔️ a book published (1950) before I was born
Raise a negroni drick to toast the bidet of the great Lotte Lenya, the Austrian-American chanteuse, diseuse & actress who played the Contessa Magda Terribili-Gonzales so campily in Jose Quintero's "The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone" (1961) based on the Tennessee Williams novella
Dec 17, 2024Portuguese (Brazil)
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After O'Neill, Williams is perhaps the best dramatist the United States has yet produced. Born in his grandfather's rectory in Columbus, Mississippi, Williams and his family later moved to St. Louis. There Williams endured many bad years caused by the abuse of his father and his own anguish over his introverted sister, who was later permanently show more institutionalized. Williams attended the University of Missouri, and, after time out to clerk for a shoe company and for his own mental breakdown, also attended Washington University of St. Louis and the University of Iowa, from which he graduated in 1938. Williams began to write plays in 1935. During 1943 he spent six months as a contract screenwriter for MGM but produced only one script, The Gentleman Caller. When MGM rejected it, Williams turned it into his first major success, The Glass Menagerie (1945). In this intensely autobiographical play, Williams dramatizes the story of Amanda, who dreams of restoring her lost past by finding a gentleman caller for her crippled daughter, and of Amanda's son Tom, who longs to escape from the responsibility of supporting his mother and sister. After The Glass Menagerie,Williams wrote his masterpiece, A Streetcar Named Desire, (1947), along with a steady stream of other plays, among them such major works as Summer and Smoke(1948), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1954), and Suddenly Last Summer (1958). His plays celebrate the "fugitive kind," the sensitive outcasts whose outsider status allows them to perceive the horror of the world and who often give additional witness to that horror by becoming its victims. Stephen S. Stanton has summed up Williams's "virtues and strengths" as "a genius for portraiture, particularly of women, a sensitive ear for dialogue and the rhythms of natural speech, a comic talent often manifesting itself in "black comedy,' and a genuine theatrical flair exhibited in telling stage effects attained through lighting, costume, music, and movements." After The Night of the Iguana (1961), Williams continued to write profusely---and constantly to revise his work---but it became more difficult to get productions of his plays and, if they were produced, to win critical or popular acclaim for them. Williams won the Pulitzer Prize for drama for A Streetcar Named Desire and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. He won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for these two and for The Glass Menagerie and The Night of the Iguana. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
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Common Knowledge
- Canonical title
- The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone
- Original title
- The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone
- Alternate titles*
- Mrs. Stone und ihr römischer Frühling
- Original publication date
- 1950
- People/Characters
- Karen Stone; Paolo; The Contessa; Meg Bishop
- Important places
- Roma, Lazio, Italia
- Related movies
- The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone (1961 | IMDb); The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone (2003 | IMDb)
- First words
- At five o'clock in the afternoon, which was late in March, the stainless blue of the sky over Rome had begun to pale and the blue transparency of the narrow streets had gathered a faint opacity of vapour.
- Last words
- (Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)Mrs Stone looked up at the sky which gave her the impression of having suddenly paused. She smiled to herself, and whispered, Look! I've stopped the drift!
- Publisher's editor*
- Vintage
- Original language
- English
- Disambiguation notice
- Please DO NOT combine this print version of the novel with videos of film adaptations. These are considered separate and distinct works for LibraryThing cataloging. Also please be careful when editing and deleting information... (show all) in Common Knowledge, since this is common data that affects everyone in LibraryThing.
*Some information comes from Common Knowledge in other languages. Click "Edit" for more information.
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